The global South as an ontological position?

This semester, I have been running a PhD course titled Urbanism: Perspectives from the global South, where we seek to reflect on where and how we should come to understand the urban condition through a “southern urban critique” lens – this, without forgetting the fundamental question: “What is the urban?” Earlier this month, we had the great pleasure of welcoming Tariq Jazeel (University College London), who led an engaging seminar and delivered a thought-provoking public lecture. For the seminar, I asked Tariq to reflect on the idea of the global South as an ontological position and connect it to discussions about the tensions between the particular and the universal. During his intervention, Tariq shared he was uneasy with the idea of a single ontological position, since there are many global Souths. He then proceeded to encourage us to reflect on the strategic value of the concept “global South.” What is it exactly, and what does it help us do?

Most of the people around the seminar table had a connection to the global South (understood broadly as a geographical location), but we could not agree on an answer. One person reflected on how the global South was a feeling – something that resonates inside of you. Somebody else said it was a political call for justice. I added it was an act of positionality, a marker to highlight a relation of unequal power. The discussion continued. Perhaps we used “the global South” for lack of a better word? Something instead of the “non-West,” or to describe that that is beyond the EuroAmerican heartland? Tariq agreed the global South served a purpose of strategic essentialism but warned us of the burden of representation.

A week after the seminar with Tariq, I was invited to be an opponent for the final presentations of the actions plans developed by the participants of Danida’s “Sustainable and Inclusive Urban Development” – convened by, among others, the incredible Jacob Rasmussen (Roskilde University). Listening to brilliant presentations that dealt with urban challenges in Nairobi, Casablanca, Medellín and São Paulo, I remembered Tariq’s question and could finally articulate an answer. Following the work of Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), the global South is, of course, not a geographical location but a relation. However, as hinted by my colleagues, the global South is also embodied knowledge. It is an understanding of an everyday life that heavily relies on informal practices and social infrastructures. It is a shared burden, a sense of lack (e.g. basic infrastructure, waste management services), and a heightened risk of death (e.g. the impacts of climate change). This is not to fall into the trap of exoticizing the global South as the Other, the “heart of darkness” (Roy 2009), but to highlight that the global South shares a “colonial wound,” as brilliantly argued by Sultana (2022). So yes, the global South is an ontological position from which new forms of knowledge can be created – “theory is in the flesh,” to borrow the words of Sultana (2022), in the “fleshiness of our bodies, minds, soils, kin.”

However, Tariq was right to point the dangers of the “burden of representation,” remind us that there are many global Souths, and to hint at the limitations of thinking about the global South as a geographical location. Homogenizing the global South ignores historical differences and blinds us to the islands of wealth that exist within it. We cannot forget about the elites that live in the “postcolony” (Mbembe in Melgaço and Xavier Pinto Coelho 2022), who likely experience the “colonial wound” differently. A second important point that Tariq raised was to remind us that there are “singularities” in the periphery/global South that resist being known in the epistemic domains of Western modernity (Jazeel 2019). Concepts such as “world,” “global,” “theory,” and “the city” have roots in European modernity and might keep us in an intellectual prison. Some concepts are so loaded with the legacy of Western modernity that we might need to replace them with another “language” – one that must be learned through a process of translation (Jazeel 2019; also see Roy 2011). Otherwise, echoing Lorde (1983), we might be trying to explain the realities of the global South with the master’s tools.

So let us think about the global South as an ontological position – but with care, attentive to historical difference, so that our move does not end up being an act that homogenizes, ignores, and erases the differences across the global Souths.

References

  • Comaroff J and Comaroff JL (2012) Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Anthropological Forum 22(2): 113–131.
  • Jazeel T (2019) Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 40(1): 5–21
  • Melgaço L and Xavier Pinto Coelho L (2022) Race and Space in the Postcolony: A Relational Study on Urban Planning Under Racial Capitalism in Brazil and South Africa. City and Community 21(3): 214–237
  • Lorde A (1983) The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Lorde A Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Crossing Press: Berkeley.
  • Roy A (2011) Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 223–238.
  • Sultana F (2022) The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography (99):102638

Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.

Our differentiated links to capitalism

I had the great pleasure of listening to Kirsteen Paton last week, who gave a lecture on her recently published book, Class and Everyday Life. A Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Class at the University of Glasgow, Paton brilliantly reminded us that social reproduction is the primary site of class formation and argued that housing struggles are key terrains to understanding this. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, Salar Mohandesi, and Emma Teitelman, Paton highlighted how urban scholarship has tended to investigate housing struggles through social movements rather than through class analysis (as if class only represented labor struggle). In Paton’s view, this is an oversight that obscures how the “politics of the kitchen” can create local-level solidarities through “differentiated class positions” and intersectional power.

Curious to know how she understood race within her theoretical framework, I asked how racialized differentiation could be taken into account. Paula Mulinari, a colleague, added to my question, wondering if there was a risk of making a similar mistake as the scholars that saw urban struggle in everything when it should have been class contestation: in this case, seeing everything as class struggle when some things might be racial struggles. Paton answered that to understand differentiation, we needed to ask ourselves what our link to capitalism is.

Paton’s response left me thinking of Fraser’s work on racialized capitalism and her argument that while some bodies are the objects of business-as-usual exploitation, others, the bodies seen as expendable, are the subjects of expropriation (Fraser 2016). In other words, there is a big difference in the links to capitalism between the free exploitable citizen-worker and the dependent expropriable non-human. The debate about the role of race within the workings of capitalism is, of course, not new. Audrey Kobayashi (2014) shows us how it was not until the 1990s, after decades during which class overshadowed all critical analysis, that scholarship began to take race seriously in relation to the development of capitalism. While the discipline of urban geography has, during the last decade, moved forward in its understanding of racialized differentiation through the work of, for example, Cedric Robinson and other scholars of the Black Radical Tradition, work remains to be done (Fonseca Alfaro 2024). It is not enough to acknowledge race as an element of capitalism, but rather to conceptualize processes of racialization as constitutive elements of capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018).

The conceptualization of what constitutes our differentiated links to capitalism might have been a point of discussion during Paton’s lecture, but, nevertheless, she raised an important point: the left needs an opening to go beyond what can broadly be referred as identity politics, and the sites of social reproduction are key.

References

  • Bhattacharyya G (2018) Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. New York: Rowman & Littlefield
  • Fraser N (2016) Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson. Critical Historical Studies 3(1):163–178
  • Kobayashi A (2014). The Dialectic of Race and the Discipline of Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 6: 1101–1115. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.958388.
  • Fonseca Alfaro C (2024) Contours of racial capitalism, urban geography, and infrastructure. Geography Compass 18(9) https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70002
  • Paton K (2024) Class and Everyday Life. Oxon: Routlegde.

Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.

Of “volcano women” and invincible summers

Mexico elected its first female president this year, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, with a landslide, riding a wave of support from her party, Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), a populist movement led by her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The climate scientist inherits a country where gender violence was downplayed by the previous administration (Barragán, 2024), but where “volcano women,” to borrow the words of Mexican artist, Teresa Serrano (Maldonado, 2024), fight for justice. Sheinbaum’s historic victory took place while I was reading Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a tour de force written by Pulitzer-prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza. The book tells the story of Liliana, the author’s sister, a bright university student who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Rivera Garza’s examination of patriarchy, gender violence, and femicide shook me to the bone. Her analysis of how in previous decades, Mexican society ‘lacked a vocabulary to explain gender violence’ spoke to me in so many ways. It reminded me of playful arguments with male friends who did not understand why piropos, “polite” or “romantic” catcalling, were unacceptable. It reminded me of all the female relatives who were not allowed to study “far from home” because of the danger their families perceived in the “big city.” It reminded me of the women who did leave home (my sister and me included) to navigate patriarchy as individuals with the support of our families. Taking into consideration how the structures of patriarchy in Mexico work against women without a male “guardian” in public spaces, did we know in how much danger we were constantly in? As Rivera Garza writes, the only reason why we survived and Liliana did not was that we did not encounter “a rapist in our path” (in reference to the powerful Chilean feminist protest song, Un violador en tu camino.) In this historic moment for Mexico, my aspiration is that President Sheinbaum listens to the rage of the country’s volcano women and our hopes for invincible summers.

References

Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.

Racialized capitalism, expropriation, and liminal spaces

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending a seminar at the Institute for Urban Research (IUR) led by the brilliant Miguel Montalva Barba, a 2024 IUR Visiting Scholar. Miguel’s talk, based on an overview of his work, covered several topics from the pitfalls of auto-ethnography, the risks of studying gentrification without considering the effects of racializing practices, and the challenges of being a critical urban scholar caught in the structures of white supremacy embedded in the discipline of urban studies (see Montalva Barba, 2022, 2024).

Miguel also shared some of his upcoming projects. One of these projects deals with the stories of undocumented Mexican-Americans who are deported to Mexico and end up working in call centers that provide services to English-speaking customers in the U.S. Miguel reflected on the different types of harm embedded in the process, for example, the violence of being “sent back” to a place that you might not know, and many times, does not even recognize you. Another type of symbolic violence was enacted by the call center itself. In Miguel’s analysis, the call center represents a liminal space, a bubble of Americanness in Mexican territory where the companies take advantage of the workers’ vulnerability. The workers might not have the right educational credentials and language proficiency to work in Mexican companies but are attractive to call centers. Their English skills and cultural knowledge of the U.S. makes them valuable.

Miguel’s point made me think of Nancy Fraser’s (2016: 169) work on racialized capitalism and expropriation, or “the ongoing confiscatory process essential for sustaining accumulation in a crisis-prone system.” For Fraser, capitalism cannot only be explained with the concept of exploitation. Instead, we need to conceptualize capitalism through the concepts of exploitation and expropriation and acknowledge the system cannot function without “unfree and dependent labor.” Racialized capitalism depends on exploitable citizen-workers and dependent expropriable subjects. The call centers represent a perfect example of racialized capitalism at work. As non-citizens, the bodies of the “undocumented” are unwanted in the U.S. However, they are still useful in the liminal spaces Miguel referred to, providing services to American customers. The labor of the dependent expropriable subject can still be extracted without them taking up space in the U.S. Something similar can be seen in Mexican maquiladoras, or Export Processing Zones, where the mobility of the commodity is always prioritized while ensuring Mexican bodies remain in place, far away from U.S. territory (Fonseca Alfaro, 2023). It seems the economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico continues to be one centered around a regime of racialized accumulation.

References

  • Fonseca Alfaro C (2023) Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism. Chichester: Wiley.
  • Fraser N (2016) Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson. Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 163–178.
  • Montalva Barba MA (2023) To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies. Urban Studies 60(5): 791–810.
  • Montalva Barba MA (2024) Questioning the foundations: the embedded racism in urban sociology theorization. In: Martínez MA (ed.) Research Handbook on Urban Sociology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.

What “extractivism” are we talking about?

In a previous piece, I discussed two thought-provoking interventions from the 12th Conference of the Nordic Latin American Research Network (NOLAN) that took place last May. Another highlight of this conference was attending a workshop on extractivism led by Eduardo Gudynas, a prominent expert in the field.

Gudynas was engaging and intellectually stimulating, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about extractivism. He began by reminding us that, in a context where the literature on extractivism and different varieties of extractivism has grown so much in the last years, it is important to stop and ask: how do we actually define extractivism? Are all commodifying practices considered extractivism? Moreover, what is the difference between extractivism and capitalism, and what can it reveal about capitalist practices? Gudynas urged us to think about the importance of definitions, arguing that we cannot begin to think about alternatives if we are not even sure ourselves what it is exactly that we are analyzing. A conceptual definition, in his view, needs to embed an understanding of history and be grounded in empirical findings. Furthermore, a rigorous definition needs to be precise, stable, and understandable.

Given that the scholarship on extractivism has expanded from its origins in Latin American colonial history and its focus on natural resource extraction (Chagnon et al., 2022; Veltmeyer, 2022), I think that Gudynas’ emphasis on the importance of conceptual precision is timely. There are currently multiple varieties of extractivism including: aeolian extractivism (Howe & Boyer, 2016), racial extractivism (Preston, 2017), hydroelectric extractivism (Post, 2022), urban extractivism (Streule, 2023), and green extractivism (Tornel, 2023). The work of Chagnon et al. (2022) suggests global extractivism and further reports the existence of four more iterations: total extractivism, agro-extractivism, and epistemic extractivism. The point raised by Gudynas urge us to reflect on the limitations of operationalizing extractivism in contexts outside of Latin America and question what is it that we gain theoretically by adding a prefix. My agreement with Gudynas is not to deny the usefulness of combining concepts. Extractivism, after all, has undergone various phases in its interaction with different modalities of capital accumulation (Farthing & Fabricant, 2018; Svampa, 2019). Current scholarship, for example, highlights there might be entanglements between extractivism and infrastructure (cf. Merino, 2024; Streule, 2023). Theoretical conversations also seem to be needed to understand the practices of disposability enabled by extractivism in relationship to racialized labor subjects. However, as argued by Gudynas, a definition that is too broad or not stable enough loses meaning.

Gudynas presented his definition of extractivism, clarifying it entails practices of appropriation of natural resources in high volumes where more than 50% of the extracted resource is exported. Here is where I become wary of Gudynas’ definition. The work of Kröger et al. (2021) define extractivism as a practice of “overexploitation and appropriation of natural resources.” Under extractivism, nature that is considered expendable is commodified in a context of depletion or even ecocide. Thinking with Kröger, from an ecological perspective, I would think that it does not matter if an extracted resource in high volumes stays in the country of origin or is exported. The environmental damage done is the same, regardless of destination. I raised this question during the workshop and Gudynas responded that, while it was true the damage was the same, it was important to highlight processes of unequal global North-South relations. The global South, in general, provides the natural resources that are used in the global North. While I agree we should not overlook unequal geopolitical relations and ignore extractivism’s origins in the European plunder of the Americas, I was left wondering if an understanding of the global North as the consumer/manufacturer while the global South is the raw material provider falls short and seems to reflect processes more prevalent in the 20th century. Thinking about the economic power of emerging economies, this perspective seems to ignore consumer practices, export-oriented manufacturing processes, and the power of the elites within the global South. It also implies that high-volume practices of appropriation of natural resources are ok as long as the resources are used by national governments (reminding us of “progressive” extractivism). This, in turn, influences debates of what sustainability might look like in contexts of poverty eradication programs. Regardless of the debate, I can see how Gudynas raises a vital point: if we are to imagine alternative futures to extractivism, our theoretical points of departure and scope need to be better clarified. In other words, we need to explain, what “extractivism” are we talking about?

References
  • Chagnon, C. W., Durante, F., Gills, B. K., Hagolani-Albov, S. E., Hokkanen, S., Kangasluoma, S. M. J., Konttinen, H., Kröger, M., LaFleur, W., Ollinaho, O., & Vuola, M. P. S. (2022). From extractivism to global extractivism: the evolution of an organizing concept. Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(4), 760–792. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2069015
  • Farthing, L., & Fabricant, N. (2018). Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America. Latin American Perspectives, 45(5), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18785882
  • Howe, C., & Boyer, D. (2016). Aeolian extractivism and community wind in southern Mexico. Public Culture, 28(2), 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3427427
  • Kröger, M., Hagolani-Albov, S. E., & Gills, B. K. (2021). Extractivisms. In C. P. Krieg & R. Toivanen (Eds.), Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts (pp. 239–252). Helsinki University Press.
  • Merino, R. (2024). The open veins of the Amazon: rethinking extractivism and infrastructure in extractive frontiers. Journal of Peasant Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2318466
  • Post, E. (2022). Hydroelectric Extractivism: Infrastructural Violence and Coloniality in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. Journal of Latin American Geography, 21(3), 49–95. https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2022.0039
  • Preston, J. (2017). Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects. Cultural Studies, 31(2–3), 353–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1303432
  • Streule, M. (2023). Urban extractivism. Contesting megaprojects in Mexico City, rethinking urban values. Urban Geography, 44(1), 262–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2146931
  • Svampa, M. (2019). Neo-extractivism in Latin America. In Neo-extractivism in Latin America. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108752589
  • Tornel, C. (2023). Energy justice in the context of green extractivism: Perpetuating ontological and epistemological violence in the Yucatan Peninsula. Journal of Political Ecology, 30(1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5485
  • Veltmeyer, H. (2022). Extractivism and beyond: Latin America debates. Extractive Industries and Society, 11(September), 101132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2022.101132

Featured image: Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay.

Of necropolitics and “writing as a geologist”

The 12th Conference of the Nordic Latin American Research Network (NOLAN) took place last week at the beautiful South Campus of the University of Copenhagen in cooperation with FIEALC (Federación Internacional de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe). Chaired by Georg Wink, Director of Iberian and Latin American Studies Forum, the conference was superbly organized and packed with an impressive number of thought-provoking keynotes, panels, and round tables. Two interventions made a big impression on me.

The first one was a presentation by Isidro Morales (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla), who analyzed Mexico’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixing statistics and discourse analysis, Morales showed how Mexico had one of the highest per capita numbers of fatalities in the world because of a lack of infrastructure (i.e., enough hospital beds and health staff), political decisions, and an irresponsible communication strategy. Despite the existence of a competent health expert in charge of the crisis management efforts led by the federal administration and promises that Mexico’s response would be as “good as Denmark’s,” the populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known colloquially as AMLO, continued with austerity policies and constantly undermined science-based recommendations aimed at the general population. AMLO, for example, refused to wear face masks in public events and acknowledge the severity of the virus for risk groups and marginalized populations. In Morales’ view, to avoid mass panic, AMLO tapped into Mexican religious culture and its relationship to death by for example wearing escapularios, an amulet worn by devout Roman Catholics, and stating that was all he needed to fight the virus. Encapsulated in the common saying “You need to die in order to let live” and epitomized in the country’s Day of the Dead, the acceptance of death has deep roots in precolonial Mexico. All these factors, according to Morales, created a context where the government’s necropolitic strategies fused with Mexican culture creating a context where marginalized populations, those working in the informal economy, for example, were left with little room to maneuver. Having to choose between the virus and not having food on the table, people stoically developed the saying “elige tu riesgo,” choose the risk you want to take. Morelos’ work on necropolitics makes me think of racial capitalism and Nancy Fraser’s (2019) emphasis that we need to understand the specific “landscapes of racialization,” to, among other things, untangle the relationship between racial capitalism and the state.  

A second intervention that I found inspiring, was the keynote by Cristina Rivera Garza (University of Houston), recent Pulitzer winner for Liliana’s Invincible Summer. In her talk – based on her book Autobiografía del algodón – Rivera Garza presented the story of migrant agricultural workers along the US-Mexico border at the beginning of the 20th century. Escaping drought in central Mexico, the workers were part of an agrarian experiment to expand the ecological boundaries of the desert to plant cotton. Looking at the “land as archive,” “forces embedded in ruins,” and personal family history, Rivera Garza uncovers how cotton became a life-giving resource, providing the foundations for an autonomous way of life. (In contrast to the stories of cotton in the United States). I found fascinating how Rivera Garza described her intervention as a piece of fiction/nonfiction. She encouraged us to practice “writing as a geologist,” uncovering layers and contradictions, and using our personal stories mediated by research. The approach reminded me of the “global intimate” (Fonseca Alfaro, 2021; Pratt & Rosner, 2006) and the call to write bodies and embodiments into academic texts advocated by, for example, Donna Haraway (1988) and Juanita Sundberg (2005). Rivera Garza’s call is central to present the geographies of Latin America in more nuanced ways and practice what Walter Mignolo (2009) refers as “epistemic disobedience.”

References

Featured image: Photo by Nicholas_Demetriades on Pixabay

How do we take postcolonial critique seriously from a location in the global North?

This blog has been dormant for some time. Happy to be back after a long period of parental leave, fieldwork, and a wonderful experience as a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Last week I attended a meeting of Urban Agency III: Towards a Sustainable Integration of Disciplines in Urban Studies, a scientific research network that I am part of (alongside Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Defne Kadioglu, Lorena Melgaço and Chiara Valli) through the Institute for Urban Research, IUR, at Malmö University. Urban Agency III seeks to investigate the “institutional embedding” of the discipline of urban studies across institutes in Europe and North America. The meeting was filled with interesting sessions discussing issues from “the interface between city and academia” to “collaboration and co-creation in the city.” One of the most stimulating interventions, in my view, was a presentation by two scholars who talked about how scientific networks can engage with postcolonial and comparative urbanism critiques. Two interesting questions posed to the audience were: How do scholars based in European institutes humbly try to take the postcolonial turn in urban studies seriously? Does doing urban research on European cities make you Eurocentric?

These thought-provoking questions reminded me of a workshop we had back in October at the IUR, Interrogating the South, led by the brilliant Kavita Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor in Geography and Global Development, University of East Anglia (who at that point was a Visiting Researcher at the IUR). For me, it is obvious that doing urban studies “on” European cities does not make you automatically Eurocentric since the project of postcolonizing (or provincializing) does not entail a geographical location, but a method. Drawing on Ananya Roy’s (2009) classic piece New geographies of theory, there are two contributions that have summarized this point brilliantly. The first one is by Nancy Odendaal (2021) who argues:

“Provincialising is not about rejecting Western/Northern debates, or only embracing Global South/Eastern experiences. It opens up analysis to how a phenomenon is tied to and generated by place, with a broader range of urban experiences.”

The second intervention is carried out by Lawhon et al., (2014) who state:

“… the South is not homogenous; different intellectual traditions exist throughout the global South and these can and should contribute to the development of theory from the South in different ways. This frames the “global South” as an epistemological location—rather than a geographical container—through which a provincialization of dominating theory can be crafted.”

It is necessary to stay away from the idea that the global South presumes a fixed geography—a precise location where one goes to carry out postcolonial approaches, for example. Instead, it is important to remember the “relational and on-going construction of North-South divides” that includes Imperial Souths, poor Norths, and bodies that carry the global South with them (Fonseca Alfaro, 2023). As one of the attendants argued, one can also find the postcolonial within Europe and explore the colonial remains that exist in contemporary cities.

As the discussion during the meeting moved to concrete actions, two suggestions emerged. One proposal suggested using pragmatism to respond as situations arose while a second opinion raised the issue that there is a need to create institutional space for postcoloniality. While both suggestions have their merits, I side with the second option. In my view, concrete actions that urban studies institutes based in Europe and North America could make to take postcolonial critique seriously include:

  • Ensuring curricula includes a variety of authors that describe urban experiences and processes from across the world (and not just the EuroAmerican heartland).
  • Making space for minorities in institutional spaces and teaching.
  • Enabling the interaction with institutes in the global South with, for example, Visiting Researcher schemes.
  • Acknowledging their “locus of enunciation” (i.e., location from where one speaks and produces knowledge. This includes a reflection of limitations in terms of generalizability and universalizing claims)
References

Fonseca Alfaro C (2023) Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism. Chichester: Wiley.

Lawhon M, Ernstson H and Silver J (2014) Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode 46(2). Blackwell Publishing Inc.: 497–516.

Odendaal N (2021) Everyday urbanisms and the importance of place: Exploring the elements of the emancipatory smart city. Urban Studies 58(3): 639–654.

Roy A (2009) The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory. Regional Studies 43(6): 819–830.

Featured image: Photo by USGS on Unsplash.

The limitations of looking at the postcolonial as a historical period

This is my last blog entry before I go on parental leave. Hope to be back with more posts in January 2023!

My academic home, the Department of Urban Studies, has for several years organized the Open Urban Seminars and during the pandemic, the tradition continued in a combination of online and face-to-face events. In December last year, I had the great pleasure of attending one of these seminars: a fascinating lecture titled Swedish Saint Barthélemy: Colonialism, Slavery, Slave Trade and Colonial Amnesia given by the historian Fredrik Thomasson. Thomasson presented findings from his latest book in Swedish, Svarta Saint-Barthélemy: människoöden i en svensk koloni 1785-1847. In the late eighteenth century, Sweden became a slave-holding nation when it purchased from France the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy. Swedish Caribbean colonialism is an under-researched topic and Thomasson has done an impressive job of going over newspaper articles of the time and documents from the French National Colonial Archives, such as ship manifestos and court papers, to expose a dark chapter in Sweden’s history. This has been important since, according to Thomasson, Sweden has traditionally held a self-image of a nation untainted by the dehumanizing and violent practices of slavery and colonialism.

While I celebrate Thomasson’s contribution to widening our understanding of colonial history, there were certain arguments during his lecture that made me think about the limitations of conceptualizing the “postcolonial” merely as a historical period. It appeared to me that this approach runs the risk of preventing us from understanding that colonial practices and ways of thinking continue to have impacts on the present. I can see that the study of history does not necessarily need to reflect on the present, but a non-critical understanding of postcolonialism or the “postcolonial” can affect the methods with which history is studied and how knowledge is produced. Let me explain. The definition of  “postcolonial/post-colonial” has been one of the central debates within postcolonial studies (cf. McLeod, 2010). The discussion has centered around the following: Does the concept only refer to a historical period (that is to say what comes after colonialism)? Or does it describe a context in places that were former colonies? Or is the “post” being used in the sense that colonial relationships no longer exist (that is to say, a condition that exists beyond the colonial)? Or is the concept meant to describe a world system where colonial practices and legacies continue to play out even now in the present regardless of the “independent” status of a former colony?

Thomasson’s understanding of postcolonialism during his lecture seemed to be one based on the perception of a historical period of time that is defined by a country’s independent status from a former colonial power. This became clear to me when, for example, Thomasson mentioned that the island of Dominica is even “decolonial” because the nation has been independent for several years now. In my view, this limited understanding of “postcolonial” (or “decolonial” in this case), runs the risk of studying history through a colonial way that reproduces Eurocentric bias – despite the best intentions. This thought came to my head when a member of the audience asked what other sources could be consulted to understand the history of Saint Barthélemy. Thomasson recommended reading the accounts written by Christopher Columbus of his “discovery” of America. While I understand the difficulties of having limited resources when studying the past of certain regions, it is also important to treat certain sources with a grain of salt. (My intention is not to claim that Thomasson is unaware of this, but only to comment on the arguments developed and answers given during the lecture I attended). As argued by scholars such as José Rabasa (1993) in his book Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism, European accounts of the American continent were shaped by prejudice, a perception of superiority, a sense of fear and wonder, and a lack of ability to understand knowledge forms and ways of being outside a Christian worldview. For example, the Caribbean was named as such by European explorers because they believed the region was inhabited by lustful cannibal women (Braham, 2016). The region was also named the “West Indies” because Columbus’s misconception that he had reached India when he stumbled upon what came to be known as America. The idea of America was also a European creation: an exotic and feminized landscape that could be named and penetrated, and that perhaps even held the Earthly location of paradise (O’Gorman, 1995; Rabasa, 1993).

An obvious question comes to mind: what are the limitations of studying a historical period through Eurocentric categories and sources? (By Eurocentric I mean, biased and bounded by a worldview that believed in the supremacy of knowledge and customs from Europe). What do we lose when the other side, in this case, the conquered, does not get to tell its side of the story? José Rabasa, for example, has attempted to bridge this gap by exploring an account of the Aztecs and how they experienced the Spanish conquest in Tell me the Story of How I Conquered You. While I understand the context of the Caribbean is different, I wonder (as a scholar that is not a historian) if there are any methods to recover the histories and voices of the colonized? (Echoing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous Can the subaltern speak?) Are there strategies that can be put to use to understand history avoiding the trap of Eurocentric bias? The answer might lie in understanding the “postcolonial” beyond a historical period.

References
  • Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 17–48.
  • McLeod J (2010) Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd editio. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • O’Gorman E (1995) La Invención de América. Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
  • Rabasa J (1993) Inventing America. Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Duncan: University of Oklahoma Press.

Featured image: “abstract world map” by fronx is licensed under CC BY 2.0