Commercial fishing, Inuit rights, and internal colonialism in Nunavut

This paper considers the degree to which the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ accurately describes the political economy of Nunavut’s commercial fisheries. Offshore fisheries adjacent to Nunavut were initially dominated by institutions based in southern Canada, and most economic benefits were captured by southern jurisdictions. Decades of political struggle have resulted in Nunavut establishing a role for itself in both the management of offshore resources and the operation of the offshore fishing industry. However, key decisions about fishery management are made by the federal government, and many benefits from Nunavut’s offshore fisheries continue to accrue to southern jurisdictions. The concept of internal colonialism is therefore a useful concept for understanding the historical development and contemporary conflicts over offshore fisheries. By contrast, Nunavut’s inshore fisheries were established as community development initiatives intended to promote economic well-being and stability. While inshore fisheries primarily benefit Inuit community economies, the growth of inshore fisheries has been hampered by small profit margins, inadequate marine infrastructure, and a dearth of baseline data. The federal government’s failure to support the expansion of inshore fisheries is a manifestation of internal colonialism, insofar as it reflects an unequal distribution of public infrastructure and research.

Earth Black Rising and Queen Sono: A Critical Decolonial Analysis

In this article two series are analyzed: Black Earth Rising (a BBC/Netflix production) and Queen Sono (the first African Netflix original series), shows that are about African realities from an African perspective (Rwanda in Black Earth Rising and South Africa in Queen Sono). The findings in this article show that both series address social and political issues such as neocolonialism, neoextractivism, internal colonialism, racism, inequality, justice, self-determination, corruption, violence, peace, memory, necropolitics, mental health, and decoloniality. I also argue that the shows could be used as pedagogical tools to raise critical consciousness in a wide public regarding the social and political issues addressed. The research in this article has been conducted with a qualitative methodology, using both shows as case studies and using content analysis and bibliographical research. The analysis of the series is based in the discussion of critical theory and decoloniality approaches and authors, especially from Latin America and Africa. Furthermore, the analysis of popular media (such as series) is a relevant effort to decolonize knowledge, using alternative and non-academic sources to produce and socialize knowledge.

Latin American Modernities

Modernity has been associated with a series of trends that have altered many societies worldwide, including those in Latin America. Chapter 2 analyzes Latin America and its path to global insertion and modernity. The chapter also addresses the images attributed to this multistate region. Latin American societies patterned their political institutions and public spheres after models that they conceived as the epitome of advanced global progress and modernity. They incorporated modern notions of citizenship, representative democracy, civic associations, elections, public debate and public spheres, justice, and equality before the law. Yet these multiple models were hybrid in nature, resulting from their international insertion and the format of internal colonialism and biases toward the centers of world development. Many of the promises of modernity were unfulfilled, generating new political demands, social change, and transnational spillover from one society to the others.

More on Diamonds and De Beers

The author develops and supplements his previous analysis of a long period of Moscow’s confidential cooperation with South African diamond cartel De Beers, both forced and mutually beneficial, initially in the 1920s, then from late 1950s to early 1990s (Journal of the Institute for African Studies №3(40),2017). According to recently released documents such cooperation also continued between these two periods. It provided Soviet enterprises with imported industrial diamonds for precision instruments and augmented the country’s defense potential during the period of toughest Western Cold war sanctions in 1949–1953, before the discovery and extraction of rich deposits of Yakut diamonds. The article contains some interesting evidence of Russian diaspora involvement in South African industrial development. The author also calls for greater objectivity in historic analysis of the period of South African internal colonialism and anti-apartheid struggle.

Internal Colonialism and the Discipline of Comparative Literature in Iran

This essay studies the history, current, and future status of the discipline of comparative literature in Iran. It compares the theoretical norms of contemporary comparative literature to the Pre-modern Perso-Islamic notion of “comparison,” which has been theorized in Iran and the Arab World as the Arabic, Islamic, and Iranian schools of comparative literature. The article highlights profound institutional and canonical Perso-Shi’a centrism in Iranian academia, and shows how the discipline of comparative literature has been used as a vehicle for transnationalism of this Perso-Shi’a centrism that has manifested in “Persianate World” in the context of European and North American academia. Marshall Hodgson’s 1960s neologism “Persianate World” has been placed with the paradigm shifts ushered in by the linguistic and cultural turns of the 1970s, the postcolonial scholarship that grew from Edward Said’s Orientalism in the late 1990s, and Sheldon Pollock’s formulation of a ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ in the 21st century. The article explains how the Persianate comparatists, under the banner of postcolonial studies, not only erased the experience of the subaltern and internally colonialized non-Persians of Iran in favor of the Middle Eastern states in a binary matrix (Western Imperialism versus a “colonialized” Islamic world), but also represents an unrealistic and exaggerated picture of the discipline to Western readers. The article further maps the conversations within the postcolonial Middle East about “internal colonialism,” as an analytic tool for thinking about operations and interlocking systems of power in the Middle East and abroad, here applied to the discipline of comparative literature for the first time.

Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies

Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

Internal Colonialism, Alien Rule, and Famine in Ireland and Ukraine

The Irish famine of the mid nineteenth century and the Ukrainian famine of the twentieth century have been the subject of large and quite contentious literatures. Whereas many popular explanations of the Irish famine attribute it to the English government’s infatuation with laissez-faire economic doctrines, by contrast the Ukrainian famine has often been ascribed to Stalin’s resentment of Ukraine’s resistance to the Soviet revolution. This essay suggests that despite their many differences, during these years both Ireland and Ukraine can be considered to have been internal colonies of their respective empires. The key implication of this conception is that these appalling famines arose from a common underlying cause: namely, the inferior political status of these regions relative to that of the core regions of these states. One of the defining characteristics of internal colonies is that they often suffer from alien rule. Alien rulers are typically indifferent to the welfare of the residents of the culturally distinctive regions within their borders. Due to this indifference, both the British and Soviet central rulers cast a blind eye to the fate of the Irish and Ukrainian peasants.

Shifting Paradigms: Nova Scotia and ‘New’ Scotland

The present chapter traces the emergence of Scottish Atlantic writing in the seventeenth century by focusing on works from the 1620s that promote the colonization of Nova Scotia. It studies works written by James VI and I, William Alexander, Robert Gordon, Thomas Hariott, and Richard Guthry while also discussing the role the Virginia Company and the indigenous Mi'kmaq and Maliseet populations played in Scotland's attempts to colonize Nova Scotia. It situates these agents and works in the larger contexts of European empire-building. It also considers forms of internal colonialism in the British Isles, including writings about the Highlands and Islands and inner-British power dynamics after the Union of Crowns. The utopian tradition offers ways to understanding the spaces, temporalities, and cultural agents in the emerging Scottish Atlantic, including the tropes of newness and reform as well as the intertextual relationships with earlier travelogues and the longevity of the Scottish colonial imagination.