The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Social Work

Tanja Kleibl, Ronald Lutz, Ndangwa Noyoo, Benjamin Bunk, Annika Dittmann, Boitumelo Seepamore, Tanja Kleibl, Ronald Lutz, Ndangwa Noyoo, Benjamin Bunk, Annika Dittmann, Boitumelo Seepamore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429888618
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Social Work reflects on and dissects the challenging issues confronting social work practice and education globally in the post-colonial era. By analysing how countries in the so-called developing and developed world have navigated some of the inherited systems from the colonial era, it shows how they have used them to provide relevant social work methods which are also responsive to the needs of a postcolonial setting.

This is an analytical and reflexive handbook that brings together different scholars from various parts of the world – both North and South – so as to distill ideas from scholars relating to ways that can advance social work of the South and critique social work of the North in so far as it is used as a template for social work approaches in postcolonial settings. It determines whether and how approaches, knowledge-bases, and methods of social work have been indigenised and localised in the Global South in the postcolonial era.

This handbook provides the reader with multiple new theoretical approaches and empirical experiences and creates a space of action for the most marginalised communities worldwide. It will be of interest to researchers and practitioners, as well as those in social work education.

Part I

Postcolonial social work

Perspectives and approaches

Tanja Kleibl

Introduction

The language of decolonisation is nowadays used by many indigenous, Afro-diasporan and other social activists and scholars. It is driven by a profound critique in relation to the process and structural discrimination that emerged out of colonialism and the impact colonialism has until today. Many of the scholars and activists involved in the discourse of, and actions aimed at, decolonisation demand deep changes within postcolonial national, transnational, and international state–society relationships, the transformation of the global capitalist economy, and a revaluing of cultural and collective rights as well as feminisms within the international debates about sustainable development. Postcolonial and decolonial feminist social work relates to those demands; it is a movement from within the social work profession, aiming at critically looking at social work education, research, and practice with the objective to decolonise the system of social work. It includes, for example, concepts linked to critical whiteness,¹ anti-racism, indigenisation, ‘learning to un-learn’ Euro-American logic (imposed over centuries on non-Western cultures) as well as more recently intersecionality.²

The following section explores various phases and moments of cultural–political influences that Euro-American social work has undergone: from its expansion into the Global South following the spread of capitalism during colonialism, to inconsistently playing a dual role of supporting and questioning the ‘helping imperative’, an adhesive professional appendix linked to the profession’s entanglement with the colonial ‘civilisation mission’. Indeed nowadays, most social workers are either engaged in supporting the consolidation of diverse Euro-American welfare regimes or assisting the implementation of so-called poverty reduction programmes³ which are mainly targeting countries and people living in the Global South. Apart from this very broad trend and the natural (re-)internationalisation of social work alongside continued migration in the global era (and the management of social problems and migration, hence managerial social work that has little to do with social change), there are patterns of reflectivity, interrogations, and resistances to the functionalisation and the managerial role of social work. The need to decolonise social work at all levels is slowly being recognised.

However, modernity and Euro-American development discourses still allocate to social work the function of a ‘helping profession’, as Caron and Lee outline in their chapter ‘Towards a decolonial feminist approach to social work education and practice’. Normatively orientated towards holistic human rights standards, the profession practically carries out a ‘repair function’, mainly engaged in individual social problem-solving that seems to be deeply interwoven with the difficulties of disembedded societies and/or so-called failed states, that no longer have sufficient care capacity on their own. Contextualising those standards into the historically and culturally shaped life worlds of marginalised and economically deprived communities (many of those communities that are based in, or have migrated from, the Global South still uphold communal and collective value systems) the Euro-American social work system runs the danger of imposing individual problem-solving approaches linked to ‘selected’ human rights, while structural problems at the macro-level are not addressed. Hence it is not suprising that the common message of articles under this section suggest that postcolonial social work often acts as a ‘civilisation mission’ that is based neither on local demands nor on perceived needs; it might rather be perceived as a continuation of coloniality. Lutz outlines in his chapter ‘Development: A postcolonial approach’ how negotiations and in-depth communication should be a central essence of Development, enabling the human being to achieve a harmonic compliance between its subjective or collective life and the external pressures and tensions of the natural, social, spatial, and technical environments.

Chapters in this book further provide narratives and describe realities from South Africa to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, from Brazil to Cambodia, from Germany to Nepal, outlining the structural imposition and restrictions for social workers that do not seek to actively recognise the contradictory role enlightenment, which paved the way towards the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has played during the darkest side of colonialism and oppression. G.W.F. Hegel, a well-known enlightenment thinker, for example, expresses the ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘savagery’ of people of any age in the colonies through his dictum of Africa as a ‘children’s land’. Liebel in his chapter ‘Colonialism and the colonisation of childhoods in the light of postcolonial theory’ reveals educational colonialism through the guise of ‘freeing’ the colonised from tyranny and spiritual darkness: ‘The equating of the colonized with children provided an opportunity to gloss over this fact (paternalistic actions of the colonial enterprise) and was even seen as a moral duty and “the white man’s burden”’ (Rudyard Kipling). In his chapter ‘The relevance of Antonio Gramsci and Paolo Freire for a postcolonial education politics’ Mayo further analyses the hegemonial role of language and religion and the recurrence of the conquistador mentality, fear of freedom, ‘divide and rule’ and the internalisation of the oppressor’s image.

Alongside the normative devaluation of many indigenous people’s life experiences and societies, came physical and psychological violence that resulted in collective trauma. Masson and Harms Smith, in their chapter ‘Colonisation as collective trauma: fundamental perspectives for social work’, describe different types of trauma, that need to be known and understood within the social work system, as they are fundamental to any process of decolonisation. They continue underlining that culturally specific responses to trauma need to be tailored to take into account the respective spiritual and cultural world views of communities. Briskman provides in-depth views of the Australian offshore detention system in her chapter ‘Social work co-option and colonial borders’, reminding us that the question of neocolonialism remains largely unexplored. She calls for social work to embrace a global agenda, however, with the fight against colonialism at its core, as this is the root of many problems past and present with which social work has to deal – racism, indigenous rights, asylum seeker interdiction, and containment.

Finally there is hope. Spivac (2002) and other postcolonial writers see potential for social transformation in the Global South if the strategy for transformation is based on a revolutionary theory that builds on the learning of contemporary political struggles rather than on Western consensual conceptions:

The post-colonial academy must learn to use the Enlightenment from below; strictly speaking, abuse it. If there is one academic lesson to learn from the revolutionary political experiment in South Africa, it is this one.

Notes

1Critical Whiteness refers to the social construction of ‘whiteness’ as an ideology tied to social status. Pioneers in the field include W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. 2Wallaschek (2015) describes a close relationship between postcolonial and intersectional theory. 3Poverty reducation programmes emerged as a response to the so-called ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPs) that consisted of loans provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) to countries in economic crises mainly based in the Global South. As part of SAPs, indebted countries of the Global South were forced to implement certain policies in order to obtain new loans (or to lower the interest rates on existing ones). SAPs and their conditionality, in particular the privatisation of basic central state services (that was part of conditionality included into WB and IMF policies, resulted in an increase in poverty to the point of humanitarian crises (Shah, 2013).

References

Shah, A. (2013). Structural Adjustment – A Major Cause of Poverty. IN: Global Issues – Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues that Affect Us All. Available from www.globalissues.org/article/3/structural-adjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty (12.02.2019)

Spivac, G.C. (2002). Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality. In Vincent, J. (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critique. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 458–459.

Wallaschek, S. (2015). In Dialogue: Postcolonial Theory and Intersectionality. Momentum Quarterly, Zeitschrift für Sozialen Fortschritt, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 218–232.

1

Colonisation as collective trauma

Fundamental perspectives for social work

Francine Masson and Linda Harms Smith

Introduction

Understanding the collective trauma that colonisation wrought is fundamental to any liberatory or transformative engagement in such contexts. Fanon (1986) impresses on us that ‘the colonial encounter is unprecedented: the epistemic, cultural, psychic and physical violence of colonialism makes for a unique type of historical trauma’ (Hook, 2012: 17). Violent, traumatic and oppressive foundations laid down through colonialism became further entrenched structurally in various historical and current contexts and in imperialist global relationships of coloniality (Escobar, 2004; Mignolo, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2011). Examples of such historical and current contexts include colonisation of nations, genocides and ethnic cleansing, repressive racist apartheid political systems, displacement of peoples through war, and globally, disastrous consequences of extreme capitalist resource inequality (Moses, 2012; Crook et al., 2018; Dominelli, 2018). However, it is not only these structural consequences of colonialism that are of concern, but the ongoing intra-psychic and social impact in the context of the postcolonial (Fanon, 1986; Mkhize, 2004).

Western conceptualisations of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder are increasingly recognised as unhelpful, acknowledged to be limited and in keeping with Eurocentric hegemony (Bracken, 2002; Edwards, 2009; Stevens et al., 2013). In order to acknowledge the pervasive and far-reaching effects of trauma, it is important to challenge Eurocentric, ‘micro’ or individualist narratives of trauma and incorporate structural perspectives which challenge coloniality. Such a broader understanding of trauma may be found in conceptualisations of collective trauma, regarded as a unique form of traumatisation experienced by groups of people or even an entire society (Volkan, 2001; Somasundaram, 2014) and deemed to be transmitted intergenerationally. The traumatic past of previously colonised societies and contexts of ongoing coloniality cannot be understood without exploring such concepts of collective and transgenerational trauma.

This chapter begins by exploring the ongoing coloniality and understandings of the traumatic psycho-social impacts of colonialism. In the postcolonial context the psycho-political consequences and ideologies are still inextricably intertwined and framed by events of the past. It then goes on to explore conceptualisations of collective trauma and how this differs from traditional understandings of trauma. Trauma develops at the level of collectivity when a social crisis becomes a cultural or societal crisis and the collectivity’s sense of its own identity is compromised or altered (Alexander, 2004; Hirschberger, 2018). The intergenerational transmission of collective trauma is then explained, as well as how the subsequent meaning of events can alter from one generation to the next. Social work as an instrument of coloniality is then examined, describing how it was used to domesticate and reinforce the existing status quo, exerting social control and supporting belief systems of domination and discrimination. The chapter concludes by framing what the appropriate social work response should be to decoloniality in a traumatogenic society.

Ongoing coloniality

It is argued that colonialism ended when European powers retreated from their geographical colonial territories and handed back political power. However, it is an error to confine the colonial project to specific geographical areas or historical eras or even to deny its ongoing operation in Africa and the world (Bulhan, 2015). Beyond the decimation of populations and expropriation of land and resources, colonialism also entrenched Eurocentrism and Western knowledges through denigration, subjugation, and the forceful destruction of people’s histories, traditional ways, and culture (Patel, 2005; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). The internalisation of oppression and inferiorisation (Fanon, 1967; Césaire, 2000[1955]; Mkhize, 2004) resulting from these dynamics continues to have an impact in the postcolonial context and these structures of coloniality remain after the end of the era of colonisation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). It is important, therefore, that the difference between the historical period of colonisation and the later relationships and structures of coloniality, is understood.

New global forces of coloniality further exacerbate the impact of colonialism. Global power is exercised through imperialist plundering and neoliberal ideologies ‘through the system of closed frontiers and open markets’ (Terreblanche, 2012: 29). In the case of South Africa, the liberation struggle to end apartheid became an ‘elite transition’ to neoliberal capitalism (Bond, 2006) when the post-apartheid state adopted neoliberal economic policies dictated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This dramatically impacted on the proposed Redistribution and Development Programme (RDP), shifting priorities and resulting in deepening poverty and the highest levels of inequality in the world (Bond, 2006; Sewpaul, 2006). Neoliberal global capitalism therefore compounds the damage wrought by colonialism and apartheid, resulting in even ‘worsening class division and social segregation’ (Bond, 2006: 17) in a society still racially stratified. In 2015, 64 per cent of Black people and only 1 per cent of white people were found to be living under the absolute poverty line (Stats South Africa, 2017).

New forms of coloniality depend on neoliberal and often racist ideologies that blame the poor, and instead of acknowledging the social and economic consequen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Setting the scene for critical new social work approaches in the neoliberal postcolonial era
• Part I Postcolonial social work: Perspectives and approaches
• Part II Postcolonial social work and social movements
• Part III Indigenisation
• Part IV Case studies and innovation from Africa
• Index