Implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non‐Western populationsIn this article, I argue that implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research transcends the limitations of modern cultural theories in exploring the health problems of non‐Western populations. Providing nursing care in pluralist countries like Canada remains a challenge for nurses. First, nurses must reflect on their ethnic background and stereotypes that may impinge on the understanding of cultural differences. Second, dominant health ideologies that underpin nurses’ everyday practice (...) and the structural barriers that may constrain the utilization of public healthcare services by non‐Western populations must be further examined. Postcolonial feminism is aimed at addressing health inequities stemming from social discriminative practices. I will draw on extant literature and data of an ongoing ethnography exploring the Haitian caregivers’ ways of caring for ageing relatives at home to unveil how the larger social and cultural world has an impact on caregivers’ everyday lives. Marginalized locations represent privileged sites from which health problems, intersecting with power, race, gender, and social classes, can be addressed. Postcolonial feminism provides the analytic lens to look at the impact of these factors in shaping health experiences. It also suggests redirecting nursing cultural research and practice to achieve social justice in the healthcare system. (shrink)

RACINE L and PETRUCKA P. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 12–20 Enhancing decolonization and knowledge transfer in nursing research with non-western populations: examining the congruence between primary healthcare and postcolonial feminist approachesThis article is a call for reflection from two distinct programs of research which converge on common interests pertaining to issues of health, social justice, and globalization. One of the authors has developed a research program related to the health and well-being of non-western populations, while the other author has expanded (...) the field of Aboriginal and international research in Canada and abroad. Based on examples drawn from our respective programs of research, we suggest conciliating the philosophy of primary healthcare to postcolonial feminism for decolonizing research and enhancing knowledge transfer with non-western populations. We contend that applying the theoretical and methodological strengths of these two approaches is a means to decolonize nursing research and to avoid western neocolonization. In conciliating primary health care and postcolonial feminism, the goal is to enhance the pragmatic relevance of postcolonial feminism to generate resistance through transformative research for achieving social justice. In tapping into the synergistic and complementary epistemological assumptions of the philosophy of primary health care and postcolonial ‘feminisms’, nurse researchers reinforce the anti-oppresive goals of postcolonial feminist research. Consequently, this approach may enhance both decolonization and knowledge transfer through strategies like photovoice. (shrink)

Through its social and political activism goals, postcolonial feminist theoretical approaches not only focus on individual issues that affect health but encompass the examination of the complex interplay between neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization, in mediating the health of non-Western immigrants and refugees. Postcolonial feminism holds the promise to influence nursing research and practice in the 21st century where health remains a goal to achieve and a commitment for humanity. This is especially relevant for nurses, who act as global citizens and (...) as voices for the voiceless. The commitment of nursing to social justice must be further strengthened by relying on postcolonial theories to address issues of health inequities that arise from marginalization and racialization. In using postcolonial feminist theories, nurse researchers locate the inquiry process within a Gramscian philosophy of praxis that represents knowledge in action. (shrink)

Climate justice activists envision a “postcarbon” future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy’s long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the “zero emissions” telos does not tend to the racial grief that’s foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a “just transition” to a “postcarbon” moment? In response, I connect today’s postcarbon imaginary with yesterday’s postcolonial imaginary. Drawing from research on US-based climate activism, I explore how (...) the utopic rhetoric of a “just transition” is instantiated in practice. I argue that the racialized absences constitutive of what scholars call “postcolonial amnesia” are operative in the anti-racist move to a postcarbon moment. This postcarbon imaginary formulates the vulnerability of people of color to biophysical disasters as the raison d’être for infrastructural transformation. This, I argue, has the effect of overlooking the ways in which racial grief inheres in such vulnerability and the capacity of energy infrastructures to uphold racist hierarchies. I situate this “postcarbon amnesia” in Anne Cheng’s framework for differentiating “grief” from “grievance,” calling for renewable energy transitions that move away from enumerative grievances and toward a sobering recognition of racial grief. (shrink)

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the two literatures into conversation (...) generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha's idea of hybridity is one of postcolonialism's most keenly debated — and most widely misunderstood — concepts. My article provides some elucidation in the increasingly reductive debates over hybridity in postcolonial studies, suggesting that what is commonly overlooked in these debates is hybridity's complex relationship to temporality. I suggest that this relationship is not given the credit it deserves often enough, resulting in skewed discussions of hybridity as simply (and mistakenly) another form of syncretism. In focusing on the (...) `time of hybridity' in the context of a bicultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I draw renewed attention to hybridity's investment in temporality as that which both enables a postcolonial politics and shifts these politics into the realm of (Levinasian) ethics, creating an as yet largely unexplored phenomenon which Leela Gandhi has referred to, in a fortuitous phrase, as an `ethics of hybridity'. Key Words: biculturalism • ethics • hybridity • Maori • politics • postcolonial • temporality. (shrink)

The authors suggest that postcolonial science studies can do more than expand answers to questions already posed; it can generate different questions and different ways of looking at the world. To illustrate, the authors draw on existing histories and anthropologies and critical theories of colonial and postcolonial technoscience. To move forward together, rather than remaining mired in regretful contemplation of past biases, the authors offer some analytical and practical suggestions. In reading hegemonic forms of postcolonial computing, this article offers tactics (...) for rereading, rewriting, or reimagining those scripts. (shrink)

In contemporary Western societies, birthing is framed as transformative for mothers; however, it is also a site for the regulation of women and the exercise of power relations by health professionals. Nursing scholarship often frames migrant mothers as a problem, yet nurses are imbricated within systems of scrutiny and regulation that are unevenly imposed on ‘other’ mothers. Discourses deployed by New Zealand Plunket nurses (who provide a universal ‘well child’ health service) to frame their understandings of migrant mothers were analysed (...) using discourse analysis and concepts of power drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, read through a postcolonial feminist perspective. This research shows how Plunket nurses draw on liberal feminist discourses, which have emancipatory aims but reflect assimilatory practices, paradoxically disempowering women who do not subscribe to ideals of individual autonomy. Consequently, the migrant mother, her family and new baby are brought into a neoliberal project of maternal improvement through surveillance. This project – enacted differentially but consistently among nurses – attempts to alter maternal and familial relationships by ‘improving’ mothering. Feminist critiques of patriarchy in maternity must be supplemented by a critique of the implicitly western subject of maternity to make empowerment a possibility for all mothers. (shrink)

This article examines what the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full, I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, (...) her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article invites us to consider the task of education as we face the end of the world as we have known it. The first part of the article gives an overview of global and educational challenges, drawing attention to how formal education has been complicit in the reproduction of historical and systemic violence, as well as unsustainability. This section also offers a distinction between educational approaches that focus on personal empowerment and the mastery of knowledge and skills, and (...) educational approaches that see the role of education in association with the non-coercive re-arrangement of desires and with responsibility before will. The second part of the paper presents a psychoanalytic experiment that attempts to create a space and the dispositions necessary for difficult conversations about the role of education in preparing us all to confront the potential for social and ecological collapse in our lifetime. (shrink)

Recent events around the globe reflect the tensions and ethical dilemmas of the postmodern, postcolonial and neocolonial world that have far reaching implications for health, well-being, and human suffering. As we consider what is at stake, and what this means for local lives and human relationships, we need to examine whether the theories we draw on are adequate to further our understanding of health, and the social and material conditions of human suffering. In this paper I begin to explore the (...) question, ‘Can postcolonial feminist theories provide an inclusive scholarship that would further our understanding of human suffering and open up a path to healing?’ At issue here is whether this scholarship adds another dimension to a praxis-oriented nursing science. (shrink)

Continuing the dialogue: postcolonial feminist scholarship and Bourdieu — discourses of culture and points of connection Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We argue that, (...) while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights — new ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ that might enhance a praxis‐oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery. (shrink)

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women (...) intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British. (shrink)

Appeal to women’s experience for moral delineation in theological ethics has been perplexed by the issue of cultural diversity and colonialism as raised by postcolonial critique. This paper aims to examine the debates from Third-World feminism and Christian feminism in dealing with difference and solidarity, leading to the call for contextual analysis and related power mappings. Margaret A. Farley’s proposal for sexual ethics in Just Love will then serve as an example to discuss how the search for common morality among (...) cultural diversity may prevent or reinforce colonial agendas and other privileges. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth review of Andrew Feenberg’s Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. To this end, the anal...

Development economist Hernando de Soto Polar has effectively advocated for property rights in the Third World, as his ideas have influenced the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations Development Programme. He envisions land titling as a means of lifting the poor out of poverty. I argue that his classical liberal interpretations of property and the good life are dangerously naive. One can see the dangers of de Soto’s imperialist and one-dimensional vision after considering the cultural (...) destruction that results from his brand of development in pastoral Kenya. Also, this article demands a reframing of standardized development approaches. It argues that the conventional view is prone to creating unstable, culturally hegemonic relationships between the government and entrepreneurs, and the people of the land. Asymmetrical lawfare is another nondemocratic feature of de Soto’s development. This article emphasizes that Kenyan pastoralists are not inherently vulnerable people but that they have been rendered vulnerable by society. Lastly, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is the basis for an alternative to de Soto’s development design. UNDRIP was a hard-fought legal protection for the world’s indigenous peoples that makes human dignity central to development. The Global North and Global South produce differing visions of development. This article points to Kenya as an example of how the Global North’s vision has fundamentally failed because it disenfranchises pastoralists—the very people policymakers and policy supporters claim it is intended to benefit. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to address literary texts written in English by diasporic writers of African descent in the context of trauma. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of “traumatic realism,” it seeks to question the Eurocentrism that marks cultural trauma studies and bring into focus the anxieties of home and (un)belonging as indicators of post-traumatic African cultures. The three analyzed works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Caryl Phillips are placed at the crossroads of cultures, beyond the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, in (...) order to construct new cartographies that question the history of colonial modernity. The spatiotemporal intricacies of postmemory in the texts problematize the “realism” of nationalist narratives and question the prefix “post” in “post-colonial” that claims a “working through” the ills of the past. Confronted with the detritus of the “real,” the African diaspora seeks to provide an ethical understanding of the past as it lays bare the far-reaching aftereffects of colonial and slave-holding enterprises on the daily lives of the displaced Africans. In “traumatic realist” terms, the writers negotiate the politics of space and race as they are constantly implicated as postgenerations of colonialism and slavery, while engaging contemporary readers ethically in the repercussions of a painful past. Several studies have addressed displacement as a traumatic aftereffect of colonialism and slavery. Yet, “traumatic realism” and its exploration of the overarching notion of “the implicated subject” by writers of African descent has not been given enough consideration. This dissertation follows a chronotopic (Bakhtin) line of investigation that realigns the dichotomous past and present, or the extreme and the everyday, as it draws on the intricacies of postmemory that bring forth the “lived” manifestations of the colonial discourse. Central to this study is the way in which the structures of nation-states, especially in Africa and/or Britain, continue to foster the forces of forgetting and separation that blight the realities of the displaced African subjects. Today, we bear witness to the growing numbers of refugees, exiles, and immigrants, particularly African ones, who are confronted with oppression, genocide, and racism between the structures of the nation-states in Africa and Europe. This context stresses the need to address pressing questions that highlight what Michael Rothberg refers to as “historical responsibility which engages other subjects, be they descendants or non-descendants of colonial violence, to bear responsible witness to the lasting aftereffects of the colonial and slaveholding pasts. The critical double bind of their representation of the past brings two issues to the fore: Although they need to provide a particularized documentation of the past, the writers resort to a non-competitive model that locates the violence inflicted on the displaced Africans side by side with those suffering from other forms of violence centered in the West. Keywords: African literature, trauma, realism, memory, diaspora, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

In order to explain some of the paradoxes and mysteries of the artist's cross cultural experience in Kiribati, he constructed an Artist's Book depicting through visuality, anecdote and reflection, his research process, engaging with current visual perceptions through negotiation with the past. In Kiribati previous encounters with Europeans and Islanders was dominated by English and I Kiribati with significant contributions by French missionaries. Each viewed the other through cultural filters of identity, which were informed by concepts of myth-historical, often heroic (...) pasts, modified by contemporary purpose such as power, trade, evangelism or personal gain. The method of transmission of beliefs about the past differed fundamentally as the Europeans were predominately informed by writing and the I-Kiribati by orality and performance. The non-literary epistemology of the I Kiribati contributed to a cosmology of non-iconic symbols that defined belief systems and social structures. These symbols connected place and space with time, self and group identities. The research found that the all surrounding visual symbol system of sacred meeting house, dwelling and canoe ) could be partly understood as an ongoing struggle since Deep Time, between the forces of the Ocea n represented by Bakoa, The Shark, and that of the triumph of the coming onto the Land and its people represented by Tabakea, The Turtle. The performative outcome of this triumph and the spirit of identity it engenders is expressed primarily in the ubiquitous I Kiribati Dance. The Artists Book is inspired by the creative classic I Kiribati form of oratory known as Te Kuna, using a structure analogous to the symbolic forms of narrative of Oceanic Voyaging traditionally employed by the I Kiribati. Differences in visual perceptions across cultural interface are understood not only as having the potential for conflict but also as providing positive dynamic force by the interchange of understood differences. The project contributes specifically to the ethnography of English and I Kiribati, semiotic systems and visual epistemologies, indicating directions towards positive outcomes in cross-cultural encounters. (shrink)