Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of (...) cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and fragmentation that (...) it celebrates. Through the work of María Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article investigates the ways in which the Western theoretical construct of the feminist utopia has been rearticulated within the field of colonial and postcolonial studies. Particularly, it contends that Rokeya Hossain’s literary works innovatively use the framework of the feminist utopia to reimagine a decolonized nation premised on the ideals of gender equity and religious harmony. Using the scholarship of Barnita Bagchi, Sreejata Paul, Sandeep Banerjee, and Ralph Pordzik, among others, as a springboard, this article situates two of (...) Hossain’s literary works—Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag —firmly at the intersections of feminist utopianism and postcolonial studies. By analyzing textual evidence and incorporating historical research on the Indigo Rebellion and the nationalist struggle for independence, the article also establishes ways in which Hossain reconfigures the discourse of nationalism by positioning the subjectivities of colonized women front and center. (shrink)

Geo Maher’s _Anticolonial Eruptions_ is a force to be reckoned with. As a reading experience, it’s a bloody delight, even as – and maybe because – Maher guides us down in to the depths of the volcanoes stoking the explosive fires of rebellion. We also get to follow the moles below and high above ground as they wait for their moment to emerge, shock, and rebel. These moles are blind in one sense, while in another sense they can tell time, (...) or more accurately they create time in the form of political time; marking the potential beginning of a new era. This political time is created in the moment of the emergence of these moles from the shadows in order to ambush and take advantage of the “hubris” of colonizers who are comfortable in their own blindness, in not-seeing what they cannot grapple with, that which is right before their eyes; colonization and all it has wrought upon the colonized. A new political moment is then birthed, time starts anew, and this is a result of the colonizer’s limitations in grasping the depths and heights of their oppression of the colonized. (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. (...) From the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines historical landmarks in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South Africa that shaped anticolonial non-racialism. These reveal the ways colonial authorities used conversion to Christianity, “tribe,” and “race” to undermine resistance to colonialism, and they show that political approaches to anticolonial resistance were divided about participation in colonial institutions for “Natives” and non-collaboration with the colonial state; political mobilization on the basis of race, and non-racialism; and assimilation (...) into the Western, racialized capitalist order as British subjects, and a radical transformation of this order. Contrary to prevailing understandings that anticolonial non-racialism advocated forgetting, transcending and evading race, this article posits that it accounted for racialized difference, contested colonial uses of race, offered a radical critique of the idea of race, and contributes to a new vocabulary for thought about race. (shrink)

The notion of ‘Inclusionary Othering,’ in garnering uptake within diverse nursing spheres, muddies a critical understanding of Othering by obscuring the colonial production, exploitation and perpetuation of the Other for economic and political gain. The ongoing genocide of Indigenous women and girls in Canada is a direct manifestation of the Othering process and in response to the report's Calls for Justice, it is an apt time to re‐enliven the conversation of the process of Othering's philosophical construction. The purpose of this (...) article is to re/turn to the philosophical underpinnings of the process of Othering in hopes of enlivening a new wave of resistance within nursing and elsewhere to the means by which the Other is constructed as well as to the notion of Inclusionary Othering itself. Perhaps this re/turn to the philosophy of Edward Said and Sylvia Wynter can result in further thwarting the Othering construct by highlighting its colonial construction and usher in a pragmatic shift, increasing critical engagement with the construct as well as inspiring a re/newed resistance toward Othering in nursing practice. (shrink)

Critical remarks on Geo Maher's _Anticolonial Eruptions_.

In _Beyond the Sovereign Self_ Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in _The Sovereign Self_, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, (...) experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myer and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements. (shrink)

Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of ungovernable (...) counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo. (shrink)

A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature outside of Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and period of its prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, practices and cultures travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows us to see how realism has been relativized in such a way as to open up the possibilities of redefinition of the notion and practice and moving beyond them. For these reasons I am (...) undertaking a short survey in this paper of the transculturation, after Fernando Ortiz, of realism in Africa, tracing its genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization in anticolonial resistance literature and transmogrification into the magical realism and postmodernism of postcolonial experimental writing. (shrink)

Good interlocutors are a blessing, and needless to say, I’m feeling very blessed today. This is especially true for a project in which _vision_ figures so centrally, since we often see most clearly through the parallax of another’s eyes. Contributors to this conversation have cast distinct lines of sight onto _Anticolonial Eruptions _that have allowed me to see both otherwise and better, to recognize which elements of my original argument remain incomplete or unclear, to glimpse what was overlooked or taken (...) for granted, and to realize other moments where I might have been wrong entirely. They have revealed how my book, despite diagnosing colonial hubris, might reproduce blindspots that are more or less hubristic in their own right. This apparent irony is anything but. Any book, especially one this short, slices into and across history and theory ways that are inescapably partial, leaving a generative remainder to be dealt with. But more than this, I find nothing but encouragement in how my comrade-readers have taken up the lenses provided—the colonial blindspot, the second sight of the colonized, and the decolonial ambush—to excavate and cultivate a radical second sight from the depths of the colonial blindspot. Whether diagnosing the paradoxical unseeing of ocular-centrism, my own blindness toward the revolutionary nature of care as community resistance, or the ways that tropes of inevitability might refract my political judgment, each of the critiques printed above offers, in Kevin Bruyneel’s words, “more ammo for the canon/cannon” (88). (shrink)

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In _Decolonizing Dialectics _George Ciccariello-Maher breaks this impasse by (...) bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion. (shrink)

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In _Decolonizing Dialectics _Geo Maher breaks this impasse by (...) bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion. (shrink)

Euzhan Palcy’s film A Dry White Season, set in apartheid South Africa, portrays a resistance not intended to lead to victimhood, yet leads to the death of the Afrikaans protagonist, Benjamin Du Toit. The narrative follows Ben as they are educated about Black South Africans’ suffering under apartheid, their growing activism and simultaneous increasing victimization beside that of their Black friends. I first examine how early political critics of the film thought it stressed the victimization of the white character (...) at the expense of that of the Black characters. Next, I interpret the film by considering how Palcy’s aims, the influence of their compatriot Aimé Césaire’s anticolonial views, and the details of the film’s structure, illuminate the film’s philosophical insights into victimization and resistance. I show how the film’s representation of Ben’s secondary victimization and witnessing highlights the victimization of apartheid. (shrink)

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, _Borrowed Light_ makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era's principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe's semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent (...) then—human vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reason—remain central today. Timothy Brennan returns to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th century and its legacies. In readings of the showdown between Spinoza and Vico, Hegel's critique of liberalism, and Nietzsche's antipathy towards the colonies and social democracy, Brennan identifies the divergent lines of the first anticolonial theory—a literary and philosophical project with strong ties to what we now call Marxism. Along the way, he assesses prospects for a renewal of the study of imperial culture. (shrink)

In this chapter, the authors trace the epistemic challenge initiated by colonialism as part of its civilizing and modernizing missions, and the epistemological violence that undermined Africa’s knowledge systems. The chapter argues that the anticolonial and decolonization efforts have been more programmatic without pushing the boundary of decolonizing the epistemic basis of colonialism. The chapter then contends that decolonizing resistance can best be captured in the form of a reversed epistemic process that not only excavates Africa’s knowledge forms, (...) Africanizes other available knowledges, but more importantly generates an epistemological framework that establishes and reinforces a combative alternative Afrocentric mythology that subverts the existing Eurocentric mythology. Such an alternative myth constitutes a new vision of the African continent and all it can achieve outside of the grip of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result (...) of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge. (shrink)

Love is a key concept in the theory and history of civil disobedience yet it has been purposefully neglected in recent debates in political theory. Through an examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paradoxical notion of “aggressive love,” I offer a critical interpretation of love as a key concept in a vernacular black political theology, and the consequences of love’s displacement by law in liberal theories of civil disobedience. The first section locates the origins of aggressive love in an earlier (...) generation of black theologians who looked to India’s anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed as “creative survival.” The second contextualizes King’s early sermons on moral injury and self-respect within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom’s account of the dignity-enhancing effects of nonviolent resistance as the triumph of love over fear. The third considers the implications of these arguments for conceptualizing the moral psychology of the white citizen and its consequences for contemporary debates over the ideological uses of Civil Rights history. The call to respond to oppression with aggressive love illustrates the paradoxical character of civil disobedience obscured by legal accounts as well as by criticisms of the very idea of “civil” disobedience. This is the paradox of affirming civility while enacting disobedience in order to bind political confrontation with political pedagogy. (shrink)

This article analyzes Drucilla Cornell’s critical theory as a practice of engaging with radical thinking and radical politics in the interest of revolutionary transformation. Arguing that Walter Benjamin’s imperative to wrest tradition away from conformism is at the heart of Cornell’s work, the article shows how Cornell applies this imperative both to the tradition of resistance against oppression and to critical theory itself. The article follows Cornell’s call to decolonize the critical theoretical project by bringing Surinamese anticolonial activist (...) and writer Anton de Kom, various collectives that participated in the 2022 German art festival documenta 15, and the disobedience of six young Palestinian “Freedom Riders” into conversation with Cornell’s writings on the South African Revolution and on Afro-Caribbean liberatory thought. (shrink)

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or (...) paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations. (shrink)

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolution, Martel shows how the revolutionary (...) responses by activists and anticolonial leaders to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech and the Arab Spring sprang from misinterpellation. He also takes up misinterpellated subjects in philosophy, film, literature, and nonfiction, analyzing works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf, Fanon, Ellison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to demonstrate how characters who exist on the margins offer a generally unrecognized anarchist form of power and resistance. Timely and broad in scope, _The Misinterpellated Subject_ reveals how calls by authority are inherently vulnerable to radical possibilities, thereby suggesting that all people at all times are filled with revolutionary potential. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 102-122 [Access article in PDF] How To Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito® Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands Michael Hames-garcia I began to think, "Yes, I'm a chicana but that's not all I am. Yes, I'm a woman but that's not all I am. Yes, I'm a dyke but that doesn't define all of me. Yes, I come from working class origins, but I'm (...) no longer working class. Yes, I come from a mestizaje, but which parts of that mestizaje get privileged? Only the Spanish, not the Indian or black." I started to think in terms of mestiza consciousness. What happens to people like me who are in between all of these different categories? What does that do to one's concept of nationalism, of race, ethnicity, and even gender? I was trying to articulate and create a theory of a Borderlands existence.... I had to, for myself, figure out some other term that would describe a more porous nationalism, opened up to other categories of identity. —Gloria E. Anzaldúa, InterviewsOne of the most crucial questions facing leftist activists and intellectuals today is the question of nationalism and its relation to liberation struggles. 1 A century ago, the period [End Page 102] of nation-state consolidation in Europe seemed to come to an end with the unification of Germany and Italy. European leftists of the era tended to address "the national question" primarily with regard to those European nations that were shut out or suppressed by nation-state formation. Debates about national culture resurfaced in a revolutionary context when independence movements swept Africa and Asia during and after World War II, and a substantial body of literature attempting to integrate anticolonial struggle, national liberation, and socialism arose from the capitalist "periphery." Much of this literature, and the wars for independence out of which it grew, adapted the language of nationalism to its own purposes. These movements gave new hope that national liberation struggles would prove compatible with greater human freedom and equality. Despite that hope, the destructive effects of nationalism are today visible everywhere: for example, the devastating wars in the Balkans, the repression of indigenous peoples by national bourgeoisie throughout the Americas, religious-national strife between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the vertiginous intensification of national chauvinism in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia. Simultaneously, and in the context of feminist criticisms of nationalism [see, for example, Chatterjee, Nation; Lutz et al.; Mosse], attempts to unite the struggle to liberate "the nation" from colonial or neocolonial domination with progressive struggles against capitalist exploitation and against sexual- and gender-based domination continue [see, for example, Trask]. In Latin America, anticapitalist struggles lauded by Western socialists regularly take the form of national liberation struggles, such as the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [Zapatist National Liberation Army]) in Mexico and the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional [Sandinist National Liberation Front]) in Nicaragua. Additionally, lesbian and gay activists and theorists in the United States have frequently sought to appropriate nationalist rhetoric even as black and Chicano nationalist movements have been on the decline [see, for example, Berlant and Freeman; Moraga 145-74].Debates about anticolonial struggle and "Third World" nationalism may seem at first to be an odd context into which to introduce the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Critical writing on Anzaldúa's work has tended not to consider its relevance to debates on the relations among capitalism, colonialism, and national culture. 2 Instead, her major work, Borderlands/La Frontera, is usually discussed (or, more often than not, simply cited) as a contribution to feminist and antiracist discussions about the construction of the self within multiple contexts of domination and about that self's resistance to oppression and struggle for recognition. 3 While acknowledging the importance of Anzaldúa's contributions to these discussions, this essay examines Borderlands as offering a forward-looking alternative to nationalism, specifically, to Chicano cultural nationalist positions articulated during the... (shrink)

Danièle-Djamila Minne-Amrane, née à Neuilly-sur-Seine le 13 août 1939, est décédée à Alger le 11 février dernier. Son père, Pierre Minne, professeur de philosophie, ancien résistant puis militant anticolonial au Sénégal, en est expulsé en 1947. Il s’installe alors en Algérie, dans la campagne de Tlemcen où sa femme, Jacqueline Netter, allait devenir institutrice. Après son divorce, cette dernière se remarie avec Abdelkader Guerroudj et tous deux militent au PCA (parti communiste algérien). Da...

The relationship between humanity and the soil is an increasingly important topic in social theory. However, conceptualisations of the soil developed by anticolonial thinkers at the high point of the movement for self-determination between the 1940s and the 1970s have remained largely ignored. This is a shame, not least because theorists like Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Suzanne Césaire and Amílcar Cabral were concerned with the soil. Building on recent work on human-soil relations and decolonial ecology, we argue that these (...) four thinkers conceptualised the connection between soil, empire, and anticolonial revolt. Williams and Rodney ground understanding of soil degradation in global relations of economic power, while Césaire and Cabral reconceptualise postcolonial nationhood in terms of the mutability and diversity of the soil. The article concludes by suggesting that these two anticolonial counterpoints, global connectivity and more-than-human identification, anticipate and deepen contemporary attempts to decolonise ecological thinking. (shrink)

Providing a decolonial, action-focused account of Yoga philosophy, this practical work from Dr. Shyam Ranganathan, pioneering scholar in the field of Indian moral philosophy, focuses on the South Asian tradition to explore what Yoga was like prior to colonization. It challenges teachers and trainees to reflect on the impact of Western colonialism on Yoga as well as understand Yoga as the original decolonial practice in a way that is accessible. -/- This book is accessible but thought provoking in its approach, (...) but it will also challenge the way you think. Each chapter takes the reader through a journey of sources and traditions, beginning with an investigation into the colonial -Platonic and Aristotelian- approaches to pedagogy in colonized yoga spaces, through contrary, ancient philosophies of South Asia, such as Jainism, Buddhism, Sankhya, and various forms of Vedanta, to sources of Yoga, including the Upanisads, Yoga Sutra, Bhagavad Gita and Hatha Yoga Pradipika. With discussions of the precolonial philosophy of Yoga, its relationship to social justice, and modern postural yoga's relationship with colonial trauma, this is a comprehensive guide for any yoga teacher or trainee to activate and synergize their practice. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether the resistance to extinction obtained in evaluative conditioning (EC) studies implies that EC is a qualitatively distinct form of classical conditioning (Baeyens, Eelen, & Crombez, 1995 Baeyens, F, Eelen, P, and Crombez, G, (1995a). Pavlovian associations are forever: On classical conditioning and extinction, Journal of Psychophysiology 9 ((1995a)), pp. 127–141.[Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]a) or whether it is the result of an nonassociative artefact (Field & Davey, 1997 Field, AP, and Davey, (...) GCL, (1997). Conceptual conditioning: Evidence for an artifactual account of evaluative learning, Learning and Motivation 25 ((1997)), pp. 446–464.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 1998 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (1998). Evaluative conditioning: Arti‐fact or ‐fiction?‐ A reply to Baeyens, De Houwer, Vansteenwegen, and Eelen (1998), Learning and Motivation 29 ((1998)), pp. 475–491.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 1999 Field, AP, and Davey, GCL, (1999). Reevaluating evaluative conditioning: A nonassociative explanation of conditioning effects in the visual evaluative conditioning paradigm, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 25 ((1999)), pp. 211–224.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). Both experiments included between‐subjects control groups in addition to standard within‐subjects control conditions. In Experiment 1, only verbal ratings were measured in order to evaluate the effect of postacquisition CS‐only exposures on EC whereas in Experiment 2, verbal ratings and postextinction priming effects were measured. The results showed that the EC effects are demonstrable in a between‐subjects design and that the extinction procedure did not have any influence on the acquired evaluative value of CSs regardless of whether the verbal ratings or the priming effects were used as dependent variables. The present results provide evidence that EC is resistant to extinction and suggest an interpretation of EC as a qualitatively distinct form of associative learning. (shrink)

Background: The present study compared the effects of a traditional resistance training and resistance training combined with cognitive task on body composition, physical performance, cognitive function, and plasma brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in older adults. Methods: Thirty community-dwelling older adults were randomized into TRT and RT+CT. Exercise groups performed a similar resistance training program, twice a week over 16 weeks. Cognitive Training involved performing verbal fluency simultaneously with RT. Exercise sessions were performed 2-3 sets, 8-15 repetitions at (...) 60-70% of 1-repetition maximum. Body composition, physical function, cognitive performance, and BDNF levels were assessed before and after intervention period. Results: The physical performance was similarly improved in response to both TRT and RT+CT. However, exclusive improvements on cognitive function and BDNF levels were observed only after RT+CT. Conclusion: The RT program associated with a cognitive task, improved physical and cognitive performance in healthy older adults. (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- However, there (...) are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

Hobbes’s account of the individual’s right to resist sovereign authority is nuanced. His allowance for cases in which a sovereign’s command falls outside the terms of the social contract, despite recent reappraisals, cannot rescue him from the accusation that his system is contradictory. It has been suggested that some Hobbesian rights can be transferred whilst others are quarantined, or that it is the institution of law, rather than the particular commands of the sovereign, which Hobbes ultimately upholds. By reconsidering Hobbes’s (...) concept of sovereignty alongside his theory of natural law, I argue that his system remains in tension with itself. Hobbes’s prioritisation of sovereign judgement over that of the individual, when combined with the principles he retains from the natural law tradition, renders his theory of resistance irreconcilable with his position on sovereignty. (shrink)

I argue that a parental prerogative to sometimes prioritize the interests of one’s children over the interests of others is insufficient to make the parental refusal of routine childhood vaccines morally permissible. This is because the moral permissibility of vaccine refusal follows from such a parental prerogative only if the only (weighty) moral reason in favor of vaccination is that vaccination is a means for promoting the interests of others. However, there are two additional weighty moral reasons in favor of (...) routine vaccination: fairness and concern for the vulnerable. These moral reasons in favor of vaccination are not defeated by a parental prerogative to prioritize the interests of one’s children over the interests of others. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, the various attempts to “radicalize” Levinas have resulted in two interesting and often separated debates: one the one hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and colonialism and racism, and on the other hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and Judaism. Whether scholars interested in issues of colonialism disregard Levinas's Judaism or use his "subaltern" identity to challenge European hegemony, they do not take seriously the Jewish content of (...) Levinas's thought. In this essay, I challenge the prevailing postcolonial orinetation of the Levinas-colonialism conversation, approaching Levinas's phenomenology from an anticolonial perspective. I will use Frantz Fanon’s dualistic understanding of the colonial world to evaluate the adequacy of Levinas’s phenomenology in describing the ontological structure of the colony and the historical experience of the colonized within it. Levinas’s incomplete understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism contributes to his failure to recognize the dividing line of colonial ontology, the zone of nonbeing, the non-human status of the colonized, and ultimately contributes to the insufficiency of his phenomenology to describe the colony. Because my purpose is not to reject Levinas’s thought in general but to encourage a new approach to his work, in the conclusion I will gesture toward the need for an anticolonial reading of Levinas’s project for Jewish education. (shrink)

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. (...) Because capacities for evidence-responsiveness are fallible and may be masked, beliefs can be held in the face of counter-evidence. Indeed, I will argue that our best science of belief supports the claim that evidence-resistant beliefs result from masks on evidence-responsiveness capacities. This account of belief not only allows for resistance to evidence, but provides us with a framework for describing and explaining actual cases of evidence-resistance. (shrink)

We experience resistance when we are engaging with fictional works which present certain (for example, morally objectionable) claims. But in virtue of what properties do sentences trigger this ‘imaginative resistance’? I argue that while most accounts of imaginative resistance have looked for semantic properties in virtue of which sentences trigger it, this is unlikely to give us a coherent account, because imaginative resistance is a pragmatic phenomenon. It works in a way very similar to Paul Grice's (...) widely analysed ‘conversational implicature’. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. On one influential diagnosis of imaginative resistance, the systematic difficulties are due to these particular propositions’ discordance with real-world norms. This essay argues that this influential diagnosis is too simple. While imagination is indeed by default constrained by real-world norms during narrative engagement, it can be freed with the power of genre conventions and expectations.

Giroux argues that challenge gives new meaning to the importance of resistance, the relevance of pedagogy, and the significance of political agency.

This chapter contains sections titled: Truth and Receptivity Receptivity and God Overwhelming Evidence Sufficient Evidence Pascal and the Search for God Brainwashing Yourself? The Practice of Atheism Resisting Belief Notes.

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and (...) modal epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the principle of fairness can license both a duty of fair play, which is used to ground a moral duty to obey the law in just or nearly just societies, and a duty of resistance to unfair and unjust social schemes. The first part of the paper analyzes fairness’ demands on participants in mutually beneficial schemes of coordination, and its implications in the face of injustice. Not only fairness does not require complying with (...) unfair and unjust social schemes, but it also prohibits benefiting from such schemes. I use the case of racial segregation in the U.S. to illustrate this latter argument, and consider some objections to my investigation, given the availability and straightforwardness of justice. The second part of the paper elaborates the argument for the duty to resist. The Radical Reform argument first establishes, by elimination of the alternatives (exit and restitution), that the principal way for citizens to cease benefiting from an unfair and unjust social scheme is to radically reform it. The Resistance Argument then shows that resistance is crucial to bring about reform, so that one ought to resist unfair and unjust schemes from which one benefits. Next, I offer two arguments for collective resistance and political solidarity, one based on empirical considerations and the other based on fairness. Finally, I consider the costs of the resistance efforts which fairness may require. (shrink)

In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions ...

Antibiotic resistance poses an urgent public health risk. High rates of ABR have been noted in all regions of the globe by the World Health Organization. ABR develops when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics either during treatments in humans or animals or through environmental sources contaminated with antibiotic residues. Spread beyond those administered antibiotics occurs through direct contact with the infected or colonized person or animal, through contact or ingestion of retail meat or agricultural products contaminated with ABR organisms, (...) or through the environment. ABR bacteria spread from individuals to populations and across countries. (shrink)