Introduction: Cultural production under multiple colonialisms

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the special journal issue, we elaborate a multiple colonialisms framework that allows us to examine the complex relationalities of multiple and converging colonial relations in historical and contemporary contexts within which cultural production does its work. Through examples of cultural production from the Americas and Asia, Special Issue contributors analyse rarely-recognized sites of colonialism that bear a palimpsestic relationship to other articulations that are more commonly legible as colonialism. Such an approach makes new analytical connections and gives greater depth to conventional theorizations of coloniality and decolonization. We also illustrate the centrality of the scholarship of Indigenous, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars to the framework, especially the ways in which their work challenges our collective and accumulated racialized and colonial unknowings and illuminates what often remains unthinkable in conventional analyses of cultural production and the colonial contexts of their making. Overall, rather than analytically imply pluralism and equivalence among varied colonialisms, we argue that a multiple colonialisms framework enables cultural studies scholarship to dwell on the relationality, contradictions, and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures and multiple articulations of colonial and racialized violence across spaces. Weaving the various contributions into the framework, we invite readers to consider what histories, structures, and relationships help to explain why actually existing colonialities remain illegible as such in the particular context of each paper, and what that implies for solidarity and decolonization struggles. We hope that highlighting the specific creative methodological practices and significant spatial and temporal rethinking that a multiple colonialisms approach can generate incites conversations about how we might enrich theorizations of coloniality and decolonization.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiple colonialisms
• racism
• casteism
• colonial unknowing
• cultural studies
• Indigenous
• Black
• Dalit-Bahujan scholarship

Acknowledgements

This Special Issue emerged from a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded workshop. We are grateful to our funders and to the participants. We are also grateful to graduate students Ipek Oskay, Benjamin Denga, and Alleson Mason, who provided their expertise and support in the planning, organization, and execution of the workshop. Original participants who are not in this issue include Susan Cahill, John F. Collins, Kim Tallbear, Natalie Loveless, Geraldine Pratt, and Travis Wysote. We are extremely grateful to Shaista Patel, Nishant Upadhyay, and Erin Morton for their truly insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this introduction. Our thanks as well to Timothy Pearson for excellent editorial assistance for this Introduction and the issue as a whole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dia Da Costa is Professor of Social Justice and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger called Theatre (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and Development Dramas (Routledge, 2009).

Alexandre E. Da Costa is Assistant Professor of Social Justice and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta. He is author of Reimagining Black Difference and Politics in Brazil: From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He has edited a special journal issue on ‘Thinking ‘Post-Racial’ Ideology Transnationally in the Americas’ for Critical Sociology and has published articles in Cultural Studies, Race Ethnicity and Education, Third World Quarterly, and Policy Futures in Education.

Notes

1. Dalit-Bahujan refers to variously caste-oppressed peoples. Dalit means down-trodden and refers to those who were formerly considered Untouchable, because the Hindu caste hierarchy considered their caste-based occupations too polluting for them to be within the fold of the caste system. Other caste-oppressed people include Adivasis who are India’s Indigenous Peoples and the lowest within the caste system, such as Shudras, who traditionally have working class and service occupations.

2. With any workshop and Special Issue, gaps often remain. We acknowledge here that a multiple colonialisms framework would further benefit from analyses of anti-Muslim racism and imperialism, as well as examinations of Indigeneity by African scholars of Indigeneity, and of racisms, (neo)colonialism, imperialism, and coloniality by Black and Indigenous scholars from Latin America. These gaps are a function both of our limited networks and initial framing of our project.

3. Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein critique, for example, tendencies within settler colonial studies to treat settler colonialism as a ‘modular analytic that travels without regard to the specificities of location or social and material relations’, and that, by emphasizing a binary of structure over event, limit ‘analyses of settler colonialism itself to a descriptive typology’, the effect of which is to elide and fail to engage ‘multiple and distinct modes of colonialism’ that exist in diverse spatial geographies, such as a more hemispheric examination of the Americas (Vimalassery et al. 2016, para 13). Deployment of the ‘settler colonialism’ analytic thus increases colonial unknowing rather than allow us to ‘better grasp colonial, racial, and imperial simultaneities, as well as positions that do not easily fit into a settler/native binary’ (Vimalassery et al. 2016, para 15).

4. Similarly, as one of the contributors to this Special Issue, Shaista Patel, commented on an early draft of this Introduction, how might beginning with African scholarship on Indigeneity, imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism (i.e. foregrounding ‘Africa as method’) shift the concerns, constructs, and frameworks of North American Cultural Studies? Although our Special Issue neglects this field, focusing instead on the Blackness of, and Black cultural production in, North America and the Caribbean, the multiple colonialisms approach invites attention to such reframings.

5. This status is readily apparent in peoples’ struggles against contemporary experiences of stigma and violence owing to the legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) and its postcolonial version, the Habitual Offenders Act (1952). Denotified tribals (those formerly labelled criminal tribes) have demanded constitutional guarantees that accrue to other tribes and castes, but not to them, owing to their presumed criminality. The demand for constitutional reforms (of Section 377 for example, British laws against sodomy) has also been ongoing, relentlessly fought for by queer communities and garnering a recent victory when law 377 was struck down in September 2018.

6. Likewise, India’s occupation of Assam and other north-eastern states intensifies the need to rethink regional histories of colonialism, and who or what can be made legible as a foreign occupying force.

 

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connections Grant [grant number 611-2016-0001].