intro Flashcards
(23 cards)
What remains inscribed in the architectures of modern politics?
The afterlives of empire, not only in the institutions of postcolonial states but in the very categories through which development, sovereignty, and modernity are imagined.
Where are the legacies of empire particularly palpable?
Across the Global South, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, where regimes of racialised identities and governance are marked by normative and epistemic inheritances of empire.
How do the legacies of empire persist?
Not simply as historical residues but as structuring conditions that continue to shape political life in the present.
What structure does the essay adopt to argue that colonialism endures as an active logic?
A thematic structure, examining how colonialism persists epistemically, politically, and economically.
What lens does the essay begin with to explore colonial violence?
A Fanonian lens, as Fanon offers more than just a descriptive account of colonial violence.
What does Fanon articulate in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (1961)?
How the colonised subject is constructed in opposition to a racialised coloniser and how the national bourgeoisie inherits forms, logics, and aspirations of colonial domination.
How is colonialism sustained according to Fanon?
Through mimicry, epistemologies that privilege Western rationality, and elite projects that reinscribe inherited hierarchies in the name of nation-building.
What challenge does Nayar assert regarding postcolonial analysis?
That emphasizing historical continuity risks reifying the past and underestimating the agency of postcolonial states.
What is Swati Parashar’s argument about the analysis of empire?
The task is not to explain Africa or the Global South through empire alone but to understand how empire is continually repurposed within modern institutions, discourses, and global arrangements.
What is the focus of the first section of the essay?
Interrogating the epistemic architectures of colonialism through Fanon’s theory of relational identity and the colonial will to civilise.
What historical examples are used to illustrate the epistemic legacy of colonialism?
Rwanda and Burundi through the Hamitic hypothesis and the Dominican Republic through anti-Haitianism and whitening ideologies.
What does the second section of the essay examine?
How epistemologies were consolidated through institutions and political violence in the post-independence era.
How did colonial distinctions become foundations for postcolonial governance?
Through centralised power along ethnic lines in Rwanda and Burundi and racialised national belonging in the Dominican Republic.
What is the focus of the final section of the essay?
How colonial legacies shape relations between postcolonial states, beginning with the Bandung Conference and the emergence of the Third World Project.
What critique is addressed regarding China’s role in Africa and the Caribbean?
While framed as decolonial solidarity, Chinese investment often replicates the extractive logics of Western capital.
How are critiques of Chinese engagement framed according to Franceschini and Loubere?
Critiques are inflected by Orientalist assumptions that render China as a deviant outsider.
What concept does Edward Said contribute to the analysis?
The concept of discursive formation, showing how critiques of imperialism are shaped by the racialised grammar of the colonial archive.
What overarching narrative bridges the thematic exploration in the essay?
The narrative of racialisation, linking Fanon’s insights to contemporary structures of power.
What is the ultimate aim of the essay’s argument?
To demonstrate that postcolonial theory remains essential to understanding how power persists through racialised structures, not only in how empire is remembered but in how it is masked and rearticulated anew.
What theoretical lens does the essay add to the Fanonian lens?
This essay adopts a dual theoretical lens, combining Fanonian postcolonial analysis with post-structural insights from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler
What are the benefits of post structuralism?
Sharpens our understanding of how power operates not only through institutions but through discursive formations, performativity and the production of truth
Together, these frameworks reveal….
What does Foucault argue?
Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” or the “art of government” encourages us to think of power not just through the top down power of the state but widening our understanding of power to include other forms of social control
What does Judith Butler argue?
Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity” reveals how racial and ethnic categories are not static but effects of repetition within a regulatory regime of truth
These insights compliment Fanon by..
