Race,Power and Social Action in Neighborhood Community Organizing: Reproducing and Resisting the Social Construction of the Other

Scholars argue in favor of social action in community organizing to address the oppression experienced by racialized groups. This study examines how community organizing practice in one diverse neighborhood constructed race to understand the potential for social action. Using interview and observational data with 16 community organizers working in 1 diverse, low-income neighborhood in Québec, Canada, I examine the social construction of race through the lens of postcolonial theory and the writings of Michel Foucault. I argue that a discourse of neutrality existed among community organizers, which was tied to state policy and a colonial discourse embedded therein. The resulting disconnect between race and power in community organizing practice not only forecloses on social change efforts, it also extends a state-driven nation-building agenda into community. As the basis for an anticolonial approach to neighborhood community organizing, I juxtapose the discourse of neutrality in community organizing with strategies that recoupled race and power by drawing attention to efforts among community organizers that were antagonistic to the discourse.     

Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity,Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, this article seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia. The focus on translocality speaks also to the existence and enactment of exteriorities to modernity. My deployment of ‘exteriority’ signals here certain historical, political, and cultural lateral relations among colonial spaces, through which the colonized generate and activate what June Nash calls ‘counterplots’ to colonial modernity.     

Gendered beings,gendered discourses: the gendering of race,colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in three Zimbabwean novels

This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding.