Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession

Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa

Dip Kapoor

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783609444
• eBook ISBN: 9781783609451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Under the guise of 'development', a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life.

In this provocative new collection, engaged scholars and activists combine grounded case studies with both Marxist and anti-colonial analyses, suggesting that the developmental project is a continuation of the colonial project. The authors then demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession in the rural belt, thereby contributing essential movement-relevant knowledge on these experiences in the Global South.

A vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of resistance, this book addresses academics and analysts who have either minimized or overlooked local resistances to colonial capital, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions.

1 | LOCAL RESISTANCE TO COLONIZATION AND RURAL DISPOSSESSION IN SOUTH AND EAST ASIA, THE PACIFIC, AND AFRICA

Dip Kapoor

Contemporary contestation and resistance by indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, small or landless peasants, pastoralists, fishers, marginal castes and ethnicities, and precariously positioned farm labor addressing colonial capitalist development displacement and dispossession in parts of the Asia-Pacific and Africa, however politically (un)spectacular, is common but seldom acknowledged. This perpetuates the untenable notion, both politically and theoretically, of an uncontested compliance or resignation, or a willing acceptance of loss of territory and customary land, if not a sense of place, history, and sociocultural presence.

Euro-American experiences of development and progress realized through liberal conceptions of land as private property characteristic of capitalist social relations and modes of production are, in the alleged absence of contestation equated with this relative silence, positively affirmed and subsequently prescribed as the universally applicable political-economic destination. The role of the repeated violence (including genocidal) of multiple dispossessions and forced (or bribed and manipulated) occupations and political-economic restructuring continually enforcing five centuries of Western colonial capitalism is obscured in such a politics, which normalizes colonization as a necessary social force of constant and (un)civil compulsion in matters pertaining to the lives of the colonial-dispossessed, while denying any explicit recognition of resistance and contestation to such violence by those being dispossessed.

These Euro-colonial political and theoretical projects have always been resisted and challenged on material grounds by the ‘wretched of the earth’ (Fanon 1963), or those being compelled, manipulated, or invited to commit social and political-economic suicide in the face of a supposed inevitability regarding their necessary demise. Anti-colonial resistance has taken on various forms in different regions and scales over the course of five centuries of Western colonialism, including: (1) the defense of, and by, pre-existing states of their polities against Western expansion; (2) popular and often violent nativist uprisings and reactions to Western interference and imposition of institutions and customs via militant or missionary Christianity; (3) slave revolts (e.g. African and Creole) against plantation owners and masters; (4) issue-specific ameliorative uprisings exposing a colonial injustice in the interests of reform/concessions; and (5) organized movements and violence against colonial regimes for national independence (Benjamin and Hidalgo 2007: 59).

Engaged academics, activists, and journalists in Against Colonization and Dispossession: Local Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa attempt to register contemporary and predominantly organized and open democratic rural resistances, struggles, or movements addressing: primitive accumulation (Marx 1867/1990); ongoing accumulation by dispossession (ABD) (Harvey 2003);1 and the exploitation of ‘unfree’ labor (landless and marginal peasants/exploited farm wage labor and fishers) (Brass 2011) as continued colonial theft integral to a coloniality of power exercised through the development project and a globalizing capitalism (Fanon 1963; Nkrumah 1965/1971; Quijano 2000; Rodney 1982) in the Euro-colonial political geographies of South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.

Colonialism is understood as material and ideological racialized dispossession, domination, and exploitation that persists beyond the national achievement of official independence of the so-called Third World or the Darker Nations (Prashad 2008) in the twentieth century, to include continuing and new forms of neocolonialism (Nkrumah 1965/1971) on an international or global scale, contrary to the suggestion of postcolonial ruptures in the post-national independence period. Speaking to the situations of the indigenous, Huanani-Kay Trask (1993/1999: 102–103, emphasis added) expresses this as follows:

I have defined neocolonialism as the experience of oppression at a stage that is nominally identified as independent or autonomous. I use nominally to underscore the reality that independence from colonial power is legal but not economic [e.g. continued Anglo-American legal and land tenure systems in places as diverse as the Philippines, Fiji and parts of Africa]. . . . it is the ideological position that all is well; in other words, that decolonization has occurred. Therefore, problems and conflicts are post-colonial and the fault of the allegedly independent peoples. Nothing could be more inaccurate.

. . . we are surrounded by other, more powerful nations that desperately want our lands and resources and for whom we pose an irritating problem. This is just as true for the Indians of the Americas as it is for the tribal people of India and the aborigines of the Pacific. This economic reality is also a political reality for most if not all indigenous peoples. The relationship between ourselves and those who want to control us and our resources is not a formerly colonial relationship but an ongoing colonial relationship.

This process includes ongoing internal colonial relations (Casanova 1965) of domination (the source of such structural control is primarily from within national containers) between state-corporate actors, the comprador bourgeois classes and racialized social groups, and classes within states and regions, reproducing historical inequalities and projects of subjugation through development or market violence, land theft, exploitation, and cultural invasion (Benjamin and Hidalgo 2007; Fanon 1963; Guha 1983/1999, 1990).

It is therefore generally understood, if not explicitly acknowledged across the contributions in this collection, that the current expression of this process as land grabbing and ABD is neither novel nor a break from the historical colonial capitalist project in these regions. ABD is continually reproduced as racialized colonial dispossession through an unrelenting project of developmentalism. That is:

much like our understandings of European conquest in the Americas, contemporary land grabbing is not simply an economic project. We would do well to remember that the myth of empty lands is a racial metaphor marking the racialized dispossession and genocide of the region’s first inhabitants by European powers. . . . understanding land grabbing as a critique of development demands recognition of the spatial and temporal continuities of grabbing as a historical geography of race. (Mollett 2015: 427)

This observation is in keeping with and is variously utilized by several contributors to this collection in relation to specific histories and political-geographical contexts, and in terms of what the Black Radical Tradition (Hudson 2016) in the Caribbean and the United States (African diasporic contributions) has found noteworthy, which is that ‘[c]apitalism and racism, did not break from the old order (slavery, feudalism) but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide’ (Kelley 2000: xxiii; Robinson 2000). Racial inferiority is concretized through the interlocking processes of racially targeted land theft and exploitation of colored labor,2 as evidenced by the mercantile capitalist forced Atlantic slave labor migration of some 30 million Africans (only 11 million survived the journey) to the New World, including Jamaica and the British West Indies, described by the then British Secretary of State as ‘a traffic so beneficial to the nation’ (Delgado Wise and Veltmeyer 2016: 56).

Local rural resistance to colonization and dispossession

The revolt against colonial capitalism and imperialism has much to learn from the struggles and movements of communal peasant societies in rural geographies (Patel 2006) as it does from indigenous/land-based sovereignties that continue to be at the front line of dispossession, along with ongoing forms of ABD in peri/urban (rural extensions) locations and destinations in the ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006) and the struggles of variously racialized urban poor migrant workers (Choudry and Hlatshwayo 2016).

GRAIN (www.grain.org) and Food First (www.foodfirst.org) continue to support and document land, water, and green grabs, and the resistance by indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, farm workers, and migrant labor, and the implications for food and hunger (see The Great Food Robbery) and the politics of Food Sovereignty. War on Want, meanwhile, has documented and politicized (see The Hunger Games) the questionable ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the editor
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• 1 | Local resistance to colonization and rural dispossession in South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa
• 2 | Waponahki anti-colonial resistance in North American colonial contexts: some preliminary notes on the coloniality of meta-dispossession
• Part I. South and East Asia and the Pacific region
• 3 | Sovereignty politics in Samoa: fa’asamoa, fa’amatai, and resistance to colonial capital and dispossession of customary land and place
• 4 | Adivasi, Dalit, and non-tribal forest dweller (ADNTFD) resistance to bauxite mining in Niyamgiri: displacing capital and state-corporate mining activism in India
• 5 | Our crops speak: small and landless peasant resistance to agro-extractive dispossession in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
• 6 | Dispossession and neoliberal disaster reconstruction: activist NGO and fisher resistance in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu
• 7 | Lumad anti-mining activism in the Philippines
• 8 | Coal power and the Sundarbans in Bangladesh: subaltern resistance and convergent crises
• Part II: African region
• 9 | Resisting accumulation by dispossession: organization and mobilization by the rural poor in contemporary South Africa
• 10 | Food sovereignty through ecofeminism: re-commoning as resistance to agribusiness dispossession in Kenya
• 11 | Guided by the Yomo spirit: resistance to accumulation by dispossession of the Songor salt lagoon in Ada, Ghana
• 12 | Contesting dispossession: land rights activism in Gambella, Ethiopia, and Pujehun, Sierra Leone
• 13 | Local resistance to large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia
• 14 | All that glitters: neoliberal violence, small-scale mining, and gold extraction in northern Tanzania
• 15 | ‘Oloibirinization’, collective identity, and the future of multilocal resistance in the Niger Delta
• Index