Projects with keyword: Colonial/postcolonial

The project's purpose is to study the relation between colonialism/decolonization and European integration. EU research has yet to investigate how concerns about colonial dominance influenced the positions of the six states that signed the Rome Treaty in 1957, four of which were colonial powers at the time. To varying degrees, they emphasized integration either as an instrument for maintaining colonial control or as a compensation for their demise as colonial powers. Our project will analyze how the colonial system and the process of decolonization influenced this early phase of EU integration.To put our analysis of the relation of European integration and colonialism in its proper historical context, we will also discuss the various ideas on European integration and colonial expansion which emerged already in the interwar period and which acquired renewed interest in the 1940s and 1950s. To this historical approach we add a contemporary perspective, in which we explore how this influence is perceived in the current historiography of the EU.

Empirically, the material being investigated draws from academic accounts, media reporting and from accounts provided by the EU itself, including archival materials. The project thus rests on two research methodologies, the first one dealing with secondary sources in the scholarly and popular context, the second with EU documents and other primary sources in the political context.

The project is of a pioneering character: the first account to date that maps the neglected historical relationship between the EU and colonialism/decolonization. Conversely, it will also be the first account to inquire into how this nexus continues to impact on the EU of today, especially in its efforts to foster a European identity by disseminating a particular history of EU integration.

In recent decades, tourism and travelling has increasingly come to be recognized as a highly complex field of research that raises questions that are both local and global, that involves questions about identity and self-understanding, as well as questions relating to human rights, development, global economy and international political relations. Still, there are yet few Swedish textbooks where contemporary tourism and travel is highlighted from a critical perspective, or where issues of global power relations are in focus. Therefore, the purpose of this project has been to produce text books in Swedish, in which international tourism and travel are confronted with new, critical, theoretical perspectives.

This project investigates the relation of European integration to colonialism by retrieving a once influential notion: Eurafrica. Through sources mainly in the EU's historical archives, it demonstrates that the incorporation into the EEC of the member states' colonial possessions was a necessary condition for the agreement on the Rome Treaty in 1957 and hence for the founding of today's EU. This by now forgotten fact is clarified by a historical investigation of how, from the 1920s until the late 1950s, practically all of the movements and institutions working towards European integration placed Africa's geopolitical and economic incorporation into the European enterprise as a key objective.

European societies have recently turned toward more austere political regimes. Evidence of this can be seen in budget cuts, management of the labor market and restrictions of welfare systems, as well as in new regimes of migration and citizenship. Against the backdrop of such processes, this project investigates how a current politics of austerity affects our cultural memory. This project seeks to extract the correlation between how minorities, migrants and their descendants are treated by present policies and how memories and experiences of migrants, minorities and colonized peoples are treated in historiography and historical pedagogy. The project is unique in the sense that it brings together social scientists analyzing ethnic relations and migration in contemporary Europe and historians studying Europe?s history and cultural memory. It is also potentially path breaking as it crosses borders between languages and academic traditions and initiates a truly inter-European academic discussion on scholarly and intellectual concerns that are deeply shared by most national communities of Europe but usually studied only in the contexts of the various nation states.

This project examines the position of the white subject in Africa. Specifically, it examines Nadine Gordimer’s exploration of the notion of whiteness and white Africanity in her fiction and prose, as well as her investigation of the oppressor’s consciousness, and her negotiation and interrogation of her own position as a white South African. In essays and speeches she intervened in debates and voiced feelings and apprehensions that concerned the futurity of whiteness in a shifting political and social context. As I argue, these interventions were made from a new emerging subject position that resulted from the social and political constraints of apartheid and colonialism, inhabiting the interstice of an old, given colonial order, and the decolonial processes of the antiracist, anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles in Africa and Europe which was bringing the colonial era to an end. Through her fiction writing she was able to shape this subject position, which lacked representation and hence existence within the dominant political discourse. Projected into her fiction, the subject position emerges as an object of knowledge within the intellectual history of South Africa.

What constitutes and maintains the structures of indifference that enable ongoing extractive plunder by the Canadian polity? As a consequence of taking the erasure of plunder as a starting point, we are invited to examine how contested extractive processes unfold in space and time: their speculative ‘buzz’ phase, their toxifying phase, and their many traumatic after-lives. That such extractive processes always have an emplaced aspect in a ‘site’ where we can encounter them in research or classification goes without saying, but of particular importance to my research are its embodied aspects, which are transmissible across space and generations insofar as communities under extractive pressure are toxified and restructured into no-places of unrestrained profit-potential, marked by monopolistic or oligopolistic life-worlds of expulsion. Two questions arising from this attention to lived communal experiences of extraction and explored across the cases are: what do those displaced by extraction carry with them? How are transversal projects of resistance articulated?