Decolonization on emsenn.net

Two-Spirit

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two-Spirit is a term coined in 1990 at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg, chosen to replace the anthropological term berdache (itself a colonial misnomer derived from a French corruption of an Arabic word for a kept boy). The term names both a contemporary political identity — Indigenous people who hold masculine and feminine spirits, or who occupy gender and sexual positions outside the colonial binary — and the historical fact that gender diversity existed across Indigenous nations before colonization and was targeted for elimination as part of the colonial project.

Coloniality

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coloniality is a decolonial term for the way colonial domination persists even when formal colonial rule ends. Where colonialism names direct conquest and administration, coloniality names the ongoing organization of power through racial hierarchy, extraction, legal regimes, and epistemic authority.

In a Marxist register, coloniality matters because it marks limits of accounts that treat dispossession as merely a prehistory of capitalism. It insists that the colonial order is reproduced in the present: in the governance of land, in who is made available for exploitation, and in which forms of knowledge count as “universal.”

Misopedy

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Misopedy is the hatred or denigration of children and childhood. The term derives from Greek miso- (hatred) and paidos (child). Unlike individual acts of cruelty toward children, misopedy names a structural condition: the systematic devaluation of childhood as a category, the treatment of children as pre-persons or incomplete adults, and the exclusion of young people from political agency and self-determination.

Toby Rollo, a political theorist at Lakehead University, has developed the concept’s most sustained theoretical treatment. In “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child” (Settler Colonial Studies, 2018), Rollo argues that the relationship between misopedy and European colonialism is not an analogy but a structuring principle. The conceptual apparatus used to justify colonial domination — the savage as child, the colonized as requiring tutelage and civilization — is itself rooted in the prior subordination of actual children. Modern colonial thinkers inherited the conceptual legacy of misopedy: the figure of the child as sinful, bestial, or irrational provided the template through which Indigenous peoples were categorized as unfit for self-governance.

The Black Radical Tradition and Russian Semiotics

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This text surveys the engagement between thinkers in the Black radical tradition and Russian semiotic theory (the Moscow-Tartu school, the Bakhtin Circle, and Russian Formalism). The connections range from direct citation and critical appropriation to structural parallels that operate without explicit acknowledgment.

¶Direct Engagements

¶Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mikhail Bakhtin

The most sustained and explicit engagement between these two traditions appears in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988). Gates builds his theory of Signifyin(g) on a synthesis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “double-voiced word.” Gates uses Bakhtin to argue that Signifyin(g) works by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word that already has and retains its own orientation.

Necropolitics

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Necropolitics, as theorized by Achille Mbembe, names the form of sovereignty that operates through the management of death rather than the management of life. Where Michel Foucault’s biopolitics analyzes how modern states govern by “making live and letting die,” necropolitics addresses the conditions — colonial occupation, plantation slavery, contemporary zones of abandonment — where sovereignty operates by making die and letting live. The question shifts from how states manage the life of populations to how states determine which populations are exposed to death.

Primitive Accumulation

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Primitive accumulation is Karl Marx’s term for the historical processes that created the preconditions for capitalist production: the separation of people from the means of their own subsistence. In England, this took the form of enclosures — the forcible conversion of common land into private property, which dispossessed peasants and created a class of people with nothing to sell but their labor power. Globally, it took the form of colonial conquest, the Atlantic slave trade, and the extraction of wealth from colonized peoples and lands. Marx treated these as the “original sin” of capitalism: the violence that preceded and enabled the apparently peaceful exchange of wages for labor.

Indigenous Anarchism

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Indigenous anarchism names the recognition that many Indigenous governance systems embody the principles anarchist analysis describes — non-hierarchy, consensus decision-making, direct participation, communal stewardship of land — without deriving from the European anarchist tradition or needing its label. This is not a claim that Indigenous peoples are anarchists. It is the observation that the European anarchist tradition arrived, through theoretical argument, at principles that some Indigenous peoples have practiced for millennia.

The relationship is complex and must be handled with care. Some Indigenous thinkers and organizers have explicitly adopted anarchist language and organizational forms — Lucy Parsons (Muscogee Creek) is a historical example. Others reject the label entirely, arguing that their governance traditions are self-sufficient and do not need validation through a European political framework. Both positions are legitimate, and Indigenous anarchism as a concept must not become another form of recuperation — absorbing Indigenous practices into a European tradition that then claims credit for them.

Conjecture: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conjecture :: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization.
Proof :: unproven
claims ::
- Given that liberal anarchism, that is, anarchism of the liberal subject, requires itself be functional within liberalism and thus a part of liberal worlding, it must maintain compatibility with liberalism.
- Given the lineage of liberal anarchism is deviation of the lineage of liberal individualism, its a priori determinations may be derived from that lineage.

Conjecture: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conjecture :: The anarchism of the liberal subject derives from civic duty and is thus incommensurable with decolonization.
Proof :: unproven
claims ::
- Given that liberal anarchism, that is, anarchism of the liberal subject, requires itself be functional within liberalism and thus a part of liberal worlding, it must maintain compatibility with liberalism.
- Given the lineage of liberal anarchism is deviation of the lineage of liberal individualism, its a priori determinations may be derived from that lineage.