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- Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two
Authors: Anita Lundberg, Hannah Regis, Gregory Luke Chwala, Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah, Ashton Sinamai, R. Benedito Ferrão, Sophie Chao
Pages: 1 - 32
Abstract: The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie; the 'tropical natureculture' imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism; deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic; the spaces of a tropical flâneuse and diasporic vernacular architecture; and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.4005
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Philippine philippine, or the Tropics in Cixous’s Dreaming True
Authors: Christian Jil Benitez, Phrae Chittiphalangsri
Pages: 33 - 56
Abstract: Hélène Cixous’s oneiric ideation of the philippine (twin almond)—and by extension, her text Philippines (2009/2011)—primarily evokes love, or that force of attraction between two beings in which one can never say where each begins or ends. It is by the virtue of this entanglement that another philippine can be offered to this discourse: the Philippines that is that archipelago which encloses and opens up a particular location and reality within the tropics. This essay attempts to reconsider Cixous’s philippine via the Philippine, through dwelling on the stroke of homophony between these two signifiers and encountering them as materials in and of themselves. As such, these words are recognized here not simply as objects of the critique, but as its very method, a material poetics through which a comparative reading can be initiated and pursued. Through this reading, despite the absence of any explicit referentiality between the words being coincided here, the loving promise of ‘telepathic philippine’ is practiced, and perhaps more faithfully so, by expanding Cixous’s exclusively Euro-Western and temperate ideation to the Philippine tropics. In decolonially yoking Cixous’s Philippines and the Philippines together, the essay ultimately intimates their being twin kernels, too, dwelling in a single shell—that same shell that is this planet.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3973
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Tropicality and Decoloniality: Sex Tourism vs Eco Tourism on a Philippine
Beach
Authors: Rosemary Wiss
Pages: 57 - 81
Abstract: The small beachside town of Aplaya, Puerto Galera, on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines has a sex, beach, and diving tourist economy. Aplaya is considered a place of isolation, providing unspoiled tropical nature. Many foreign men discuss their desires for a Utopian paradise, a tropical beach that is imagined as uninhabited except for the necessary extras – the welcoming natives and compliant women. Foreign men depict the Philippines as a place where women are ordinarily sexually available, part of the natural excess of the tropics. This discourse of tropicality is here put into context with a discourse of decoloniality. The Philippines archipelago was colonised for over 400 years firstly by the Spanish, then by US colonisation, followed by Japanese occupation in WWII, and a return of the US until 1946 – after which post-colonial US influence continued. Despite this long and complex history, tourists who recount desires for a natural world and a nostalgia for a lost paradise in relation to the West help produce Aplaya as paradise found, rather than a particular version of paradise made. Amidst these ideas about natural women and traditional gender arrangements there are also ideas about the tropical natureculture, its natural state and cultural interventions. In Aplaya, a conflict is occurring between the development of sex tourism and environmental conservation through ecotourism. The domains of nature and culture, their articulation in the tropics, the environment, and development are produced and contested around this beach.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3988
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Decolonizing Discourses of Tropicality: Militourism and Aloha ‘Āina in
Kiana Davenport’s Novels
Authors: Kristiawan Indriyanto
Pages: 82 - 103
Abstract: This paper contextualizes Hawai‘i as a tropical landscape submerged under the discourse of exoticism which conceals the continuing American militarism, nuclearization, and tourist-oriented development in this archipelago. Militourism, as defined by Teresia Teaiwa, argues that the perpetuation of tourism based upon the imagination of tropical paradise conceals the continuation of colonial/neocolonial exploitation of the Hawaiian Islands. Under the discourse of tropicality, nature is instrumentalized, denying the agency and subjectivity of both the environment and Hawaiian indigene positioned as the Other. Kiana Davenport’s literary imagination of Hawai‘i contextualizes this locale as a postcolonial space, a site of conflict and contestation concerning discourses of nature. Her fictions decolonize colonial conceptions of nature by construing the Kānaka epistemology of aloha ‘āina which refigures nature as an active subject. It further posits the intertwined aspects of nature, place, and culture in Indigenous epistemology. Aloha ‘āina functions as a locus of Indigenous resistance interwoven with their political resistance, ongoing struggles for reclaiming ownership of land, and eventual sovereignty.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3955
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Decolonizing Literature: The Absence of Afro-Brazilians in the
Anthropophagic Movement
Authors: Paola Karyne Azevedo Jochimsen
Pages: 104 - 124
Abstract: This article analyzes how the Movimento Antropofágico (Anthropophagic Movement), an avant-garde cultural manifestation was conceived by São Paulo's ruling elite and aimed to create a national identity. Inspired by the Indigenous anthropophagic ritual, in which the flesh of the enemy was consumed to acquire their skills, the movement proposed the incorporation and transformation of foreign European culture into national culture. This study is based on the analysis of the Manifesto Antropofágico (the Anthropophagic Manifesto) and the texts published later in the Revista de Antropofagia between May 1928 and February 1929. To theoretically support this work, I use the concepts of postcolonial authors such as Frantz Fanon and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The objective of the study is to question how the absence of Afro-Brazilians happened and to deconstruct the myth of the attempt to build a Brazilian national culture.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3960
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Extraction and Environmental Injustices: (De)colonial Practices in Imbolo
Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were
Authors: Goutam Karmakar, Rajendra Chetty
Pages: 125 - 147
Abstract: Environmental degradation, climate crises, and ecological catastrophes effect the countries of the tropics distinctly from those of the Global North, reflecting the ramifications of colonial capitalist epistemes and practices that sanction extraction, commodification, and control of tropical lands and peoples. Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, bears witness to the history and presence of ecological disaster in the African tropics through issues related to extractivism, environmental injustices, and structural racism that are ongoing under the mask of capitalist progress and development. Mbue, a Cameroonian-American novelist, recounts Kosawa’s decades-long struggle against the American oil company Pexton. This article focuses on the critical aspect that Mbue’s discourse reveals—that there is a need to map environmental injustices with other forms of structural injustices and the prevalence of neocolonialism and its manifestations through racial, economic, and epistemic practices. The article further explicates how the ordinary people of Kosawa become subjected to “slow violence” and “testimonial injustice” and foregrounds the necessity of “epistemic disobedience” demonstrated in the novel through the madman’s intervention and Thula’s sustained resistance to the exploitative agendas.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3970
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Decolonial and EcoGothic Tropes in Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on
the Purple Line
Authors: Sanghamitra Devi, Esther Daimari
Pages: 148 - 169
Abstract: This paper analyzes Deepa Anappara’s novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020) from a decolonial ecoGothic perspective to show how the novel exposes the human and ecological crises in an urban slum known as a “basti” in an unnamed part of present-day India. The paper argues that Anappara uses the child narrator Jai and the gothic tropes of “Bhoot,” “Djinn,” and “smog” to convey the violent and traumatic experiences of marginalized communities residing in the slum. The novel uncovers child kidnappings, murders, and toxic waste dumps. This paper explores how Anappara employs the imagery of South Asian Gothic tropes as devices to create a postcolonial urban ecoGothic highlighting the ecological and climatic crises that arise out of the gentrification of the city and the growing divide between the slum dwellers and the privileged inhabitants of high-rise gated communities. Finally, the paper posits that Anappara’s decolonial ecoGothic creates a vision of the city as a site of trauma, violence, corruption, and environmental degradation within a neocolonial capitalist regime.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3977
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- A Tropical Flâneuse in Ahmedabad: Flânerie as a Decolonial Act
Authors: Sayani Konar, Punyashree Panda
Pages: 170 - 192
Abstract: This paper reads Esther David’s book Ahmedabad: City with a Past as a tropical flâneuse’s exploration of the city of Ahmadabad. To this end, the article draws from Baudelaire and Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur, and re-articulates this masculine and temperate character. Esther David, the decolonial tropical flâneuse, critiques neocolonialism, manifested through the nexus of capitalist globalization, rapid urbanization and consumerism that has drastically altered the face of the city. This is done mostly by bringing out Ahmedabad’s hybrid identity of an old heritage city and a modern metropolis. The paper further analyzes the flâneuse’s connection with the postcolonial identity of the city and her endeavour to extend flânerie to domestic interiors exploring their relationship vis-à-vis the city.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3982
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- Vernacular Dwellings of the Rakhaine Diaspora in Bangladesh:
Decoloniality, Tropicality, Hybridity
Authors: Antu Das, Nur Mohammad Khan
Pages: 193 - 217
Abstract: Decolonization in tropical architecture upholds cultural identity and diversity in both its material and non-material forms. The Rakhaine, a diasporic ethnic minority in southern Bangladesh, migrated from the former Arakan state more than two centuries ago. They have gradually adapted their cultural way of life as well as their vernacular dwellings to their displaced context, especially in the last few decades. Their cultural identity shows a new dimension, which is termed hybridization in postcolonial discourses. Considering the above context, this research initially aims to understand the unique spatial-physical morphology of the Rakhaine's traditional stilt houses. Later, the study explores different influences behind the current hybridized transformation taking place in their vernacular dwelling. Through a qualitative case-study approach, an in-depth comparison of two dwellings was undertaken to document and understand both their traditional and hybridized aspects. Theoretically influenced by decoloniality, tropicality and hybridity, this study contributes to decolonial and postcolonial studies in tropical architecture and will be of interest to academics and professionals in understanding the unique in-betweenness of cultural hybridization of ethnic minorities in the South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3986
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- A Decolonial History of African Female Education and Training in Colonial
Asante, 1920-1960
Authors: Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Helena Osei-Egyir
Pages: 218 - 238
Abstract: This paper is a decolonial exploration of the intersection of colonialism, education, and gender in the Asante (Ashanti) region of colonial Ghana in tropical West Africa between 1920 and 1960. Despite the atrocities of the colonial period, Western education provided a system of change for African women. However, the colonial period also deprived female leaders of their authority and perpetuated traditional gender roles, which were reinforced by the education system. While some schools and centres were opened for the training of girls, there was still limited access to education and opportunities for women. This study relies on primary and secondary sources, including archival sources, books, and articles, to uncover the complex history of Asante women’s colonial encounters and female education. Using a decolonial lens, the paper challenges dominant narratives and uncovers hidden histories, highlighting the systemic exclusion of women from power and the perpetuation of colonial power relations.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3949
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
- A Multiversal Adventure in Decolonising Education: Everything Everywhere
All at Once
Authors: Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng
Pages: 239 - 268
Abstract: This article is a conceptual creative piece, drawing a parallel between the themes of the 2022 cinematic work Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) and decolonising education. Initially, I examine the career trajectories of the film's two leading protagonists, both of whom originally hail from tropical Southeast Asia, expounding upon Asian media representation and juxtaposing their personal narratives with the discourse surrounding decoloniality, inclusivity, and diversity. Secondly, through a close analysis of key scenes and motifs, I highlight the film's relevance to debates around decolonisation, including the need to challenge dominant narratives, recognise diverse perspectives, and acknowledge the intersectionality of identity and experience. Thirdly, I suggest incorporating playful pedagogies and praxes that draw inspiration from the imaginative ingenuity of EEAAO as a means of overcoming the continuing ramifications of colonialism and Western-centrism within education. By positioning the film as a catalyst, I hope to contribute to broader efforts to decolonise and transform the structures, systems, and practices that shape our social fabric. This paper is a valuable resource for educators aiming to connect Eastern philosophies, quantum physics, and decolonising approaches to teaching and learning with adolescent learners, using the themes of interconnectedness, multiverses, and collective action.
PubDate: 2023-07-23
DOI: 10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3956
Issue No: Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023)
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