Session 6b: Defining, Contesting and Remaking

5th Global Conference

Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

The Nomad Gypsy through Decolonial View
Iona Vrabiescu
Political Science Faculty, National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania

If the uncivilized communities designate people without history, the decolonial perspective will argue the “coloniality of power” as the way the “other” is interiorized and racialized in the modern time. The myth of the nomad Gypsy is a way of bringing into modernity a special kind of slavery worked in Eastern Europe. The term “nomadism” shouldn’t be linguistically or historically justified, by explaining how recent political regimes treated the Roma nomadic lifestyle. The myth of the nomad started in 13-14th c. and just crossed the centuries bearing the negative moral value into the contemporary discourse, shifting from theological level to the epistemic one.

Building a geographic structure of power on the European territory, the modern state-system results can be seen in, on one hand, the “orientalization” of the Eastern territories, and on the other, in the colonization of any new lands. The present Romanian culture being in the Orient started with a price that should be paid: “othering” the Roma people. The Romanians have been the subject of the orientalism, and then its agents.

The modern racialization is not only racism – it’s a world structure. The same colonial thinking and policy works in the post-socialist transition redefining the oriental location of the Eastern Europe, where those copy-pasted institutions, symbols and realities from western democratic countries, are imposing a new kind of integration. We have to talk about this new Romaphobia in this context.

The poverty, exclusion, racism, violence, all are forms of discrimination that can be attributed to the non-homogenous Roma identity. But if the political building of the Roma identity must cross the threshold of modernity, what does it mean? It is not about loosing traditions, being assimilated, but going over the purity line. A nationalist construction should start somehow here.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Racism in Barbados in the 21st Century: Forty Year Beyond the Growth of the Modern West Indies
Natalie Walthrust Jones
Barbados Community College, “Eyrie” Howell’s Cross Roads, St. Michael, Barbados

In this the first meaningful analysis of race relations in Barbados, the authors have embarked upon a line of research which has not been utilised by other scholars, except perhaps Linden Lewis. The writers have explored the theory of crypto racism in independent Barbados; and we argue that this form of discrimination and segregation has succeeded the apartheid-like conditions which Gordon K. Lewis encountered when he undertook his seminal research on the dynamics of Barbadian colonial society before 1966.

Lewis’ findings which were published in his path breaking study the Growth of the Modern West Indies in 1968, were that Barbados was a mixture if anti-democratic an illiberal practices. On one hand there was the deification to British culture which within itself was racist in that it enshrined the deification of English heroes, such as the anti-abolitionist Admiral Horatio Nelson. Secondly, Lewis found openly segregated schools, sports clubs, places of adult entertainment, churches as well as commercial firms all based on race and colour differences. There is now the persistent contention that with the passing of forty-five years of independence these odious segregationist ‘acts’ have disappeared and that Barbados in 2012 is free of anti-black racism.

The writers will adduce quantitative and qualitative evidence to support their contention that what exists in Barbadian society in the first decade of the 21st century is crypto racism, which is a more insidious form as it is camouflage behind traditions of a commercial, agricultural and leisure time nature. In this connection the authors introduce a novel dimension in exploration of race relations in Barbados – investigating of the role of Hindu-Muslim East Indians who have now recorded a century of labour migration to Barbados and have established themselves as a disproportionately significant economic and social grouping.

The authors intend to bring to bear on this topic, theories of hegemonic and subaltern relations in a race conscious and class stratified island society. The works of Gramsci, Marx, Rodney, Lewis and Beckles among others will be examined along with primary sources from a wide cross-section of actors and groups in this modern Caribbean society.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The Ethics Between the Self and the Other: The way to Formosa in The Most Distant Course.
Liu Shu-Jhen
Taiwanese literature at National Chengchi University in Taiwan Taipei, Taiwan

Upon the arrival of the 2nd millennium, the postmodernist theory reached extreme universality, accomplishing the politics of resistance against mechanical rationality with border crossing aesthetics and completely deconstructs subjectivity. However, it is exactly the aesthetic act with such extreme negation that marginalized itself at the extreme. That means the relativism and nihilism in subjectivity. At the present moment when postmodernism already peaked, what we have to reconsider is not simply how to reconcile with the reality that has been in the way of subjectivity, but the kind of neo-ethics to be reconstructed between subjectivity and the Other, which t has seemingly been regarded as illusion. Perhaps there’s another way to perceive this. If the metempirical state of postmodernist subjectivity’s has turned into nothingness, is it still possible to reach the “Other”? Let’s go one step further. Does the “Other” exist? What should be the relationship between the “Other” and “Self”?

This thesis argues The Most Distant Course (2007) by Taiwanese director Lin Jing-jie, which won the International Critics’ Week Award at the Venice Film Festival, demonstrates such reconstruction of Self and the Other. As Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) pointed out, the only way to realize alterity is to stay in a state of “departure” from the essence of Self. With the three characters getting away from the mundane emptiness and heading for the distant, this movie searches for the traces of “Formosan sound.” The path, from self-escape to the Other, is also the path for the Self to reconstruct the ethics with the Other. This thesis attempts to follow the metaphoric quest of “Formosan sound”– the path to find one’s name by detouring through the Other. What seems to be the most distant course brings us closest to the Self of Taiwan. This thesis argues in the context of Taiwan under globalism and the after effects of post-colonialism by inquiring “What is the most distant course?” We can then truly reconsider the strategy for a post-colonial nation to reconstruct its culture and ethics by accepting the Other.