challenge and disrupt codes of intimacy, family and domestication which animate the exclusion of people racialised as non-white from humanity. The three strategies and forms of struggle I expand upon are: 1) inversions, the inverting of the colonial gaze and its patterns of seeing against itself – this can be through forms of counter-surveillance or through practices of visual empowerment; 2) escape – that is, modes of becoming invisible and refusing to work within dominant ways of seeing; and lastly, 3) decolonial aesthesis, a political and ethical orientation used both
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
populations, I argue that such an approach still underdevelops the role that race, colonialism and mobility played in the emergence of modern liberal rule. In drawing upon the work of decolonial and postcolonial and black feminist scholars (Spillers 1987; McClintock 1995; Povinelli 2006; Lugones 2011), this provides a more historically nuanced account of the role of that ‘family’ has had in creating and sustaining colonial hierarchies of personhood – that is to say the categorisation of people and spaces into the human/not-quite/non-human (Weheliye 2014). I tie this
required movement is decolonial, as the conceptual interaction between the art piece and the viewer is about a relationality which transcends Eurocentric conceptions of time and space. What does this mean? Similar to various Chicanx murals, the Mesoamérica Resiste poster portrays various struggles across different timelines and lands rather than one place at one particular point in time. This non-linearity opposes the hierarchies of recency and individuality by visually denying an end or beginning, and instead forcing the viewer to recognize the interconnectedness of
pound) note is one of few existing examples of currency issued by Te Peeke o Aotearoa, The Bank of Aotearoa, and is, indeed, one of few testimonies to the bank's existence. Very little is known about the bank, save that it operated as an exclusively Māori alternative to prevailing colonial financial institutions for approximately twenty years (1885–1905). In this chapter, I take the banknote as an artefact that reveals historical and material entanglements of finance and colonization and that, moreover, points towards political potentialities of finance for decolonial
’ violence, detached from the legitimacy, freedom and democracy which supposedly defines the Global North. Despite the healthy upsurge in postcolonial and decolonial theory in studies of international politics (Anievas et al. 2015; Agathangelou and Killian 2016; Sabaratnam 2017; Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018; Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019), there is still a hesitance in bringing these analyses to bear on questions of government in spaces like Britain (although see Virdee 2014; Kapoor 2018; Shilliam 2018; Innes 2019). Whilst there is much historical scholarship on the
: 153–5). Any critique of the present rests on core values that should also guide interpretation of the past. Shilliam (2015) provides a solid example of practice in connected histories in his survey of decolonial scientific connections between anti-colonial movements linking Africa, New Zealand (Aotearoa), the North Pacific and the United States.The presence, contestation and activity of Maori and Pasifika communities (particularly the youth) in creating solidarities between different post- colonial cultures denies the monopoly of truth claimed by the post-colonial heirs
accompanied by the watering down and appropriation of anti- and decolonial agendas, but met by a ‘recolonial’ backlash in a number of former metropoles. 5 In Britain, historical narratives which incorporate ‘unpalatable elements of the national story’ have been seen as morally threatening and challenging to redemptive visions of Empire (Fowler 2020 ). More subtle attempts to leave colonialism in the past have been made even by critical scholars famed for their opposition to neoliberalism. David Harvey has argued that
to the decolonial element of our transition [to democracy] … we became independent very recently [referring to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s] … so [to] people in London and the US [international investors] … we are still unknown [in the sense that] people don't know whether South Africa will become like Zimbabwe or the Congo … these are real factors . So there has been a very strong desire to demonstrate that we are credible […]. [All emphases added
racism and whiteness as much as it is to heterosexuality, so a decolonial politics must equally be attuned to this. In following this lesson, the contestation of normative intimacies to include different affective relations, kinships, dependencies, is far from an issue of private orientations or about who can be intimate with whom; instead it is about how worth, value and with that humanity continues to be organised – that is, made and unmade – in postcolonial societies like Britain and beyond. This book has demonstrated some of the reach, embeddedness and everyday