ID 258--Special Topics: Beyond Tokenism: Indigenizing, Feminizing, Queering Development

International development has been an overwhelmingly white, heteronormative, and patriarchal project. That is to say, it has been informed ideologically, epistemologically, and in practice by hegemonic Eurocentric norms, priorities, and “expert knowledge.” In this course, we focus our attention on the shifting but near-permanent criticisms of normative, hegemonic development projects articulated by LGBTQ people, people of color, Indigenous scholars and activists, Pan-Africanists and African feminists, transnational feminists, Chicano/a historians, and more. We give particular attention to elucidating alternative imaginaries of “progress,” “empowerment,” and “development” for meaningful, livable futures that emphasize wellbeing, ecological balance, and buen vivir. In this way, the course is explicitly forward-looking as we seek to move beyond critique towards the active imagining of new horizons

Slow dissent and worldmaking beyond imperial relations in “kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)

Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally supported,” and misappropriations of the anti-imperial mantel by government representatives. Over the preceding several decades, the state fostered a political environment antagonistic toward Cameroonians of the diaspora, and this was instrumentalized in the widespread dismissal of activists as foreign, foreign-backed, or foreign-influenced. Activists were hesitant but sometimes strategically prepared to call upon transnational groups for attention and political action against repression and violence in Cameroon. In the context of the state’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that transnational solidarities must be attuned to and integrated with local politics in Cameroon. Making sense of popular debates regarding (anti)imperialism, (anti)intervention, and transnational solidarity in conditions of authoritarianism matters for political debates across the African continent

Extraction is not a metaphor: decolonial and Black Geographies against the gendered and embodied violence of extractive logics

We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value-making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies, and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of research with three communities entangled within and targeted through extractivism along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive-tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of 'extractive logics' to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory, foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly-permanent structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization. We analyse documents from the Chad–Cameroon oil consortium, which projected and then calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline's triggering of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities, alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystefies the ways that racial and gendered violence are sanctioned (and even premeditated) within extractive logics. We hope that this work challenges some of the methodological nationalism so common within extractive scholarship, and brings extractive processes across disparate South–South and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross-fertilisation of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical refrains. We reflect on the imperatives for and (im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism

Social Licence to Operate

In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We focus on the role of academics and social science researchers within and beyond the space of the university in engineering, shaping, and promoting dominant SLO frameworks, and endorsing the power and mythology of SLO. We do so in conversation with decolonial orientations that simultaneously analyse the colonial logics within corporate practice and galvanise epistemic justice beyond colonial and epistemic extractivism. The university, as a site for the refinement and promotion of hegemonic concepts like SLO, is an important space for post-extractive struggles

'What kind of witchcraft is this?' Development, magic and spiritual ontologies

This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spirituality. They do so with attention to the paradoxes, nuances, and complexities of these intersections. This introduction explores some of the cross-cutting themes arising from these complexities, including: scale; limitations of Euro-dominant conceptualisations of development; Othering of polytheistic, multi-theistic, and non-theistic spiritual ontologies; entanglements of spirituality, politics, and power; and co-productions of new forms of development. We argue that thinking through these various cross-cutting themes provides a multitude of possibilities for decolonising the development project

Review Concerning Violence. Directed by Göran Olsson. Produced by Final Cut for Real, Helsinki Filmi Oy, Louverture Films. 2014

Göran Olsson’s filmic account of what is perhaps Frantz Fanon’s (1961) most famous chapter in The Wretched of the Earth, “Concerning Violence,” opens as a soldier, from his secure vantage point in a hovering helicopter, shoots a horned bull as it races across an open field. The animal is shot with the automatic gunfire and stumbles, its knees buckling and head stooping. Convulsing painfully in the dirt, the shooting continues until a bullet pierces the inner nostril. Blood pours from the animal’s nose in a thick, constant stream as his movements slow. Lauryn Hill’s powerful voice is heard, quoting Fanon, “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The dying bull, crudely shot from above without any intention of providing nutrition to the passing soldiers, embodies the illogical and brutal suffering effected upon colonized people through colonial violence. Olsson’s film is a powerful aesthetic backdrop for Fanon’s anti-colonial manifesto, one that unflinchingly engages with colonialism as a violent project. Against this illogical violence, counter-violence becomes a crucial component of emancipation. The film opens up new spaces for considerations of the use of violence in the face of terrible, absolute, and normalized violence, including today’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist movements, poised as they are against enormous infrastructures of normalized and everyday violence

Constant questioning on-and-off the page: Race, decolonial ethics and women researching in Africa

© The Author(s) 2019. Drawing from emergent scholarship in feminist political geography on discomfort feminism and the literature on decolonial ethics for research more broadly, I argue that further work is necessary to deconstruct the artificial barriers between ‘the field’ and ‘non-field’/home and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa.’ Motivated by the conversations inspired by this volume—which importantly consider the possibilities, challenges and tensions of woman-researchers in Africa—I argue that our exchanges must be simultaneously attuned to the racial politics of doing research in contemporary African societies. The adoption of decolonial ethical orientations is valuable in pushing such a project forward.https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1099/thumbnail.jp