Colonialism SPS26

Wolfe 2006

Settler colonialism is based on "logics of elimination" and "externalisation". Argues it is a "structure" not an "event"

Mamdani 1996

Bifurcated state- explains conflict today in former colonies as a result of the delegation of indirect rule through ethnic identities in rural areas. Bifurcated meaning direct rule used in urban centers compared to indirect rule in rural

Quijano 2000

Coloniality of power and knowledge. Spanish/Portuguese colonisers created race classification system to natrualise regimes of violence. Non-european knowledge systems also designated local/mythological.

Rodney 1972

African poverty was actively produced by hundreds of years of European extraction

Nkrumah 1966

Neo-colonialism: imperial domination continues after formal independence - assumptions of colonialism being "finished" are flawed

Nabulsi 2024

'To stop the earthquake': Palestine and the Settler Colonial Logic of Fragmentation", Antipode. Reads Israeli territorial fragmentation as a settler colonial strategy of elimination, building on Wolfe (2006). Fragmentation-as-spatial-logic argument deployable in any settler colonialism question.

Said 1978

Orientalism - Colonial production of East-West binaries

Gregory 2004

"The colonial present" - maps Said onto present-day war + discourse

Spivak 1988

Epistemic violence: the violence of colonialism is more than material - its also epistemic, inflicting violence on indigenous ways of knowing. This is why Decoloniality requires "de-linking" from western epistemologies

Fanon 1961

Colonialism produces a Manichean spatial order: the colonial city is physically partitioned into two ontological worlds, settler quarter and native quarter, organised around who counts as human. Decolonisation is necessarily spatial and violent because colonial power is itself founded on and maintained by violence. Key warning: the pitfall of national consciousness, where decolonisation produces a comprador elite that inherits colonial structures under a national flag, reproducing extraction without dismantling the underlying order. Runs directly into Nkrumah's neo-colonialism argument.

Getachew 2019

decolonialism is a radical process of "worldmaking" + ambitious project of restructuring global power

Loomba 1998

Postcolonialism is not just temporally "coming after" colonialism, but flexibly as the active "contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism.

Mignolo + Walsh 2018

Colonialism + Imperialism inseparable from and constitutive of the project of modernity. Decolonialism is an ongoing "doing" not just theory - a verb not a noun.

McKittrick 2006

Black feminism, cartographies of struggle, "demonic grounds", Colonialism / gender / resistance + futurity. Spaces that Wynter’s non-humans live in are represented as ‘less real’. Argues black people were producing knowledge + spatial practices in plantations. Extends this in 2013 arguing that plantations spatial logic has continues.

Tuck + Yang 2012

Decolonization is not a metaphor (e.g. decolonise the curriculum)- argues against co-optation of the term into broad social movement because it must remain rooted in the physical repatriation of indigenous land. Term: “settler move to innocence”

Mahjoub 2025

The UAE's Subimperialism in Sudan (Spectre Journal). UAE behaves as regional imperial power while remaining subordinate to US-led order. Arms RSF paramilitary + extracts Darfur "conflict gold" smuggled through Dubai. Why?: 2011 Arab Spring perceived as existential threat to Gulf autocratic model.

Marini 1972

Dialectics of Dependency. Subimperialism - semi-peripheral nations reach monopoly capitalism + begin exploiting neighbours for resources + markets while remaining subordinate to core powers (US). Originally applied to Brazil under military dictatorship. Used by Mahjoub (2025) for UAE in Sudan.

Fogel in Jacobin 2026

We’re Now in the Sopranos Stage of Imperialism. The assault on Venezuela signals a shift from hegemony and consent to Sopranos imperialism: unapologetic gangster-style power. As with the Mafia, loyalty may ultimately buy nothing, and deals can be broken at gunpoint.

Robinson 1983

Racial Capitalism- feudal social orders was simply explanded geogrpahically in capitalism. Race is a fundamental part of how capitalism functions. Black radical tradition- counter tradition of thought developed within and against these conditions.

Lewis 2020

Moulds Robinson and Quijano together saying that racial capitalism (robinson) doesn’t just rely on the exploitation of already-racialised groups, but rather is actively producing and reproducing these racial catagories (Quijano) in order to survive

Bonds + Inwood 2016

Shift from understanding ‘white priviledge’ to white supremacy. White supremacy is the ongoing material pracise through which settler colonialism reproduces itself. Based in the ‘bundy standoff’ where white farmer felt a god-given entitlement to his land, ignoring the indigneous before him.

Andrea Smith 2006

3 pillars of white supremacy (full name + date)

Genocide, Slavery, Orientalism

3 pillars of white supremacy. One is basis of colonialism, one is mechanism that secures capitalism, one is the logic that establishes permenant war/empire

Ferretti 2021

Lusophone subaltern diplomacy- envokes nkrumah, cabral, mondlane, neto. Resistance to colonialism not just reactionary- a sophisticated production of alternative knowledge. E.g. multi-lingual manifestos

Mignolo 2009

Genuine decolonial thought requires de-linking from the web of imperial knowledge. (problamatised by writing in a western SAGE journal)

Wynter 2003

Central act of colonialism is the definition of the human itself. ‘The overrepresentation of the human’ constituted the fland theft, slavery and genocide the followed. Creates ‘Demons’- functioning outside the know laws - taken from maths