Sukanya Bhattacharya, "An Exploratory Attempt to Contextualize Dominant/Western Abolitionist Thought in India"
During the independence struggle against British colonial rule, India saw countless political prisoners locked in jails and prisons. Many of the same colonial rules under which freedom fighters were imprisoned, however, still exist and have been widely used by the central government since 2014 (and before) to arrest dissenters, while the police have continued to serve as a loyal arm of the state by carrying out arrests, oppressing minorities, and beating up protestors. In this context, abolition of the prison and the oppressive state become a dream and a goal. However, even though abolition continues to be a liberatory thought and practice, there are unique challenges in applying it freely as it is built around and by North American academics and activists. Hence, to read and engage with dominant streams of abolitionist thought that has emerged in the Global North is also to reckon with how different the Indian context is. This paper is an exploratory effort to think through and engage with those differences based on my own experience in a summer school facilitated by the Feminist Autonomous Center (FAC) on ‘Abolitionist Care Practices’. The summer school and its participants dealt with questions of care practices but also found a tension in the relationship between scholarship (especially one that uses English language and mostly academic terms) and practice in India. The key questions that emerge are - Is abolitionist thought restricted to the academic class with access to social, cultural, and economic capital? How do we then attempt to de-westernize and contextualize abolitionist thought to address different socio-cultural contexts and roadways to abolition?
Işıl Karacan, "Decolonizing Turkish-rule Kurdistan: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance"
The self is reflexive, historical, and contextual. I grew up listening to my grandmother (dayikê) lament in a language that the majority of the society I live in does not understand. I watched her mourn for every soul and soil she lost. In the following generations, I witnessed the exile of my father, uncles, and aunts. I was surrounded by generations of people weeping for a place, for a dream. It was a place that could not be described without mentioning the name of Turkey, where it was forbidden even to utter its name, a place only associated with backwardness and terrorism: “Eastern” Turkey, Kurdistan, or Bakur. As I grew up, I realized that people around me were traumatized by years of humiliation, assimilation policies, and state repression. When I got a little older, I noticed that trauma is not always disempowering. My family and relatives were, in fact, prominent Kurdish political activists in the struggle for equality and democracy.
Walter Benjamin argues, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” This approach to unveiling the “tradition of the oppressed” addresses the fact that there are alternative and often drastically different narratives circulating in the geographies of both the colonized and the colonizer. However, a subaltern-focused mode of history writing is less common for the Kurds who live under Turkish rule. Therefore, my paper aims to adopt an analytical lens—settler colonialism—to contextualize the northern part of Kurdistan within a longer history of, and intersection with, military occupation.
Settler colonialism does not have to be bound by certain presumptions derived solely from the New World contexts, which are reductive of the peculiar nationalist dimensions for the Middle East cases. Recent approaches have initiated a research dialogue that connects the histories of various settler colonialisms, aiming for a globally integrated model. My project emerges in response to this academic inquiry. Although recent studies linking the Ottoman Empire to global history and imperialism challenge former trends, only a few accounts explore the Turkish state from a broader perspective in relation to the colonial legacy. This paper seeks to situate the Kurdish experience within the global context and contribute to understanding distinct settler colonialism patterns in the Middle East.
Francesco Liucci, "Decolonizing a "postcolonial" world: A critical response to "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor""
This essay seeks to respond to and problematize Tuck and Yang’s article, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a seminal contribution to decolonial literature that has received surprisingly few direct responses despite being cited over 8,000 times since publication. For the authors, true decolonization demands a total land return to Indigenous peoples.
I agree with Tuck and Yang’s critique of performative uses of decolonization; genuine justice for Indigenous peoples requires foundational societal restructuring, including significant (not symbolic) land reclamation. Nonetheless, their rigid view of modern colonial violence may undermine broader efforts toward justice and transformation. In the first part of this essay, I argue that their notion of Indigenous struggles as separate from other liberatory movements represents a simplistic characterization of colonial-capitalist oppressions while depriving us of the mass organizing mechanisms necessary for substantive decolonial aims. I also discuss how their interpretation of decolonization on exclusively material grounds is insufficiently unimaginative and detached from broader human concerns in ways that may condemn decolonial projects to irrelevance. I hold that decolonization should be a holistic process that permeates every aspect of life. This project should attempt to respond to the all-consuming nature of colonialist violence with all-encompassing solutions, following the totality of various Indigenous cosmologies and the interrelated continuum of biological life.
In the second section, I make a case for a decolonial project defined by a myriad of transdisciplinary solutions – developed in deep dialogue and horizontal collaboration with and by Indigenous people – by exploring a diverse landscape of decolonial projects being implemented globally. Such an expansive interpretation of decolonization is strengthened by its mutually reinforcing pursuits, making decolonization more politically possible and impactful for humanity. Moreover, I contend that non-land-centric projects – focused primarily on ontological, epistemic, sociopolitical, and personal consequences of colonialism – are just as valid and urgent forms of decolonization.
