Postcoloniality – Claudia Fonseca Alfaro

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.

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

My journey to postcolonial theory began in Sweden

Last fall I joined a webinar series organized by Leon Moosavi, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool and Director of the University of Liverpool in Singapore. It was an impressive list of speakers and one of the lectures I enjoyed the most was the one given by Walter Mignolo. In his talk, Mignolo shared how he had become interested in decolonial theory. As an immigrant in France, and later on in the United States, Mignolo became aware he was perceived as a “third-world” stereotype: an epistemologically-deficient and ontologically-behind “other.” These experiences unleashed a migrant consciousness that also triggered an awareness of the insights that can be discovered through the body (what he would later understand as geo-body politics). Dwelling in metaphoric borders creates “power differentials” that become embodied in us. Mignolo suggested we reflect on where we sense coloniality in our bodies. Our own embodied experiences can be a powerful tool to approach decolonial theory as long as these do not come from a place of ego, but from a sense of shared history (that is to say, with an awareness that whatever has happened to you, has also happened to others).

Mignolo’s story resonated strongly and made me think about my own journey towards postcolonial theory and anticolonial concerns. I became aware of the geo-body politics surrounding my body when I came to Sweden as an immigrant. I have never experienced explicit in-your-face racism while living here (for example, being called derogatory terms or hearing racial slurs), but the polite under-the-table racism has always been there. Echoing part of Mignolo’s account, I have also felt being treated as an epistemologically-deficient and ontologically-behind “other”: a homogenous and third-world uneducated woman; a stereotypical “Latina” that is one of those migrants or brown faces. Under the white gaze of this context, I became aware my body denied me the decency to be perceived as an individual instead of a Latin American “other” endowed with the prejudices attached to the local social construction of the region. Put in my place as a brown woman because of what my body projects, I started to become aware of different “power differentials” I had not encountered before in my country of birth, Mexico (not because there is no racism in Mexico but because I was shielded by being part of the majority Spanish-speaking mestizo group). The unpleasant experiences in Sweden added to the awareness of imperialism I already perceived in the Mexico-US relation and once I began to read postcolonial and decolonial authors something clicked. Lived experience can have a powerful impact in our understanding of the effects of coloniality or colonial forces and echoes in the present.

So, for the ones interested in anticolonial concerns but do not find that postcolonial or decolonial theory resonates with them, follow Mignolo’s advice and reflect: where do you sense coloniality in your body? (If you do not sense it, could it be there is a form of privilege providing you the luxury of ignorance?)

Interested to know more about coloniality and the body? Some reading tips from Mignolo’s lecture: Gloria Anzaldúa, Franz Fanon, María Lugones and Nelson Maldonado Torres.

Featured image: “foundation skate park quarter pipe peeling paint abstract world” by zen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The importance of theorizing from small or secondary cities

Motul, Yucatán. © Claudia Fonseca Alfaro 2015.

Early this year (January to be precise), I participated in a digital workshop on small and secondary cities organized by two talented postdocs: Susana Neves Alves and Hanna Ruszczyk. Over the course of one week, I learned about corners of the world I had never heard of as the group explored: What do we learn from theorizing from “overlooked cities”? What modes of urbanity are specific to these places? What are the conceptual and methodological challenges of doing research in “small” or “secondary” cities? What are the risks of homogenizing by using such terms?

The discussions were intellectually stimulating and connected to some of the big debates currently taking place within urban studies (e.g., the strengths and limitations of operationalizing the concept “planetary urbanization”). At the end, Susana and Hanna encouraged us to write a creative piece to reflect on our respective “small” locations of study thinking through the rich discussions that we had.

The final product is an eye-catching and thought-provoking digital magazine titled Theorising from the overlooked city: Generating a research agenda & research network on small/secondary cities.

Make sure to read my contribution, Finding the secondary or overlooked city? Some methodological reflections from a postcolonial urban scholar.

How do we navigate Eurocentrism? Reflections from teaching postcolonial urban studies

For the past four years I have been teaching a lecture on postcolonial urban theory within The Urban Question—a first-semester course in the international Master’s Program in Urban Studies. In this lecture, I try to explain the relationship between the postcolonial and its impacts on both the urban condition and the production of urban knowledge. (Meaning: the traces of Eurocentrism in how we learn about and teach urban studies today). I encourage students to reflect on examples of postcolonial conditions in their own countries—regardless if their country has an official colonial past or not. This opens a series of interesting reflections and questions. Last year, a student asked if trying to tackle Eurocentrism meant being at odds with the aims of modernity, for example, democracy. A few years ago, a student from Turkey wondered: what happens when ultra-nationalist governments hijack the emancipatory aims of postcolonialism to oppress their own populations by arguing “Western” notions, for example, LGBTQ rights, are “colonial” and therefore have no place in their society?

These important questions are at the heart of postcolonial and decolonial debates and are precisely two points that Kanishka Goonewardena and Tanja Winkler touched upon during their interventions in A Non-Occidentalist West: Learning from Theories Outside the Canon, workshop #1 of the Dislocating Urban Studies Series (which was also a PhD course in which I contributed). Pointing out that not all critique of the West that comes from the global South aims towards emancipatory goals, Kanishka wondered: What forms of critique of Europe and the West are then valid? What is the nature of critique of the West? While Kanishka was thinking about the ultra-nationalist governments in India and Sri Lanka, his point had echoes of the question the student from Turkey had posed in my class. Tanja, in turn, reflected how the concerns of the left had been hijacked by the intellectual political right but for negative purposes. For example, the post-structuralist concern that “all knowledge is important” had been twisted to dismiss science, support regressive standpoints, and promote undemocratic contexts. This reminded of the first student’s concern that postcolonialism could be wielded as a tool to attack democracy.

While we have not been able to settle these debates in class, the discussions around them have stayed with me because of the important question that they raise: how do we navigate Eurocentrism? In Kanishka’s view, we need to have a dialectical understanding of binaries, (for example, center-periphery and north-south), in order to engage with thinkers that are genuine internationalists in the sense that they are not constrained by their geographical locations. The point is to look at the global North and global South as locations that both contain centers and peripheries. For Tanja, our epistemic tools need to be reclaimed. Adding to this, a source of guidance for me has been the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) and his intervention A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Arguing that it is meaningless to carry out epistemological divisions across north/south, de Sousa Santos instead proposes engaging with thinkers that are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, regardless if their work can be labeled as “Western.” In his view, there is much to learn from theories that, even though were produced within Western modernity, can nevertheless offer tools to fight capitalism and colonialism. At the end of the day, as Aníbal Quijano (1992) argues through his work on coloniality of power, what we are trying to dismantle is the colonial side of modernity, not necessarily modernity itself.

I am eager to hear what questions students raise this year.

References

Quijano A (1992) Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena 13(29): 11–20. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353.
Santos B de S (2010) A Non-Occidentalist West?: Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 103–125. DOI: 10.1177/0263276409348079.

Featured image: “Perpetual Ocean – Gulf Stream” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0