Colonialism

European colonialisms (circa. Late 1400) are complex, particularized, and changing political-economic-social-religious systems of domination. In the pursuit of capital accumulation and appropriation, European colonialisms generated and benefited from racialized and racist logics. Following the “formal” decolonization of much, but not all, of the colonized world—from Haiti in 1804, to Cameroon in 1960, to Papua New Guinea in 1975, to Timor-Leste in 2002—colonial structures, relations, and imaginaries often persisted in altered forms. Social scientists draw variously from political economy and historical materialism as well as postcolonial thought and cultural materialism within the broader field of colonial studies to both critique European colonialisms of the past and reveal the persistence(s) of colonial relations/structures in the present. Colonial “durabilities” and the “coloniality of being” continue to inform post-colonial political economies, social relations, and knowledge productions, creations, circulations, and contestations. The protraction of colonial domination(s) into the early 21st Century have given rise to reinvigorations of anti-colonial and postcolonial critique, including decolonial options and polygonal projects of decolonization. Widespread discontent regarding the persistence of “colonialism in the present” are manifested in the vocal and visible debates within early 21st Century universities around decolonizing knowledge, including struggles to decolonize the discipline of geography