POST COLO NIAL BODI ES
POSTCOLONIAL: describing individuals, cultures, or concepts that were once colonized and continue to be affected by their colonial histories and structures of colonial oppression
embodiment: how culture becomes part of everyday movements and actions; when culture becomes a uniform or an identification badge
orientalism: Western construction of Eastern culture as only existing as part of a western narrative. often dependent on historical colonial trade relationships e.g.—India and the Middle East are Britain’s orient China and Japan are the US’s
cultural appropriation: See: Coachella When India was liberated from its colonial rulers, freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi advocated for the national structure to reflect swaraj (or home rule). Urging the writers of the constitution to codify Hindu medicine (Ayurveda) as the official medical system as one form of swaraj, Gandhi denounced Western biomedicine as another instrument of the colonizer. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru anchored India’s quest for progress through innovations in technology and emphasis on scientific research using western methods. Gandhi’s views are used today by the right-wing BJP political party to denigrate non-Hindu principles, especially in terms of racist and discriminatory policies that promote anti-Islamic violence.
Social death occurs when the individual body is treated as already dead as it ceases to have social function. This can happen as a result of illness, disability, old age, or systematic social oppression where the body no longer has economic value. Social death is the death before the biological death of the body. In the framework of necropolitics, a body is taken from the individual and used as a tool. Qatar, the site of the 2022 FIFA World Cup has had over one death per day of migrant workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh during the construction of its stadium, totaling at least 1,200 by mid 2015. These workers are disposable and stateless.
Biopolitics and biopower come from the right of the state to make policy that impact the individual body and how the state influences the individual’s bioframeworks.
“Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times "fantastical" differences about the two races -- for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people's blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true.”
biopower is often most visible in examples of structural violence, such as the study above. This leads to negative policy impacting those who are socially marginal (including and especially women, POC, LGBTQIA folk).
Necropolitics is the state’s right to decide who lives and who dies—which life is valuable and worth living. This value is derived from race and class.
SOCIAL DEATH IS A MAJOR METHOD OF CONTROL The postcolonial body is denied statehood and still subject to its colonial aggressors’ conceptions of its body as less than human. The body is subject to terror, death, and violence. Necropolitics is distinct from biopolitics as biolpolitics covers how the state monitors the body whereas necropolitics governs how the body can be taken from life and used economically. There are differences between Flint and Tuskegee, of course. Tuskegee was a deliberately, even cynically, planned trial involving a moderate number of adult African-American men, who were purposely left untreated to suffer the progression of their disease, while falsely told that they were being helped. It was a cruel medical study directed by government public health doctors who violated their professional medical ethics. Flint is the consequence of depraved indifference and layer upon layer of smug, incompetent denial by the state government – more like a slow-moving, long-lasting Tuskegee, with an impact orders of magnitude greater in terms of the numbers of people affected: tens of thousands of particularly vulnerable children and tens of thousands more adolescents and adults. However, just beneath the surface of these two events is the similarity. All of the men in Tuskegee were African-American, and so were the majority of those exposed to toxic water in Flint. In both events, a particularly despicable form of racism is manifested: a contemptuous disregard for the health of people of color, especially if they are poor and can be dismissed as politically and economically irrelevant.
As Venus turned around on the stage, Londoners marveled over her ample bottom and wondered about the size of other parts hidden from view. For a little extra, you could poke her with your fingers or a stick, notes […]Instead, her silent displays — complete with animal skins, face paint, and a tight body stocking — fueled European myths about people from Africa: They were primitive. Close to nature. Exotic. Hypersexual. For the five and a half years Baartman lived in Europe, from 1810 to 1815, aristocrats ogled her, cartoonists lampooned her, a famous scientist studied and, when she died, dissected her. Since her death, the Hottentot Venus has appeared in the writings of William Makepeace Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, even Barack Obama's inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander. These days, activists and academics claim her as a symbol of Western exploitation and racism.
Coretta Scott King I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.
If Flint happened in Ann Arbor, would we have cared sooner? -Leana Wen, MD, MSc, FAAEM, Health Commissioner, Baltimore City
POST POST COLO COLO NIAL NIAL BODI BODI ES ES
references Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau. Frith, Susan. Searching for Sara Baartman, In Johns Hopkins Magazine. Jun 2009 Vol. 61 No. 3. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality vol. 1 Panetheon books. Geiger, H. Jack. 2016. “The Flint Disaster: Why doesn’t black health matter?” Physicians for Human Rights blog. February 3, 2016. Glazer, Ilana and Abbi Jacobson. Broad City Season 3, Episode 4. March 9, 2016. Lamar, Kendrick. 2015. Blacker the Berry. “To Pimp a Butterfly” Mbembe, A. 2008. Necropolitics. In Foucault in an Age of Terror (pp. 152-182). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Somashekhar, Sandhya. 2016. “The disturbing reason some African American patients may be undertreated for pain.” The Washington Post. April 4, 2016. Sotomayor, Sonia. 2016. Utah v. STRIEFF, No. 14-1373 (U.S. June 20, 2016). Transia Design via Shutterstock “Tribal native American set of symbols” Retrieved June 2016.
*photograph of projected image of Kali on Empire State Building by unknown photographer
There is something you do that I see a lot of white people do. And it's kind of like cultural appropriation.
It's almost like you're stealing the identity from people who fought hard for against colonial structures. So, in a way, it's almost like you are the colonist.