We Will Not Cave

 As jd ripper has explained the postcolonial is on the street and in the second decade of the twenty-first century this has strongly influenced policy making by liberals and progressives as politicians. It is clear that words written on the street and walls, pavement and concrete, have coincided with protests about the lives which live under the iterations (to borrow a term from intellectual Homi K Bhabha) of colonialism; such as slavery, racism, discrimination, and welfare state conditions.  The part of the West that appears to be most closely correlative to the conditions of the so-called third world, are found in inner-city urban areas.  Even when notions are set into action by white liberals what results is things like gentrification and systemically racist infrastructures that promote dependence and not freedom, much less justice. Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood say “ European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclu...

  I must iterate, re-iterate, pledge, and vow-and-declare that the content of these blogs is NOT “just academic”    It is important to know the ways in which public and government policies are being driven by those who are and those who aspire to be POSTCOLONIAL !!!        Please understand that this is serious content about the destruction of nations in our world, and that this content directly affects the United States.  PLEASE READ every post here to get the sense of what is happening on the streets around the world. 

  Stein and Andreiotti assert “Firmly committed to the need to link historical and ongoing injustices, post-colonial studies represents an effort to conceptualize and critique how and why even re-configured global relations (social, economic, political) reproduce colonial hierarchies and hegemonies”   This assertion seems to demonstrate what is to be a very difficult feat. The following condition seems to be at the crux of the matter: the difference between power and representation of power is part of the problem that will be addressed here. The condition is about “the false and disabling distinction between colonization as a system of rule, of power and exploitation, and colonization as a system of knowledge and presentation”     Colonization as a ruling situation presents real power.   Re-presentation of a better life for the subaltern is typically done by representations which re-establish and fortify colonial power and discourse. The path to creating a cha...

  Sharon Stein and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti in 2002 connect the educational system to “capitalist market logics and the pursuit of private profits rather than public goods” in a glaring statement which is not the case.    Anyone who has been in the academy for the last 40 years knows that capitalism has taken a bashing in the educational system.   (The very educational system which has been propagandizing its liberal agenda and sociology to every student and faculty.)   The system is like a funnel, as it reaches the bottom it shows greater   and greater resistance to ideas outside the pale of liberalism and its liberal arts.   Exclusion, lack of tolerance, and exclusivity has become the hallmark that there will be no argument with at this point of the game. “The marching band has left field, the day the music died.”   The postmodern has given way to the onslaught of anti-isms, and post-isms. There is no room for true democracy and freedom of ...

    <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>  Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood (2017) “European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclusion and exclusion which remain racialised through into the twenty-first century”   In postcolonial thought there continues to be an understanding that class warfare is not as significant to revolution and that there is more complexity in subaltern (the dispossessed) people and that the idea of the bourgeoisie and proletariat class understanding does not fully explain the disparities in the societies of the East particularly and the Global South.   Certainly, though the acquisition of land and change of culture has been the hallmark of colonization.   Bhambra and Holmwood understand the exclusionary nature of land owning in the colonized ...

   <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>  Bernhard Forchtner writes “ it seems as if critical discourse analysts have understood critique mainly against the background of their progressive consensus” . . . “ The discourse-historical approach is . . . concerned with language in use and perceives discourse as, a form of, social practice [which] implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institutions and social structures which frame it” According to this approach the language we speak is actually action, it is behavior that can be directed at another and guides us through the course of our lives. Language is history; the development of history is more than just informed by language but is language and we create a social reality through discourse. Our world of ideas and language deter...

  <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>   Henry Giroux educated us in 2004 with a critical position and Marxist insight, demonstrating how the world is affected by capitalism’s influence, he says “non-commodified public spheres are replaced by commercial spheres as the substance of critical democracy is emptied out and replaced by a democracy of goods available to those with purchasing power and the increasing expansion of the cultural and political power of corporations throughout the world” Giroux continues to reinforce this theory of critical thought even these days when a social democracy is killing our economies and the well-being of people around the globe, including the East and the Global South.  Giroux discusses goods as a negative.  Some, a lot, of these “goods” fulfill needs. What Giroux calls “critical democra...

  <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>   Henry Giroux proclaimed in 2004 that “Central to the hegemony of neo-liberal ideology is a particular view of education in which market-driven identities and values are both produced and legitimated. Under such circumstances, pedagogy both within and outside of schools increasingly becomes a powerful force for creating the ideological and affective regimes central to reproducing neo-liberalism” The world market and economy, which neo-liberalism (and thus capitalism) would be interested in, is in fact failing around the world.  Giroux states in the same work that “At this point in American history, neo-liberal capitalism is not simply too overpowering; on the contrary, ‘democracy is too weak’” First, I must say that the democracy Giroux claims to want is actually social democracy or dem...

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Henry Giroux "explores how the intersection of cultural studies and public pedagogy offers a challenge to both the ideology and practice of neo-liberalism as a form of cultural politics" According to Giroux neo-liberalism "(corporate culture into every aspect of American life)"    "thrives on a culture of cynicism, fear, insecurity, and despair"  One does not get far along in Giroux's work before one can realize that what he says is the reverse of actual reality.  What is problematic is the singular, pervasive, never challenged from within perspective which is taught in the universities; the academy always bolsters and reaffirms itself. Giroux's challenges culture by teaching what he considers critical thought or critical pedagogy.  One argument that Giroux uses aga...

<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>    John L Campbell states that it is necessary to be “identifying the actors who seek to influence policy-making with their ideas, ascertaining the institutional conditions under which these actors have more or less influence, and understanding how political discourse affects the degree to which policy ideas are communicated and translated into practice” These three processes are central in the conditions by which public policy is shaped.   It seems most likely that policy is formulated by the influence of the most power, and power is determined by the discourse one or the other uses to clarify their wants.   In many humanities departments, the “hegemony” is identified and blamed for policy determinations. This title is typically attached to the male, white, Christian; on the other hand, th...

    <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>  According to Jasmine Gani and Jenna Marshall, the biggest questions are and should be to stir public and private policy away from discriminatory practices.   “How can the discipline hold practitioners accountable or contribute to more effective policy-making if it has struggled to grapple with and overcome its own foundational mythologies,   exclusionary practices, and amnesias, especially vis-à-vis race, racism, and imperialism?” This is a concern and developing practice being addressed; it has been in place in American policy-making for decades. One needn’t worry about practices of racism, especially in the past few years. Governing agencies and bodies are being instructed to cause amnesia cultivation and to prop up agendas that are definitely not racist. Requiring most peo...

   <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script>  “Postcolonial scholarship (particularly in post-structuralist approaches) not only contextualizes present colonial conditions within their historical precedents and patterns, it also situates post-colonial (and anti- colonial) critique itself, including self-reflexively engaging the complicity of intellectuals in reproducing harm” (Stein and Andreotti) This is quite difficult to conceive of because one would think that shedding light on a problem would elucidate it, making it more accessible to those who wish to see change. This approach is always open for rebuff, “ one of the post-colonial studies’ most valuable gifts is its commitment to put itself, and many other foundational concepts, up for ‘dispute and debate’” (Loomba 2007 : 173). A commitment to change comes at the expense to change....

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> In an article entitled The Impact of Colonialism on Policy and Knowledge Production in International Relations Jasmine Gani and Jenna Marshall state that academia and intellectuals have helped to supply, shape, and justify colonial and racist policies. They also state that based on enlightenment political thought, the erasure of slave history had occurred where scholars have confronted the erasure of racism and have argued that the erasure forecloses greater debate about the scrutiny of racism within the disciplines of mainstream and critical theories.  It is now that these topics of theory and racism and policy-making have become quite the hottest topic of discursive practice and debate, which have been going on in the academy for decades.  It has been a debate over topics surrounding postcol...

Greetings on Juneteenth . . . . . . . .

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> If the definition of social justice in the East and Global South is “the expansion of access to universal Western knowledge. The result would be to repeat the very Euro-centrism that many globalizing efforts purportedly seek to disrupt” (Stein and Andreotti) This type of teaching the other does not take into account the complexity of the pedagogical reform that would have to happen within the system of content, to have a meaningful  education for each indigenous person.   Teaching from a Western framework would disinclude the traditions and life experiences of a certain audience. Appreciating one’s tradition but going further into the definitive result of indigenous education leads us to complex integration of thought worlds  

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Stein and Andreotti indicate that "scholars more oriented toward a post-structuralist approach may critique the Marxist approach for being too rationalistically relying on Western human values, while scholars partial to the Marxist approach may critique post structural approaches for an inadequate critique of capitalism and insufficient commitment to political struggles" "Spivak critiques the ways well meaning Western intellectuals often fail to account for their own position and celebrate the oppressed in ways that actually resubjugate them" "the effects of colonialism are not easily dismantled, and efforts to overcome them may end up producing more of the same" In the well-intended way of the present-day Christian missional person there may continue to be the effect of We...

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Aime Cesaire says "my turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification.". I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about achievements, disease cure, improved standards of living." "I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled under foot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out." These are the results of colonization.  Cesaire's ability to illustrate them is impeccable.  With kingdom theology, with an eye towards justice (mercy), which to some people is impossible. Then it would have to be radical.  If one can name the immoral acts of the colonizer, then one must be able to identify the immoral acts of colonized.  No one is ...

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Aime Ceasair writes in Discourse on Colonialism "we must study how colonializaton works to de-civilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism . . ." and "at  that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery" This is very...

<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> Karl Marx’s understanding that feudalism would lead to capitalism and corruption was meant “only for the West and was not to be universalized. Not every nation needs to make one trek from one to the other.” (Terry Eagleton, 2018, Why Marx Was Right)  This idea of Marx’s is accurate, because there is not linear progression from one to the other in South East Asia. There are many classes, castes, and portions of society that do not lead to or lend to any conversion directly from one form of society and government to another in the East and Global South.  Today’s Marxist-driven agendas are often inaccurate in interpreting the text and faulty in their approaches to revolution. Some seek to apply their agenda subtly in the academy, education as early as pre-school, and in public policy.  In any case,...

 <script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6077932889256660"      crossorigin="anonymous"></script> “The halcyon days of cultural theory lasted until about 1980” – then there was the “victory of the radical right.” (2003, Terry Eagleton, After Theory ) This statement is absolutely fallacious, in the 1980’s and beyond, the agenda of the left was taught in the academy.   Ronald Reagan was president, then Bush, but this did not stop the academy from teaching theory, along with many other social concerns . . . . . theory and critical thought did not disappear, but rather flourished, even informing the theologies that were taught in Seminaries.   The discussion of the rights of many continued into the 1990’s and beyond. Postmodernism and posttruth ruled the textbooks, and the postcolonial addressed much that had happened in South East Asia and the Middle East.   No one was left unaware of the...