This document discusses concepts related to race, colonialism, and decolonization. It begins by defining key terms like racialization and colonialism. It then discusses how race was commodified during European colonial expansion, resulting in the transatlantic slave trade and racial hierarchies. The document advocates for decolonizing institutions and knowledge by dismantling orientalist frameworks and addressing epistemic violence against marginalized groups. It also examines the impacts and challenges of decolonization efforts.

1. RACE AND COLONIALITY
Amal Abu-Bakare
POLI-3515-WA
Lakehead Winter 2016
Week 9: (March 1 & 3 )

2. PREVIOUSLY
• Empire
• Global Terrorism
• State of Exception
• Biopolitics and Necropolitics
• Humanitarianism and International Law
• Gender and Inequality

3. What do these topics share?
Critiques of
• Sovereignty and the nation state
• Imperialism, Eurocentrcism, (Neo)
Colonialism
• Discussions of power and the ‘ ‘normative’
• Positioning and Authority
The way the world is vs. the way the
world should be

4. What is Race?
• Is it Biology? Is it Social?
• Pre Colombus era- raza –a defect or a coarseness in fine cloth, or a
defect in poetic speech
• The early 17th century raza also referred to the branding of purebred
horses
• Human lineage defined especially by Jewish or North West African
Muslim ancestry.
• As time goes on- 15 century Christian Europe, diverse references to
raza start to share a common notion:
Raza demonstrates a sense of defectiveness + a non-
Christian and/or non-European (“heathen”) heritage.

5. Commodification of Race
• The connecting of Europe, Africa and the Americas to form the “Atlantic
world” resulted from the European colonial project that began in 1492.
• Spanish Conquistadors laid claim to the Americas in the early 1500s
• Problem: the inhabitants of the Americas did not appear in the Bible.
• Naked appearance suggested that they should be incorporated into the
Christian world as animals.
• Religious reasoning used to justify dispossessing indigenous peoples of
their land
• “Defenders of indigenous peoples” (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas) argued
in favour of their humanity, claiming that their living practices
demonstrated an ability to reason – a key competency of humanity.
• Therefore indigenous people could not be enslaved.

6. • In 1672 the Royal African Company received a monopoly
over English trade with West Africa in…..
• “redwood, elephants teeth, negroes, slaves,
hides, wax, guinea grains, or other
commodities” (Mtubani 1983: 71)
• Designated as ‘live stock’ due to the dissimilarities to the
Caucasian physical form
• Legal ownership allows for the literal and sovereign power
of life or death over them.

7. • 1510s: Beginning of systematic trafficking of enslaved Africans to the
Americas by Spanish and Portuguese interests.
• 1605: Africans runaway from slave-masters and form the “Quilombo
dos Palmares” in Brazil, a self-governing political entity that lasts for
almost one hundred years before being destroyed by the Portuguese
military.
• 1640s: Dutch Brazil demonstrates the lucrative potential of sugar
plantations.
• 1640-1670: Introduction of sugar cane into British and French
colonies in the Caribbean by Dutch agents.
• 1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution.
• 1807: Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (Britain).
• 1833: Slavery abolished in British Caribbean colonies.
• 1848: Abolition of slavery in French and Danish Caribbean colonies.
• 1865: After a bloody civil war the USA abolishes slavery with the 13th
amendment to the constitution.
• 1886: Slavery abolished in Cuba.
• 1888: Slavery abolished in Brazil.

8. The problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color-
line – the relation of the darker to the
lighter races of men in Asia and
Africa, in America and the islands of
the sea” (DuBois 1961: 23 )

9. The Creator of this Chart?
• STEM GENUS: white brunette.
• First race, very blond (northern Europe).
• Second race, Copper-Red (America).
• Third race, Black (Senegambia).
• Fourth race, Olive-Yellow (Indians).

17. Connection: Racialisation
Q- What is Racialisation?
A- The exercise of ascribing racial identities to social
practices or groups (Garner 2009:19)
• Historically classification of non-Western peoples went
hand in hand with the hierarchisation and racialisation of
cultures.
• The ideological or discursive process by which
understandings, expressions and actions are expressed
through racial, cultural and ethnic symbols and signifiers
(Goldberg, 1993)

19. This Week:
• Colonialism: implies a material political and economic
relationship/process in which the sovereignty of a nation
state is imposed by a colonizing institution, people or
entity
• Addressing both colonialism and coloniality entails an
analysis of geopolitical, cultural and economic domination,
and the struggles waged against these structures of
domination
• Such concepts entail discussions of decolonization and
the eventual re-indigenization of political discourse

20. “Colonial rule is enmeshed with a system
of representation and, as an apparatus of
power, its [colonial rule’s] discourse
constructs a knowledge of subject
peoples through which it variously
authorizes that rule, installs racial
differences, and produces the colonized
as entirely knowable (Childs & Williams,
1997:123)

21. Decolonization:
What does it mean to decolonize?
• To uncover (i.e. Franz Fanon)
• To dismantle ( Orientalism)
• To acknowledge ( Spivak and Epistemic Violence)
• To resist ( Black Lives Matter)

22. Decolonial Research Methods
“[Research refers to] processes of
understanding how Western discourse
about the Other is supported by
‘institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,
imagery, doctrines, even colonial
bureaucracies and colonial
styles’” (Smith,1999)

23. Decolonization & Orientalism
Orientalism describes an….
1. Epistemology
2. Interdisciplinary discussion
3. Political Project
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZiyXEF1Aas

25. Coloniality and Violence
• Decolonization is important not just for demonstrating
orientalist underpinnings and for further understanding how
imperialist structures are reinforced
• Reinforcement often occurs through violent means/ends
• If and when somebody is defined as the enemy ‘Other’, they
no longer are human anymore
• “it has become a beast to be eliminated to gas chambers
or by atom bombs” (Harle, 2000:4)
• Epistemic Violence

26. Epistemic Violence
• Coined by Spivak (1994) in her acclaimed work
• Can the Subaltern Speak?
• Describes the devastating effect of the routine silencing of
marginalized peoples that results from a purposeful
dismissal of alternative knowledge due to the privileging of
Western epistemic practices
• Results in the denial of non-western and racialized
testimony, experience, and reality

27. To what extent have supposed
‘Others’ fallen outside the category
of human and how do our cultural
frames for thinking set limits on the
kind of [human] losses we can avow
as loss?” (Butler, 2004:32)

28. BLACK LIVES MATTER
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlIlM03SDHA

31. White Privilege II
• “White privilege” refers to the differential treatment and the
social advantages that accrue to white/european persons due
to their transparent competence and humanity
• Describes a systemic state of being not ‘physical’ or ‘material’
• Is contextual ( i.e. Irish 1960s and Italians 19th C) but
generally structurally and empirically consistent
• Theorists of race describe the structural conditions that uphold
white privilege as “white supremacy”.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sjhU2t9ocA

32. Decolonization Impact
Important questions to consider:
Is it possible to decolonize
institutions of colonial power (such
as the academy, government, etc.),
but, further, is it possible to
decolonize through them?

33. Understanding Re-Indigenization
• "The contours of the terrain itself being defined between
(neo)colonial and anti-colonial legacies of interactions,
that are of practical implications in the context of identity
politics (or what Charles Taylor refers to as a politics of
recognition ), and hitherto what follows in ties and claims
by those self-identifying as indigenous in relation to ‘land,
nation, autonomy, sovereignty, and the right to self-
determination..."