The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties

Inventing Postcolonial Elites: Race, Language, Mix, Excess

“…Coloniality also foregrounds the continued centrality of race: the remarkable durability of systems of human classification based on notions of natural, hierarchized difference that were established under colonialism. As Aníbal Quijano (:533) writes: “rac[e] has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established.” The ongoing project of decolonization “seeks to apprehend and, ultimately displace a ‘logic of coloniality’ that undergirds the experiment of Western modernity” (Allen and Jobson :130).…”

Thinking ‘differently’ about a feminist critical geography of development

“…The development stories need to be told by those who experience them, not by proxy or by others; a new generation of scholars is now needed to decolonise Australian geographical approaches to critical developmental studies. Members of Jafari Allen's and Ryan Jobson's () ‘decolonising generation’ in anthropology—the cohort of Black, coloured, allied anti‐racist, feminist, and political economy scholars who have critiqued the representations of Third World peoples (and women)—have yet to make substantial inroads into Australian geography. This generation troubled the conceptual and methodological precepts of other field‐based social sciences (such as anthropology) by repeatedly questioning this ‘signature’ method.…”

One View from a Deterritorialized Realm: How Black/Queer Renarrativizes Anthropological Analysis

“…Black/queer ethnographic work draws its understanding of Black subjects as agents centered in their own globally situated political-economic dramas, and of the anthropologist as an observant full participant, coauthoring witness, and chronicler-aligned and in on the joke, the groove, and the affect-from the decolonizing stream of anthropology, which has yet to be fully critically assessed, much less socialized in graduate training (see Allen and Jobson 2016). This radical and decolonizing intellectual tradition is currently being extended to contemporary forms of Black/queer life by the anthropologists Shaka McGlotten, Vanessa Agard-Jones, Serena Dankwa, Lyndon Gill, Alix Chapman, Andrea Allen, Kwame Edwin Otu, and others, working, for example, on pleasure, resistance, endurance, violence, statecraft, media, displacement, belonging, advocacy, and spirituality, and making important methodological, theoretical, and writerly innovations.…”