Ecocinema Studies: Evolving Colonial Critiques

This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.

Chapter 4 explores how the Guadeloupean Sully Lara’s Sous l’esclavage clearly sets out to dismantle the narrative of the grandeur of béké (white Creole) culture and patriarchy by depicting the dysfunction of the emblematic Savalon family. Lara offers a rewriting of colonial Guadeloupe during the tumultuous period of the 1848 February Revolution that presents a critical vision of the white Creole oligarchy. Lara grapples with, and also manipulates, colonial archives (narrowly defined). Sous l’esclavage is thus a “historical” novel based on archival research to denounce the white Creole vision of Guadeloupean history. Lara denounces colonial sexual exploitation as exemplified by the motif of rape (of the slave Sida) and the forbidden liaison between a white Creole woman and her Black slave. However, Lara’s narrative praises the French colonial order and minimizes the negative effects of French colonialism even as it betrays his loathing of békés. His discussion of the Code Noir (1685), the set of laws created to govern the relationships between colonizers and the New World peoples under their rule, shows the limitations of his critique of colonialism: Lara argues that the Code Noir was beneficial to slaves and as such was humane, seeming to takes this document at face value.

Reviewed by: Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology eds. by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, and: Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology eds. by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink Margaret M. Bruchac PhD (bio) Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi , eds. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. 503 pp. Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink , eds. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012. 300 pp. During the emergence of archaeology as a scientific discipline, research on Indigenous peoples and sites typically followed a colonial model focused on discovery and recovery. Sites, artifacts, and human remains were located, removed, contextualized, and displayed by explorers and outsiders; these processes often took place without the participation or consent of traditional leaders and knowledge-bearers from the population under study. These archaeological excavations enabled colonial states and scientific authorities to dominate and appropriate the intellectual and cultural property of colonial subjects. Practitioners of scientific colonialism routinely marginalized Indigenous perspectives and distorted representations of ancestral peoples, objects, and territories. They also introduced temporal, social, and typological divisions between present and past, and between theoretically "primitive" and "civilized," "historic" and "prehistoric" eras. Postcolonial approaches to archaeology, as theory and practice, constitute more than just forms of resistance to earlier colonial models of archaeology. Postcolonial methods are, ideally, investigative, restorative, and collaborative. Practitioners examine the impacts of colonial processes, while soliciting data and insights that can expand our understanding of the archaeological record. Proponents of decolonization also seek to [End Page 184] restore local and Indigenous perspectives and to shift the social relations around archaeology by increasing engagement with contemporary descendant communities. Two new publications examine both the history of colonial archaeologies and trends in postcolonial archaeologies; each is likely to prove influential in shaping the future of collaborative archaeologies. Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology: Reframing Colonialism Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, editors of the Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, offer a collection of narratives that recount place-specific histories of colonizing archaeologies and decolonizing projects. This volume is organized into five parts, framed by introductions and commentaries. Themes are critiques of colonialism; archaeological narratives of colonialism; issues of restitution, repatriation, and ethics; postcolonial identities; and strategies for implementing postcolonialism. Forty-five contributors from six continents represent various scientific, Indigenous, and ethnic perspectives. Each author examines colonial power relations, articulates attempts to decolonize, and proposes future projects, while weaving together regionally specific negotiations of power, identity, and history. The authors seek to disentangle archaeological theory, practice, and ethics from the limitations of colonialist thought and to recover more culturally accurate representations of local Indigenous peoples and ethnic histories. Part I, "The Archaeological Critique of Colonization: Global Trajectories," is particularly valuable for its thoughtful discussions of the histories of archaeological practice in the Middle East, Near East, South Asia, and East Asia. Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal (chapter 2) examines Western searches for the origins of classical civilizations in the Middle East, linking this work to the invention of the "primitive," the consolidation of nation-state identities, and the persistence of Western intellectual dominance (45). Benjamin W. Porter (chapter 3) critiques archaeological (re) constructions of history in Palestine and Israel that bolster national narratives to legitimate contemporary social injustices. Identifying the term "Near East" as a "discursive myth," he suggests recovering local Indigenous terms (e.g., the Arabic mashriq) that are more historically grounded (52). Museological models are examined in the chapter by Sonya Atalay (chapter 4). She uses Anishinabe petroglyphs and prophecy representing [End Page 185] spiral reckonings of time to acknowledge colonial ruptures while also laying foundations for postcolonial futures. Dilip K. Chakrabarti (chapter 5) argues that in South Asia, archaeologists marginalized India's Indigenous history by focusing on successive migrations rather than local communities. He also complains of the continuing intellectual marginalization of Third World scholars by First World scientists. Koji Mizoguchi (chapter 6) describes trends in East Asia (e.g., antiquarianism, Marxism, and myths of imperial genealogy) that reshaped identities and inspired new national traditions (83), and Hyung Il Pai (chapter 7) discusses how Japan mapped and manipulated Korea's ancient remains (koseki), relics (ibutsu), and...

Alternative discourse in its various forms informs us simultaneously on collective disparate, mainstream and marginalized histories and identities. The various manifestations of these larger problems and their sources are identified as, namely, the critique of colonialism, academic imperialism, de- colonization (of knowledge), critical pedagogy, imitation and the captive mind, de- schooling, academic dependency, Orientlism and Eurocentrism (see Alatas, S.F., 2003). These are captured in the larger contexts of political, cultural and power relations between the former Western colonial powers and the ex- colonies.

Introductiongordon k. lewis was a man of sound learning, steeped in the classics and totally interdisciplinary in his approach to knowledge. He was also the complete Caribbean scholar and intellectual, passionate and committed to the economic and political viability of the entire region. He was both a European and a Welshman, and in his own time and style he was also a revolutionary. He married a black woman from 'the islands' (Trinidad) long before the practice was viewed as acceptable, and he wrote bitingly critical things about Europe that white, European men were not commonly known to write. Via his marriage he was afforded an insider's view of both Trinidadian and the wider English-speaking, colonial Caribbean society, but at the same time, because he lived for many years in Puerto Rico, he also acquired a deep familiarity with, and appreciation for, the Hispanic Caribbean reality. The latter gave him first-hand knowledge of the neo-colonial condition and the hulking, imperialist presence of the United States in the Caribbean. Yet Lewis retained the objectivity of an outsider as he sharpened his critique of colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. With this in mind Anthony Maingot declared that of Lewis' works are attacks on imperialism,1 and this fits well with his characterisation of Lewis the intellectual as someone with a penchant for crossing swords, and, drawing blood.2As a European he had a keen sense of what it was like to live in the heart of one of the great colonial empires and to witness the vicissitudes of European 'civilisation, while, given the subordinate place of Wales in the United Kingdom, as a Welshman he had a bird's eye view, albeit from the margins of that empire, of colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation. In other words, though he was white, male and European, Lewis's Welshness gave him a special insight into the shameful record of Europe's human rights abuses at home and abroad, and sensitised him to the tortured history of indigenous genocide, cultural mutilation, colonial tyranny, slavery and indentureship. And these all fed into his passionate and critical defence of the victims of colonial rule everywhere. Lewis also appreciated the glorious and truly wondrous society that was America, but at the same time wondered about the contradictory essence of its own historical record. That contradiction is well captured by Orlando Patterson, who wrote that Americans have never been able to explain how it came to pass that the most articulate defender of their freedoms, Thomas Jefferson, and the greatest hero of their revolution and history, George Washington, both were large-scale, largely unrepentant slaveholders.3This said, Lewis was very aware that the historical circumstances attending the birth of the modern Caribbean meant that it would not unusual to find that many of those who today comprise the region's inhabitants would have a keen interest in their 'identities'. The combined processes of colonialism, slavery, indentureship, servile labour, forced migrations, multiple cultural encounters, all contributed to the debate over the question, Who are we? Thus, he wrote of the confusion about Caribbean identity - what it is and what it ought to be and chided the conventional-minded writers from the imperial centers [who] have seen the region as a backward area requiring guidance from outside to modernise it, which really means to westernise it - which in turn means to shape it into yet another capitalist-industrial society beholden to the foreign investor.* This tells us that Lewis was cautious about the intrusion of capitalist relations of production into the region, just as he was aware that Caribbean identity is a mix of what Caribbean peoples think of themselves, and very importantly, what outsiders think of them. Understanding what some have referred to as realpolitik and the idea that 'might makes right', he knew that if the region were defined simply as America's backyard, American military and economic might could carry the day in spite of any local protests. …

This article focuses on distinctive traits of poetics in the works of Caribbean thinkers, its critique of colonialism and slavery, its orientation toward the world and attention to the creativity of survival. It draws on writers who have influenced my work—particularly Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter—to give the reader a sense of the textures of their works.

Amplified by a feedback loop of nationalist memorialization and international reception, the dominant narrative on Ricardo Rangel’s work reduces the anti-colonial purchase of his images to a simple disclosure of binarized injustice. By reading lesser-known images alongside his more canonical production, I argue that his wider archive in fact shows a gradated engagement with the racial complexities of late-colonial Mozambique and provides a key source of material for a post-colonial analysis of its capital, Lourenço Marques. To wit, Rangel’s images permit both a nuanced reflection on his own intermedial status and a critique of colonialism that goes beyond the sheer fact of native exploitation and marginalization.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a serious critique of colonialism. The novel shows its impacts, both economic and social, concerning the colonizers as well as the colonized people. This has been set against the backdrop of Congo to pinpoint the imposition of capitalist systems upon traditional African societies driven by brutal enforcement. Such contrasts between the insatiable greedy European economic interest and indigenous ways of life eventually translate into the local economy, social setup, and cultural identity. In its symbolic use, Conrad criticizes the exploitation of the natural resources of Africa, a metaphor for the suffering and degradation of the indigenous populations, through ivory. Indeed, their search for gains due to natural resources comes at the expense of humanity for the Africans, the enforced labor being central in such exploitation under inhuman conditions. The characters used, Kurtz and Marlow, reveal some sort of psychic influence that may emanate as an aftermath of imperialism. While Kurtz's descent into madness epitomizes the moral corruption and psychic disintegration that arise out of an unrestrained pursuit of economic profit, Marlow's journey depicts internal conflict and disillusion on the part of those who bear witness to the horrors of colonialism. Powerful though the critique of imperialism may be, in this novel there have been critical remarks regarding its Eurocentric position and its representation of African people as passive individuals with no agency. The absence of the narration of African voices undermines the multicategory of social and economic transformation that took place in the Congo and omits possibilities of resistance from those colonized. In any case, Conrad has relevant insight into the ethical dimension of colonialism through the forces of self-destruction driven by economic greed and the mission to civilize.

Theories of human nature might provide the keys to discovering the purpose and meaning of later life. But such theories have come under fire in recent decades, as they have been found to harbor covert or overt messages of a clearly prejudicial kind. Critiques of colonialism, gender stereotypes, and sexual orientation have destabilized arguments from nature. Likewise, naturalistic accounts of aging and later life have also been subject to critical analysis as modernist societies struggle to valorize, find guidance for, or liberate what it means to grow old. Four contrasting accounts of later life reveal underlying theories of nature that either support an inherent sense of purposes and social norms or, conversely, cast doubt on any imperative for how older adults should live out their later years. In the quest for meaning in later life, philosophically, should we “do what comes naturally?”

Taking part in the broad contemporary effort of proposing an anticolonial and non-Eurocentric critical theory, this article sets out the dialogue between Aníbal Quijano's critique of coloniality, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason. Firstly, we reconstruct the critique of instrumental reason, highlighting how it is enriched when associated with the binary objective reason and subjective reason as well as aspects of negative dialectics. Secondly, we revisit Quijano's texts immediately preceding his decolonial phase. These texts allow us to see how the critique of instrumental reason is an integral part of and is enlarged by the concept of coloniality. Building on this double movement, we are able to map affinities, differences, and connections between the two critiques and their respective outlining of alternatives to instrumental reason, especially the mediations between, on the one hand, objective reason and non-identical, and, on the other, historical/alternative reason and heterogeneous totality.

This study explores Khafif Makhfi ki Khwab Beeti, a groundbreaking Urdu novel by Mirza Athar Baig, through the lenses of parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, and postmodern narrative theory. Baig’s experimental narrative blends elements of metafiction, philosophical inquiry, and linguistic hybridity to challenge traditional literary forms. The protagonist, Khafif Makhfi, is not only a researcher of paranormal phenomena but also a narrative agent questioning memory, truth, and authorship. Through the novel’s polyphonic structure, multiple cultural and intellectual discourses intersect, including indigenous wisdom, colonial critique, and scientific skepticism. The study demonstrates how Baig transforms parapsychological experiences—such as lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and hypnagogia—into complex literary devices. Furthermore, the research argues that the novel exemplifies postmodern fiction by dismantling narrative certainty and embracing intertextual ambiguity, thus offering new directions in Urdu fiction.

Black Panther's (Coogler 2018) popularity amongst its black audiences in part stems from its foregrounding of the persistent social injustices engendered by colonialism and slavery (what Aníbal Quijano (2000:533) terms 'coloniality') and black people's struggles to overcome them. As a representational tactic in approaching this theme, the Hollywood blockbuster draws on the imaginings of Afrofuturism, which variously endorses radical or more conciliatory approaches to decoloniality. This southern theoretical approach and the critique of coloniality offered by Afrofuturism frame our exploration of how the film positions the hero, T'Challa and the villain, Erik Killmonger, as embodiments of contrasting approaches to emancipation from colonialism's entrenched legacy. Using a structuralist approach that draws on the narrative models of Tsvetan Todorov, Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss, we analyse the film's approach to decoloniality by examining the relationship between T'Challa and Killmonger as the protagonist and antagonist respectively. The analysis reveals the limitations of the film's construction of the hero's and villain's understandings of the path to liberation. Rather than offering a revolutionary remedy for the injustices of colonialism and its aftermath, the film embraces a liberal standpoint that remains palatable to the white establishment, both within Hollywood and the broader socio-political milieu.

The first study of colonial Taiwan in English, this volume brings together seventeen essays by leading scholars to construct a comprehensive cultural history of Taiwan under Japanese rule. Contributors from the United States, Japan, and Taiwan explore a number of topics through a variety of theoretical, comparative, and postcolonial perspectives, painting a complex and nuanced portrait of a pivotal time in the formation of Taiwanese national identity. Essays are grouped into four categories: rethinking colonialism and modernity; colonial policy and cultural change; visual culture and literary expressions; and from colonial rule to postcolonial independence. Their unique analysis considers all elements of the Taiwanese colonial experience, concentrating on land surveys and the census; transcolonial coordination; the education and recruitment of the cultural elite; the evolution of print culture and national literature; the effects of subjugation, coercion, discrimination, and governmentality; and the root causes of the ethnic violence that dominated the postcolonial era. The contributors encourage readers to rethink issues concerning history and ethnicity, cultural hegemony and resistance, tradition and modernity, and the romancing of racial identity. Their examination not only provides a singular understanding of Taiwan's colonial past, but also offers insight into Taiwan's relationship with China, Japan, and the United States today. Focusing on a crucial period in which the culture and language of Taiwan, China, and Japan became inextricably linked, Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule effectively broadens the critique of colonialism and modernity in East Asia.

Abolishing Settler Imperialism:Review of Red Scare Juliana Hu Pegues (bio) Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist is a significant and necessary examination of state power's consolidation through the criminalization and surveillance of Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the historical and contemporary contexts in the United States and Canada, Barker argues that Indigenous peoples are both represented as terrorists and made representable as terrorists in order to establish, organize, and maintain state imperialism. Barker looks specifically to two figures, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, who act in tandem to fortify the authority of the state to regulate identity, punish opposition, and condition the possibilities for life itself. Red Scare offers an important analysis of state power through an intersectional Indigenous studies, which is in conversation with feminist studies, carceral studies, critical ethnic studies, and anti-imperialist scholarship. Readers familiar with Lenape scholar Joanne Barker's work will recognize her incisive critique of colonialism and capitalism grounded in an Indigenous feminist framework. While her previous book Native Acts focused on Indigenous peoples' subjectivity within state formations of recognition and membership, in Red Scare she hones in specifically on how, and to what ends, state and corporate actors (often working together) deploy discourses of national security and public safety in order to enact materially and epistemically violent reprisals against Indigenous activists and Indigenous peoples' self-determination. Since the 1998 publication of Luana Ross's (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) foundational book, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, very few scholars have focused keen attention on the criminalization of Indigeneity and [End Page 221] Indigenous peoples. Such analyses are critical, given disparities within the system of mass incarceration and the alarming yet underreported instances of police violence experienced by American Indian, Alaska Native, Hawaiian, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit persons and communities. Barker joins scholar-activists in Indigenous studies, such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Alderville First Nation), Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in centering the criminalization of Indigenous peoples as both sign and instantiation of colonialism's longue durée in the United States and Canada. Red Scare, moreover, locates the state's current strategies of counterterrorism, particularly in response to the pipeline opposition of Indigenous water protectors, as a continuation of ongoing imperial processes of anti-Indigenous invasion, occupation, extraction, and sexual violence. Throughout the book, the concept of Red Scare functions as both an organizing analytic and a reading practice for studying state formation through this polysemantic phrase that invokes the fearmongering fueled by the discursive and affective imagery of, alternately, the red communist and the racialization of the Native Red Man/Woman. Though an inventive play on words, Barker moves past analogizing the multivalent meanings of the term to offer a historical reiteration of anti-Indigenous criminalization located in the shift from government scapegoating and the (extra)legal disciplining of communists, socialists, and anarchists during World Wars I and II, to a post–Cold War refashioning of subversive threat attached to a new cohort of racialized radicals, namely Indigenous, Black, Muslim, or queer. From the late 1960s forward, Indigenous activists in particular were considered communist sympathizers, or unknowing patsies for communist organizers, because of what was viewed as the inherently socialistic and anti-capitalist nature of Indigenous communities. In relation to state imperialist practices, Barker goes even further to explicate an additional Red Scare genealogy through the lens of extractive capitalism. In a section under the heading "Capital Oil," Barker brilliantly traces the development of oil economy and infrastructure alongside the ascendancy of American military hegemony, resulting in the equating of energy security with national security. Not only does this securitized economy depend disproportionately on energy and mineral extrication from Indigenous territories, but it underscores the reasons underlying the creation of the Indigenous terrorist, whose protection of the environment undermines national inviolability and public freedom. These are not incidental constructions. Barker excels in [End Page 222] drawing these types of unexpected and nuanced linkages that, once understood, are the only way one can view them. Joanne Barker most...

This article examines instances in Philippine historiography where nationalism, as a unitary end, has been used to elide and obscure class difference. It begins with a partial explanation of the lacunae in antinationalist thinking in the Philippines, and then proceeds to a critique of contemporary nationalist historiography. Using historians Zeus Salazar and Reynaldo Ileto as case studies, it examines how nationalist historiography can serve as means to implicitly justify localized acts of class oppression. The works of these scholars, while crucial in forwarding critiques of colonialism and neocolonialism, privilege nationalist unity over thorough examinations of disjunctures produced by class difference.