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Gender and Colonialism - Coggle Diagram
Gender and Colonialism
Colonialism and its Justifications
Colonialism
Colonialism
Old, heterogeneous practice of domination
Involved military, economic, political, cultural, and psychological subjugation of one people to another
Territorial expansion
Transfer of population
Great leap through technological development after c16th, enabling this practice of expansion
Colonialism does not just convert territory
But also minds, bodies, languages, cultures, knowledges, etc
Justifications
Important to think of empire as a ideological concept
Justifications
Peace and protection against other empires
Includes religious protection
'Colonial care'
Imperial competition
Benefits for the metropolis
Political, economic, geopolitical, ideological, etc
A test of progress and technology
Civilising mission
'White man's burden'
The idea that Western European powers are at the helm of history and human progress
And thus have a duty to bring those behind' with them, out of the 'non-age'
Linear idea of progress
Religious justification
European imperial orders benefited considerably from the involvement of the Church
'Saving souls'
Typical of both Christian and Muslim empires
Violation of God's natural law by the colonised's idleness
Anti-colonial Theory (overview)
Anti-colonial Theory
Colonialism generated lots of resistance and criticism at the time, which generally has been erased from history
A broad church with many schools of thought and methodologies
Critical studies of the effects of colonialism in politics, the economy, literature, history, and art of both colonies and colonising states
Some foreground cultural domination and the imposition of imperial standards of value
E.g. the message of the inferiority of the colonised
Hybridisation and double consciousness defying the conditions of the colonised
Living and being torn between cultures
Others focus on the historical imbrication of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the destruction of the environment
Generally:
Counter-narratives to the imperial discourse about progress and civilisation
Written from the perspective of colonised subjects
These scholars' theories are models of resistance and decolonisation
Symbolic and material
Decolonialisation must target:
Former imperial structures
Neo-colonialism
E.g. the continued exercise of political or economic influence over a society in the absence of formal political control
Decolonising Knowledge
Knowledge as power
Framing reality and the limits of the possible
Anti-colonialism for this school of thought is an intellectual-political exercise in disclosure and resistance
The ontological, epistemological, moral, and political categories through which we think about the world have been shaped mostly by extractives colonialism
Most of these categories are exclusionary
They are gendered, racialised, and speciesist
Understanding how these categories work politically helps us understand:
The present subordination of groups
The exploitation of the environment
The need to recover Indigenous worldviews and valorise alternative, non-hierarchical ways of building community and of relating to nature
HOWEVER, without romanticising pre-colonial pasts or assuming their purity
Dichotomic Thinking
Decolonising Beyond Knowledge
Argues that while valuable in itself, the decolonisation of knowledge is not sufficient
What we need to do is:
Reevaluate the economy and capitalism
Who consumes what
Reparations
Talk about patriarchal capitalism
Talk about gendered and racial patterns of economic exploitation that continue beyond 'official' decolonisation
Talk about the uneven distribution of both burdens and privileges
Critique of the tokenistic, superficial understanding of decolonising academia, the curriculum, and various canons
Focusing on decolonising knowledge displaces a political problem into epistemological territory
Feminist Anti-colonialism (Key dimensions of analysis)
Centred on gender as central to the constitution of empire
Empires were built mostly by sailor and military men, tradesmen, doctors, etc
material, gender was central to the practice ad establishment of empire
Empire was based on a racialised masculinity and masculine values
The conquest of the west over people and nature was masculine
Violence, frontier, military, etc
Gender is central to constructing an image of the colonised as inferior and feminine
Colonised masculinities are either effeminate, weak, and inferior, or sexually predatory
(Fanon, 1952; Sinha, 1995)
Colonial control of reproduction
Enslavements
Eugenics
Involuntary sterilisation
Transfer of European binary ideas of gender, monogamous patriarchal family, and sexuality upon to colonised societies
Criticism of ani-colonial theory's lack of attention to women as colonists and colonised, as both victims and accomplices/beneficiaries of imperialism
(Chaudhuri and Strobel, 1992)
White feminists have treated women from former colonies as 'other'
(Mohanty, 2003)
As though they need to be rescued
As though they are devoid of subjectivity and imagination
As though they are homogeneous in their suffering, irrespective of religion or nationality
Monolithic view that these women are poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, and eternal victims of their men/
/culture/religion
Criticisms of the focus on certain practices
E.g. the veil
Often racism is masked as feminism
Undue glorification of western women as modern and in control of their bodies and sexuality
Neglect the role of religion and tradition as sources of meaning and solidarity for women
Globalising capitalist forces tend towards the homogenisation of masculinity
A distinction between 'modern' vs 'traditional' masculines, depending on the degree of integration in the global market
The debates over multiculturalism, religious accommodation, migration, and security are informed by dominant gender and racialised norms and imaginaries, as well as by colonial ideologies
The White Anthropocene
The imbrication of colonialism, patriarchy, and ecological disaster
The era of the human
Di Chiro 2017; Whyte 2017, 2022
