Postcolonial Freud: Psychoanalysis in the French Antilles

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Simek
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
French Antilles ◽  
Cultural Alienation

While Martinique and Guadeloupe were assimilated into the French state in 1946, traces of colonial power relations and economic structures persist despite the islands' current status as French départements equal to any other. This article examines the contributions of Freud's thought to the shift in critical perspective that has allowed the continued ‘colonial’ status of these islands, and the cultural alienation of its people, to be identified as a problem or phenomenon requiring analysis and rectification. Speaking of ‘postcolonial Freud’ in this context is tantamount to asking: which postcolony for the French Antillean future, and which Freud for the thought emerging from this space?

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. TORRETTA ◽  
Lizette REITSMA
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Design For Sustainability ◽  
The People ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Design Power ◽  
Relational Issue

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

The Circular Routes of Colonial and Postcolonial Domestic Work: Però’s and Ciaravino’s Alexandria and Ghermandi’s “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Fiore
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Emigration And Immigration ◽  
Women Migrants ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Post Colonial

The chapter explores the connection between emigration and immigration through a combined reading of texts where demographic movements are defined by colonial routes: Renata Ciaravino’s script for the 2005 play Alexandria directed by Franco Però about adventurous women from the Friuli region who emigrated to Egypt in the 1920s to work as wet nurses and maids anticipates the silent yet profoundly important role of today’s domestic helpers and caretakers in Italy as portrayed by Gabriella Ghermandi’s colonial/post-colonial “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio,” included in her 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle. The two texts highlight the forms of emancipation that women migrants develop as part of relocations abroad as well as the forms of awareness about colonial power relations that they prompt among locals.

scholarly journals Structural Foundations of Social Resilience

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-552
Author(s):  
Hulya Dagdeviren ◽  
Luis Capucha ◽  
Alexandre Calado ◽  
Matthew Donoghue ◽  
Pedro Estêvão
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Social Resilience ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
Distinct Role

This article aims to contribute to the theoretical development of the social resilience approach. Recognising the interface between resilience and poverty studies, it proposes a distinct role for resilience research from a critical perspective to understand the dynamics of hardship in exceptional times, such as times of socio-economic crises, rather than explaining the long-term trajectories of poverty. It then provides a conceptual framework on the structural foundations of social resilience, highlighting three components: rules, resources and power relations. The article uses the 2008 crisis and the ensuing period of austerity as a microcosm to place the discussion within a contemporary context.

scholarly journals Linguistic Colonialism in the English Language Textbooks of Multinational Publishing Houses

HOW ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (27) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Jairo Eduardo Soto-Molina ◽  
Pilar Méndez
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Alienation ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Language Textbooks ◽  
Cultural Component ◽  
Cultural Components

The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the concepts of linguistic colonialism and cultural alienation in University textbooks for teaching English as opposed to the theories about culture in the decolonial turn. Dichotomous categories were established based on the analysis of the cultural component of the textbooks for the teaching of English. The corpus consisted of six textbooks produced by multinational publishers and used in Colombia during the years 2006-2018. Documentary analysis procedures were used to discuss emergent themed contents in relation to cultural components from a critical perspective that unveiled imperialism practices. Results showed that the textbook contents dealt with high levels of alienation burden, superficial cultural components and instrumentation to the submissive person who favors the dominant culture of English and does not offer possibilities to embrace interculturality in ELF teaching contexts.

scholarly journals Mediatization Studies and Cultural Studies: A Possible Dialogue for Further Critical Analysis?

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Myriam Durocher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analyse Power ◽  
Privileged Site

<p>Over the last decades, it has been possible to observe an increasing amount of research having for common assumption the impossibility to dissociate changes which occur within medias, culture and society. Mediatization theories, particularly developed in Scandinavian countries, and American configurations of cultural studies utilize interesting tools and conceptual material to think about the transformations that occur within the social field. Both encourage questioning the power relations and struggles that inform those transformations. However, their manner of conceiving and using “culture” and “media” as conceptual tools for analysis differ, bringing multiple and diverging ways to study and question objects, phenomenon and processes. These two approaches do not appear as irreconcilable and would take advantage of being put in dialogue as a way to see how they can possibly complement each other. For example, by enriching their mutual understanding of power and, therefore, their critical character. This article draws points of tension and convergence between cultural studies and mediatization studies. It explores cultural studies' focus on (cultural) practices as a privileged site to analyse power relations and their ongoing negotiations by and through media. This approach may resonate or complement Couldry’s (2004) proposal for a paradigm of media as practice “to help us address how media are embedded in the interlocking fabric of social and cultural life” (p. 129). This dialogue between mediatization theories and cultural studies is being put to the forefront with the hope it may allow further discussions and relevant theoretical avenues for critical research located within both fields. Thinking of this possible interplay let foresee the possibility of questioning objects, processes and phenomenon in a critical perspective in a context produced and characterised by medias’ omnipresence. It would allow researchers to question the power struggles that are negotiated through practices themselves, without neglecting the consideration that most of these practices are made by, with or within media.  </p>

scholarly journals Revealing colonial power relations in early childhood policy making: An autoethnographic story on selective evidence

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-28
Author(s):  
Norma Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
South African ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
Early Childhood Policy ◽  
Inclusive Policy ◽  
Uncertain Future

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding & Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood policy making. I argue for a fresh decolonial debate about early childhood policy to replace dominant imported evidence-based narratives. I pay attention to power relations and examine, not only the content of evidence, but who has authority to speak (Mignolo, 2007). I introduce the bottom-up appreciative participatory dialogical policy making in the Gauteng Impilo project (1996 - 2000), as one attempt to resist the dominant policy trajectory. Local networks, that can inform policy making and resource allocation though conversation and action, emerged from this experience. This article invites urgent inclusive policy debate that expands choices and can produce cumulative worthwhile change and new learnings to birth a better society.

The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Tragic Vision ◽  
Postcolonial State

I have been arguing, over some years, that thinking about the postcolonial condition in relation to tragedy or, rather, through a critical perspective informed by the idea of the tragic is especially useful in a historical conjuncture in which the triumphalist narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism, and socialism have become exhausted, if not extinct (Scott, Conscripts and Omens). Romance, it seems to me, is the predominant mode of emplotment of the anticolonial and radical postcolonial imaginarles. This is because the salient questions animating the critique of the colonial past have turned, understandably enough, on the identification of the disabling repressive harms of colonial power and the construction of the justificatory narrative of resistance that, at length, overcomes the perceived obstacles to a postcolonial state without these sources of (moral, political, cultural, economic) dissatisfaction. These are narratives of longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption. But what if the futures anticipated in this story form come to be fundamentally thrown into doubt so that they lose the self-evidence that so long sustained them as an effective horizon of political desire and political action? What if the futures anticipated by the past are now themselves a part of the past? I have been arguing that, as a consequence of the collapse of the great social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties, we do indeed inhabit a postcolonial present marked by such an irreversible transformation. I have been arguing that the problem about the former colonial worlds for the present is not the superficial one of finding better answers to existing questions but the more fundamental one of altering the questions concerning the relation between past and present that have organized our expectations of possible futures.

Tropical Bont Tick Eradication Campaign in the French Antilles Current Status

1996 ◽  
Vol 791 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. BARRÉ ◽  
E. CAMUS ◽  
J. FIFI ◽  
P. FOURGEAUD ◽  
G. NUMA ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Current Status ◽  
French Antilles ◽  
Eradication Campaign

scholarly journals Indigenous Memes and the Invention of a People

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511773899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Frazer ◽  
Bronwyn Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
National Myth ◽  
Australian Aboriginal ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Over Time

Scholars have become increasingly interested in the political work of Internet memes. While this research has delivered critical insights into how memes are implicated in both progressive and reactionary politics, there endures a lack of critical work on the ways in which Indigenous people engage with memes to deconstruct colonial power relations and produce alternative political arrangements. This article offers a reading of a set of memes produced and published by Australian Aboriginal activist Facebook page Blackfulla Revolution. We consider the ways in which memes are entangled in the achievement of an anti-colonial politics. More specifically, drawing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage, this article offers two levels of analysis. The first analysis focuses on the memes as a text that works to challenge the founding national myth of “peaceful” British settlement. Through the careful narrative of the memes, we see how the colonial assemblage works through “making missing” Indigenous people. And while the material practices and expressive justifications of Australian colonialism might have varied over time, the assemblage has ultimately not changed in nature. For the second analysis, we read the subsequent user engagement with the memes. The sequence of memes, from this second view, contributes “to the invention of a people,” as Deleuze has said. Those excluded from the colonial assemblage and those who recognize it as violence are called forth to engage in movement against it.

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