"Postcolonial Bourdieu": Notes on the Oxymoron

The notion of a postcolonial Bourdieu presents us with an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms - that points to a set of conditions which have informed the international translation of Bourdieu's work as well as certain tensions existing both within and towards the field of postcolonial studies. Colonial contexts, as well as competing anti-colonial positions, have been a part of the social environment that has generated much of the social theory we present to our students. Yet these contexts are rarely given due consideration. Moreover, Manichean presentations and receptions of theory that have reduced various intellectual fields to a series of "isms" lack the subtlety that is necessary for an understanding of the complex, interwoven and shifting nature of social thought (Puwar & Sharma 2007)

Carrying As Method: Listening to Bodies as Archives

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related

Compiling Maxwell Street

A Book Review Essay of Maxwell Street by Tim Cresswel

Puzzlement of a déjà vu: Illuminaries of the global South

The act of de-centring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge, as long standing geo-political anchors of epistemological authority, is by its very nature a continuous process of undoing, relearning and creating. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’, of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can re-produce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This paper considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus will be on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitute points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes platforms them in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which they respectively map fields, to situate their own points of intervention

Estudios postcoloniales : ensayos fundamentales

278 p. : il. ; 22 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEste libro presenta una amplia panorámica de los estudios postcoloniales, un campo heterogéneo de prácticas teóricas que se ha ido constituyendo en el mundo académico anglosajón a partir de la mitad de la década de 1980. Se ofrecen aquí traducidos al castellano dos de los textos fundamentales que pueden situarse en el origen de los estudios postcoloniales —el de Gayatri Spivak, «Los Estudios de la Subalternidad. Deconstruyendo la historiografía » (1984), y el de Chandra Talpade Mohanty, «Bajo los ojos de Occidente» (1985). Las intervenciones de Ella Shohat y Stuart Hall documentan la discusión que se desarrolló, con particular intensidad a lo largo de la primera mitad de la década de 1990, sobre el «significado de lo “post” en el término postcolonial». Los artículos de Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Robert Young, Nirmal Puwar, Sandro Mezzadra y Federico Rahola dan cuenta, por último, de la evolución del debate en los últimos años a partir de distintas perspectivas teóricas y posiciones «geográficas».índice INTRODUCCIÓN. Sandro Mezzadra 15 1. Estudios de la Subalternidad. Deconstruyendo la Historiografía. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 33 2. Bajo los ojos de Occidente. Saber académico y discursos coloniales. Chandra Talpade Mohanty 69 3. Notas sobre lo «postcolonial» Ella Shohat 103 4. ¿Cuándo fue lo postcolonial? Pensar al límite. Stuart Hall 121 5. La historia subalterna como pensamiento político. Dipesh Chakrabarty 145 6. Al borde del mundo. Fronteras, territorialidad y soberanía en África. Achille Mbembe 167 7. Nuevo recorrido por (las) Mitologías Blancas. Robert J. C. Young 197 8. Poses y construcciones melodramáticas. Nirmal Puwar 237 9. La condición postcolonial. Unas notas sobre la cualidad del tiempo histórico en el presente global. Sandro Mezzadra y Federico Rahola 26

Working across difference: theory, practice and experience

Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, “Black feminist theory is the theory”. The comment referred to how it is not ‘just’ that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, ‘even’ within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow ‘big’ insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts

Striking a Chord: Dementia and Song

We have co-written this piece to relay what can be achieved with song and music in familial and non-familial settings when caring for a person with dementia. This article started as a conversation we had in the Wellcome Collection cafe in London to catch up with each other while Prabhjot was en route from Canada to India, to meet her father. We shared how dementia was becoming a part of our parents’ lives. This article is dedicated to the chords Prabhjot Parmar has struck with her father, Major Harbhajan Singh (25 Dec 1925 – 16 April 2018) and Nirmal Puwar has had the pleasure of sharing with her mother, Kartar Kaur. Both of us have been drawn to understanding how our own performance of song with our respective parent enabled them and us to maintain a register of connection. Song became a means of trying to keep striking a parental and musical chord. We aimed to connect by engendering ‘therapeutic atmospheres’ (Sonntag 2016) through song. We use song and music interchangeably, operating with performance as an umbrella term that includes gesture, utterance, dance, singing and playing musical instruments, for example. Two autoethnographic relational contributions provide a substantive basis to our article, each written by a researcher-carer-daughter, seeking to sustain contact with what remains in her parent living with dementia

Brexit, British People of Colour in the EU-27 and everyday racism in Britain and Europe

This paper foregrounds an understanding of Brexit as unexceptional, as business as usual in Britain and Europe. It reports on original empirical research with British People of Colour who have settled elsewhere in Europe, to bring into view an original perspective to understandings of what Brexit means to Britons living in Europe, and to consider what these testimonies offer to emerging social science research on Brexit. As we argue, focussing on the testimonies of British People of Colour living in the EU-27 offers a unique lens into how Brexit is caught up in everyday racism, personal experiences of racialization and racial violence, and longer European histories of racialization and racism. Importantly, these experiences precede and succeed Brexit, taking place in both Britain and other European Union countries

The Sexual Contract 30 Years on: A Conversation with Carole Pateman

This reflection is based on a conversation with Professor Carole Pateman on 4th December 2017 as we prepared for a conference at Cardiff University to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of her seminal work, The Sexual Contract (1988). As socio-legal scholars, The Sexual Contract has been formative in, and transformative of, our understandings of law and gender. We explore Professor Pateman’s academic journey and consider how she came to write a ground-breaking book that has made major impacts on socio-legal and feminist legal studies. The paper is structured around the main themes arising in conversation with Pateman, with each section centred on her own account taken from our conversation in late 2017

Cross-Fadings of Racialisation and Migratisation: The Postcolonial Turn in Western European Gender and Migration Studies

Looking at feminist and anti-racist approaches situated in or focused on Western Europe, especially Germany, this article investigates how racism and migration can be theorised in relation to each other in critical knowledge production. Rather than being an article ‘about Germany’, my intervention understands the German context as an exemplary place for deconstructing Europe and its gendered, racialised and sexualised premises. I argue that a ‘postcolonial turn’ has begun to emerge in Western European gender and migration studies and is questioning easy assumptions about the connections between racism and migration. Discussing examples from academic knowledge production and media debates, I suggest to think of migratisation (the ascription of migration) as performative practice that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and works in close interaction with racialisation. In particular, drawing on postcolonial approaches, I carve out the interconnection of racialisation and migratisation with class and gender. I argue that equating racialisation with migratisation carries the risk of whitening understandings of migration and/or reinforcing already whitened understandings of nation and Europeanness. To make discrimination ‘accessible’ to critical knowledge production, I engage in an epistemological discussion of the potentials and challenges of differentiating analytical categorisations. With this, this article engages with ascriptions, exclusions and abjectifications and attempts to formulate precise conceptualisations for the ever shifting forms of resistance we urgently need in transnational feminist activism and knowledge productio