#internal colonialism

[thinkingimages]

Forbidden. As my school years were drawing to a close, the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred. It wasn’t until my forties that I discovered an extra letter in the Ukrainian alphabet, unbeknownst to me before. This letter had been removed from the Ukrainian alphabet shortly after the formation of the Soviet Union, only to be reinstated after Ukraine gained independence in 1991. © Julia Wimmerlin

[normalweirdoboy]

What I think of the Indian Government's decision to make Hindi compulsory in North-Eastern schools:

(Disclaimer: This is not against the policies of any particular political party, ethnicity, or linguistic group. This is just to highlight the naivety of the Government of India and the unfairness of Indian constitution. I believe all the parties in power till date have not done anything at all to prevent this linguistic catastrophe, well, mere compensations at times, maybe.)

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North East India is a culturally sensitive region. It differs from the mainland culturally, racially and historically. Most of the population is tribal and speak a myriad of distinct languages and dialects. It is probably the most culturally diverse area of the country.

Hindi is already an optional subject in many state boards as well as CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education). Now what the Indian government wants, is to make it compulsory. Which means students will be forced to learn it whether or not they wish to.

Some of you might ask, what's the problem with that? Well, you see... As I mentioned earlier, North East is a sensitive region. Many communities here are already struggling to keep their native culture alive, forceful imposition of Hindi will only make matters worse. Having grown up in the NE, I've had many local acquaintances who either didn't know how to speak their tribal languages or were hardly fluent in them. "I'm not that good at it..." they'd say with a sad smile. And, you know why? Because they were never taught the language. Either they are to pick it up from their parents, or they'll never know it.

Most of these tribal languages are not taught in schools. Even when they are, consider the scenario of migration. Once they leave their native village or town and maybe even settle down in a different part of the same state where the natives hail from some other tribe, they risk losing ties with the language forever. Same goes for intercommunity families where the children end up learning only the link language and not the native ones.

So why isn't the Indian Government helping to preserve these languages instead of promoting and imposing Hindi? I leave it upon you to ponder...

Also...

Reminds me of the 18th century missionaries lmao. Just replace teachers with missionaries and scripts with religion and yeah...

Hindi imposition is no better than what the British did to these people back in the colonial days. It's risking their native cultures and threatening to replace them with something foreign in the name of reforms. Yes, I said 'foreign', because Hindi was never spoken in this region prior to a hundred years or so when Hindi propagation became a thing.

And it's not like there never was a link language in the region. Assamese was the lingua franca for most of North-East facilitating communication between the numerous tribal communities as well as non-tribals. Bengali worked as a link language in Tripura and Barak Valley region of Assam. Nagamese, a pidgin version of Assamese is still spoken as the common language between the different communities inhabiting the state of Nagaland.

What the Indian government is doing, is destroying the old linguistic fabric of society that kept the people connected and replacing it with Hindi. Many languages that historically used the Assamese or Bengali script are turning to Devanagari or the Roman script, thanks to government funding and propaganda (Boro, Khasi, Mising etc.) Old link languages like Nefamese (in Arunachal) have been replaced by Hindi and English.

There are hundreds of local dialects in the region that are currently endangered either due to small population sizes or because the young generation is shifting to more 'economically profitable' languages. There's really not much that the Indian government has done to protect them.

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What they want to destroy. What we need to protect. The map is of course only depicting the unofficial languages, the recognised languages like Assamese, Bengali, Bodo and Manipuri have not been highlighted.

Let us not forget that when one culture threatens to replace another, there's always resistance and this kind of cultural imposition is, in my opinion, one of the factors contributing to the insurgencies and separatist movements in the region. If you make people believe they need to speak a certain language to connect with the nation instead of making them realise that their own culture and language is an integral part of the nation too, well, this is what happens.

There's been opposition and clear voicing of displeasure coming from many tribal and political groups regarding this new education policy but I don't suppose much will change given how deaf our governments have always been.

It's a lost battle, unless we all speak out against it.

*sigh*

- Normalweirdoboy

[a-book-dragon]

*External colonialism* (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the  expropriation  of  fragments  of  Indigenous  worlds,  animals,plants  and  human  beings, extracting  them  in  order  to  transport  them  to-and  build  the  wealth,  the  privilege,  or  feed  the appetites of-the  colonizers,  who get  marked  as  the  first  world.This  includes  so-thought ‘historic’  examples  such  as  opium,  spices,  tea,  sugar,  and  tobacco,  the  extraction  of  which continues  to  fuel  colonial  efforts.This  form  of  colonialism  also  includes  the  feeding  of contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset  of  activities  properly  called  military  colonialism-the  creation  of  war  fronts/frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military   operations.In   external   colonialism,   all   things   Native   become   recast   as   ‘natural resources’-bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel. The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is *internal colonialism*, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora  and  fauna  within  the  “domestic”  borders  of  the  imperial  nation.  This  involves  the  use  of particularized  modes  of  control-prisons,  ghettos,  minoritizing,  schooling,  policing-to  ensure the  ascendancy  of  a  nation  and  its  white3elite. These  modes  of  control,  imprisonment,  and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders-ghettos, their policing, their economic divestiture,  and  their  dislocatability-are  at  work  to  authorize  the  metropole  and  conscribe  her periphery.Strategies  of  internal  colonialism,  such  as  segregation,  divestment,  surveillance, and criminalization,are both structural and interpersonal.

Decolonization is not a metaphor

[russianreader]

Clearance Sale

“From August 15. There’ll be bargains galore at the clearance sale!” Source: Email flyer from Russian e-commerce giant Ozon. In the original, the nouns meaning, roughly, “bargains galore” and “clearance sale” are written, unaccountably, with the Italian endings -ggio and -issimo. Let’s think about who the beneficiaries are and what their profit is: this should explain why the regime is stable.…

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[russianreader]

Speak Speech, Speaker (The Imperialist Mindset)

One day, I hope, someone will explain to me why “progressive” Russians find the English words speak, speaker, speech, etc., so sexy and exciting that they have to incorporate them needlessly into Russian every chance they get. Do they know that, in English, these words are less evocative than three-day-old bread, duller than dishwater? In this case, hilariously (and awkwardly, too: “speak”…

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[russianreader]

Neocolonialism To set Russia apart from the pack, Putin is leaning on a unique pitch: that only Russian support can help protect the sovereignty of African countries.

[rienfleche]

The set of settler colonial relations

Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of colonialism[2]. External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought ‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset of activities properly called military colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as ‘natural resources’ - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel.

The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white[3] elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery. Strategies of internal colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization, are both structural and interpersonal.

Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts - though they can overlap[4] - and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US military still nicknames all enemy territory “Indian Country”). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments.

Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage.

2 Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects. Racism is an invention of colonialism (Silva, 2007). The current colonial era goes back to 1492, when colonial imaginary goes global.

3 In using terms as “white” and “whiteness”, we are acknowledging that whiteness extends beyond phenotype.

4 We don’t treat internal/external as a taxonomy of colonialisms. They describe two operative modes of colonialism. The modes can overlap, reinforce, and contradict one another, and do so through particular legal, social, economic and political processes that are context specific.

From “Decolonization is not a metaphor”.

[the-exhausted-researcher]

"As the corporations abuse the planet and push the environment to its breaking point, their careless exploitation and sole concern for profits results in a decimated, uninhabitable environment and people who become sickly and weak."

- Devon DB