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The practice of music diversity is colonialized. Its model is impotent to disrupt the Western canon. On the contrary, the practice has opened the door to sonic materialization and trafficking that has become indicative of the encounter between classical music and other music traditions in higher education. The Global South has become the mining area, while Western institutions “explore” indigenous music to repair the status quo. The thesis of this article is that the current Western curricular approach to music diversity is a reincarnation of the Western hegemony. I adapted a decolonial lens to examine the premises of diversity practice, questioning its model and unmasking its logic. I will interrogate the unbalanced relationship or what Quijano and Mignolo call the “matrix of power.” In doing so, I introduced a conceptual tool - canonity, which is defined and examined alongside the concept of diversity. I argue that diversity represents the other side of canonity, just as coloniality and modernity/rationality are two sides of the same coin. This coinage suggests that musical canonity/diversity is indicative and constitutive of coloniality/modernity. Thus, the article calls for the decanonisation of the epistemic center, delinking from the trajectory of modernity/rationality and shifting the geography of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, written by members and friends of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Palestine solidarity group founded at Columbia in November 2023—brings forth an analysis of our movement. We begin by describing the steps that led to CUAD's formation, and then its historical continuity with Columbia's legacy of student activism. We discuss our approach to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the research that informs our demands, and two of our methods for accomplishing them: an encampment and building occupation. By contextualizing ourselves in Columbia's student protest history, we hope to explain the lessons we have learned about the content and form of struggle. By explaining our demands, we hope to focus attention to our points of unity, often overlooked or misunderstood, even by our supporters. Finally, by describing our own experience of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and Hind's Hall occupation, we hope to situate the protests for which most readers know us in our own political, strategic, and practical framework. We analyze our movement through the principal lens of anti-imperialism, while situating ourselves in the context of the US imperialist core, from which we remain auxiliary to the liberation movement in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the cancellation of a public lecture by Palestinian scholar, Walaa Alqaisiya, during a curatorial program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in May 2022 due to false accusations of antisemitism in the context of anti-Palestinian racism in Austria. We speak of an 'architecture' because we analyze the questions of power, (in)visibility and erasure from the point of view of the public and institutional spaces, asking who can speak, about what and for whom, when? As a collective of former participants, we write from an implicated positionality that we call 'participatory witnesses:' the program ceased to be an abstract exploration of decolonial and queer/feminist perspectives, and transformed us affectively and politically, forcing us to critically respond to the censorship. We start by summarizing the unfolding of events and introducing the figure of the participatory witness and the concept of architecture. Then, we turn to Austrian academia's climate of censorship of Palestinian perspectives. From this context, we analyze Alqaisiya's cancellation through the prism of Euromodern Orientalist tropes, disciplinary strategies and civilizational discourses employed to continue the marginalization and exclusion of Palestinian perspectives. We pay particular attention to the significance of silencing queer Palestinian voices in the context of Israeli pinkwashing. Finally, we mnemonically map our attempts at navigating the architecture, negotiating between reclaiming public visibility for queer Palestinian perspectives and collective acts of refusal and delinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Our article argues that the role of translingual instruction in mathematics classrooms is under-recognised in South Africa, as policymakers, teacher educators, teachers, learners, and parents assume that mathematics is just about numbers and calculations and not language. This is despite findings on the value of using children’s familiar language resources in MacDonald (1991), code-switching for meaning-making in mathematics and science learning by Setati et al. (2002) and Probyn (2015), and the findings by Mbude (2019) on using isiXhosa for boosting mathematical and science skills. Objectives: The main aim of our article is to examine the role of the Languaging-for-Learning (L4L) project in fostering ‘supportive teacher dispositions’ to translanguaging and bilingual and multilingual education. We will accomplish this aim through description and analysis of one Grade 8 and Grade 9 mathematics teacher and her learners who participated in the project. Method: The study is a qualitative and interpretive linguistic ethnographic case study of a Grade 8 and Grade 9 mathematics teacher. The researchers used ethnographic methods to collect data and primarily draw on data transcribed from one of the video recordings of a lesson, fieldnotes of their classroom observations and still photographs from their classroom visits and L4L workshops. They used discourse analysis to interpret the data. Results: The research findings point to the critical role that fostering supportive teacher dispositions to translanguaging can play in teacher development and in supporting learners’ engagement and learning in multilingual mathematics classrooms. Contribution: Our contribution to the field has been in demonstrating pluriversality in mathematics classrooms, showing how translanguaging enhances meaning-making and participation and helps to give voice to learners. Conclusion: Having multilingual resources, collaboratively building knowledge and resources and team teaching with teachers played a role in supporting the teacher’s development in pedagogical translanguaging.

The China–Africa relationship has received increased interest over the past few decades as scholars critically examine the challenge that China, in its quest for a closer strategic partnership with Africa, poses to the norms governing the neoliberal world order (NLWO). One crucial aspect of this is international aid, and how Chinese aid to Africa differs from Western aid. This paper argues that Chinese aid reduces the power of traditional aid donors to shape the development route of African countries. This new development finance ultimately breaks the monopoly of Western aid to decide how poor countries in the global 'South' develop. In doing so, the Sino–African aid relationship is challenging the current world order as it offers African states the possibility to decouple (or delink) themselves from the global economy. By challenging assumed neoliberal economic development fundamentals, this relationship, if harnessed correctly by African leaders, can pose longer-term ideological questions around the very set of ideas that underpin development itself, while enabling African states the policy space needed to pursue more sustainable development from an Afro-centric perspective. It is this possibility to delink, due to changing ideological fundamentals concerning economic development, that is the challenge China and Africa pose to the NLWO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ana Castillo's So Far from God draws attention to the effects of global toxicity on female bodies as the characters of the novel fall victim to various forms of social, economic, and environmental injustice such as war, AIDS, cancer, and rape. This essay engages theories on decoloniality to illustrate how Castillo textualizes spiritual practices and alternative forms of knowledge to weave an epistemically disobedient narrative. By constructing Chicana figures who embody hybrid, subversive spiritualities enabled by the syncretic space of the US-Mexico border, Castillo offers avenues for liberation from colonial and patriarchal ideologies that are textualized as physical, sexual, and spiritual transformations. Notably, the characters who refuse to see the colonial difference are consumed by the colonial matrix of power, eventually falling victim to war and industrial toxicity. By weaving spirituality, curanderismo, and the supernatural into the lived experiences of the female characters in So Far , Castillo constructs Chicana subjectivities that enact body politics of knowledge and decolonial forms of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the answers that Samir Amin, a well-known theorist of the Third World, gave to three questions: why, how and by whom the global capitalist system must be changed. Among other topics, the article outlines Amin's theory of unequal development, the generalized monopolies, the five privileges of the global centre, Eurocentrism, "delinking," "long transition," progressive nationalism, and the global class structure. Amin's participation in the fight for the emancipation of developing countries and of all of the world's oppressed social classes will also be addressed, as will his last call for a global alliance of workers and the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current era of financial hegemony is characterized by a dense financial actor concentration, an exacerbated reliance of many South countries on private credit and an internalized compliance of South states to financial market interests and priorities. This structural power of finance enacts itself through disciplinary mechanisms, such as credit ratings and economic surveillance, compelling many South states to respond to creditor interests at the expense of peoples' needs. As a human rights paradigm, the Declaration on the Right to Development has the active potential to redress the structural power of finance and the distortion of the role of the state through upholding the creation of an enabling international environment for equitable and rights-based development on two levels of change. First, structural policy reforms in critical areas of debt, fiscal policy, tax, trade, capital flows and credit rating agencies. Second, systemic transformation through delinking as articulated by dependency theorist Samir Amin, which entails a reorientation of national development strategies away from the imperatives of globalization to that of economic, social, and ecological priorities and interests of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peasant women in Cajamarca, Peru, who were sterilized by the Peruvian government in the 1990s, narrate their experiences of reproductive abuse using Andean medical principles of debilidad and fuerza (debility and strength) (Tapias 2006). In their narratives, many describe a generalized sense of loss of strength resulting from the procedure. This contrasts with the reproductive rights framework's emphasis on infertility as the main harm. In this article, I ponder the dissonance between these two frameworks and propose the concept of debilitated lifeworlds as decolonial feminist delinking (Mignolo 2007) from human fertility‐centric narratives. This concept is methodologically significant as a decolonial attunement to local motifs to talk about abuse and for weaving a constellation of embodied, emotional, social, and family harms. This article contributes to the emerging field of "decolonial reproductive studies" (Smietana et al. 2018: 117). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important, contemporary focus of scholarship is on the necessary structural conditions to promote a sustainable transition in agriculture. This study examines the possible role of anti-systemic structures, delinked and exilic, in conditioning transitions to agroecological production. I conduct a comparative-historical analysis of two periods, 1959–1991 and 1992–2016, within a single case, Cuba. The results provide evidence that the prevalence of delinking with incorporation maintains an industrial model of agricultural production, even while bringing the law of value under sovereign control. In this way, the existence of delinking as one type of anti-systemic structure is not a sufficient condition for increasing agroecological production; although data suggests that delinking can provide important tools to support sustainable transitions in future periods. In the second period characterized by increasing prevalence of an exilic structure in conjunction with delinking, results demonstrate that anti-systemic structures operate complementary to one another and can maintain partial incorporation while increasing the application of agroecological production. As such, this study provides a rationale for future research and action on anti-systemic structural mixture conditioning sustainable transitions.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to critically read the multiliteracies proposal through a decolonial lens. It has two fundamental aspects: one, of an epistemic nature, refers to the need to de-link the concept from a particular hegemonic scholarship so that local knowledge production may prevent literacy practices from universalisms and methodologization; the other, of a technological nature, refers to the need to de-link the concept of multiliteracies from its apparent subjection to the digital.

In the last decade, the terms 'decolonial' and 'decoloniality' have been deployed in an expansive manner and have gained increasing traction across many theoretical and political domains. Therefore, a critical assessment of the specific decolonial vocabulary is both timely and necessary. The relationship between the decolonial and the postcolonial especially requires more critical scrutiny than it has received so far. This special issue takes a step in this direction by staging critical dialogues between postcolonial and decolonial approaches on different terrains. While decolonial theory tends to operate as an expansive and centripetal force, pulling within its orbit a variety of other theoretical and political formation, our focus is on the original formulation of 'decoloniality' – or the 'decolonial option' – within the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) group. In this introduction, we outline some of the main objections that decolonial critics have formulated against postcolonial theory, and we argue that these critiques have been instrumental in defining the decolonial option itself. While advocates of decoloniality have been very vocal in their critiques of postcolonial theory, we note among postcolonial critics – with some exceptions – a predominant tendency either not to respond to these charges or to downplay them in favour of reconciliatory moves. As an alternative to this tendency, we stress the value of a postcolonial critical response to the decolonial intervention. We argue that postcolonial theories still have something to offer to a critique of the present and the past. In the face of the decolonial claim to have radicalized or surpassed postcolonial theory, we suggest that the postcolonial must speak back and reclaim the value of its critical apparatus in the context of the unfinished struggle for decolonizing knowledge and the social unconscious of postcoloniality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article stages a confrontation between postcolonial theory and the decolonial option on the terrain of their respective engagements with Marxism. While prominent decolonial critics accuse postcolonial theory of relying too much on 'Eurocentric' theories, including Western Marxism, the article argues that this critique ignores what has been in fact a long-standing debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics. Thus, the article questions this decolonial characterization and locates postcolonial theory itself in the crossfire of Marxist and decolonial critiques. First, it outlines the main objections that Marxist critics have formulated against postcolonial theory. Next, it discusses the decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory with an emphasis on the role played by Marxism in this confrontation. Finally, it proposes a 'relinking' between postcolonial theory and Marxism, understood not as a closure of the debate between these two theoretical formations but rather as an effort to hold that debate open. The article identifies the space of this open debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics as a vantage point from which to articulate a critical response to the decolonial intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global pandemic accelerates economic problems, divisions over global capitalism have sharpened. This includes those who want to delink the US/China relationship, those who wish to recalibrate but maintain the transnational system, and China's own more assertive strategy as its economic power increases. These debates affect national and world politics as antagonism grows, even as capital continues to pour into China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important, contemporary focus of scholarship is on the necessary structural conditions to promote a sustainable transition in agriculture. This study examines the possible role of anti-systemic structures, delinked and exilic, in conditioning transitions to agroecological production. I conduct a comparative-historical analysis of two periods, 1959-1991 and 1992-2016, within a single case, Cuba. The results provide evidence that the prevalence of delinking with incorporation maintains an industrial model of agricultural production, even while bringing the law of value under sovereign control. In this way, the existence of delinking as one type of anti-systemic structure is not a sufficient condition for increasing agroecological production; although data suggests that delinking can provide important tools to support sustainable transitions in future periods. In the second period characterized by increasing prevalence of an exilic structure in conjunction with delinking, results demonstrate that anti-systemic structures operate complementary to one another and can maintain partial incorporation while increasing the application of agroecological production. As such, this study provides a rationale for future research and action on anti-systemic structural mixture conditioning sustainable transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of Musée Guimet and the transition of museums in the 'countries of origin' of its collections elucidates how white-cube crystallises Western cultural hegemony by erasing the colonial past of the objects and by representing the physical form of modernity. It contributes as well to nullifying the demand of repatriation, which seems to merely raise new power struggles rather than to recover indigenous beliefs (or identities). Through such a muséographie, the deities of the Other are 'elevated' from ethnographic specimen into art in the West while 'diminished' from sacred icons into art or historical artefacts in Asia. Museumification as such constitutes a whitening (Westernisation) heritage process that physically and epistemologically secularises non-Western faiths. Although the temple-simulated design is applied and limited Buddhist practice allowed in certain exhibition milieu or tourism destination, the phenomenon of museum coloniality is to be further studied should cultural diversity be indispensable for better heritage futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of communities successfully governing urban commons could be seen as a strong move towards 'delinking' from homo economicus myth that still remains at the centre of the capitalist economic assumptions. This paper, theoretical in nature, presents an alternative, a preferred scenario of a future 'communal system' as a vision of society built on different values than homo economicus conduct, values that are distinctive for urban commons today, especially in peripheral countries. These are: responsibility, networking, cooperation, caring for others, reciprocity, self-help, continuous learning and sharing. The given three examples of urban commons: Torre David, SE VIOME and Bangkok Noi urban gardens -- that illustrate such system in the present -- share these values and therefore contribute to social change. Although commons are still at the margins of economic considerations, while corporations through the processes of neo-colonisation dominate the centre, a future transformation into a 'communal system' is possible, as posited by the postcolonial theory and the actor-network-theory (ANT) discussed in this article. Vision of an economic system, based on the new communal myth contributes to the emerging field of postcapitalist, post-growth theories arising in the shadow of a climate catastrophe and other upcoming crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement the general idea of sustainable development has been transformed into a policy concept with well-defined goals, indicators for measurement and an implementation process. To reduce environmental impact (e.g. on climate, SDG 13) two basic options are available: efficiency and sufficiency. Eco-efficiency (less environmental impact per unit of GDP) still plays the most important role and has the potential to delink economic growth and environmental impact. Growth could continue (green growth). However, rates of efficiency increase are not (yet) large enough to comply with e.g. climate goals - and efficiency increase is (partly) compensated by rebound effects. Therefore, greater emphasis on the sufficiency option (lower GDP) is necessary, i.e. consumption patterns and lifestyles will have to change; in macro-economic terms: economic growth (in rich countries) will have to end. This has significant consequences for the transformation of economies and societies and for government policies, which have been dominated by growth policy. Nevertheless, given the ambitious environmental (climate) goals and the only small effects of efficiency strategies, strengthening of the sufficiency option is inevitable. Only with policy concepts that integrate the efficiency and sufficiency components is there a chance to fulfill environmental SDGs - which are the foundation for many other SDGs.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the trajectory of critical thinking about the uneven development of the great organic intellectual of the South, Samir Amin, as a teacher for the renewal of critical studies of development.

This paper proposes to critically read the multiliteracies proposal through a decolonial lens. It has two fundamental aspects: one, of an epistemic nature, refers to the need to de-link the concept from a particular hegemonic scholarship so that local knowledge production may prevent literacy practices from universalisms and methodologization; the other, of a technological nature, refers to the need to de-link the concept of multiliteracies from its apparent subjection to the digital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of African Political Economy is the property of Review of Political Economy (ROAPE) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to “discipline” us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, presents a theory of change geared toward borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive pedagogy and scholarship.

Currently, the world system is in a state of complex crisis and transformation. The overall influence of its US-led centre has weakened, and most of the global periphery is in either chaos or misery. The mechanisms of the global accumulation of capital prevent new global leaders from emerging. Until now, China's economic ascent has been based on managed market forces and sovereign monetary policy. However, if the liberalisation of capital flows in China continues, the country's financial independence might be lost. This article explains how the nodal crisis of global capitalism has evolved, how far the marketisation and financial liberalisation of the Chinese economy has gone and the largest obstacles to China further strengthening its influence on the world order. The author concludes that China could play a positive role as a new superpower in constructing a world beyond capitalism, if it does not give up the socialist project, keeps market forces under control, maintains accumulation without dispossession, preserves its financial independence and makes alliances with other nations on the global (semi-)periphery. The latter is particularly important, as the present hegemonic centre will not give up its position peacefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International aid often functions as a neocolonial extension of colonial power structures. Aid to Africa is particularly problematic because of ideologies casting the continent as backward and devoid of agency, which have material consequences for African lives. Afrofuturist imaginings offer a space where these politics of aid can be challenged, as Afrofuturism centers Africa and the African diaspora in our understandings of futurity, and works to undo racist, sexist, and Westerncentric ideologies in the present. In this essay, I analyze the 2018 Afrofuturist film Black Panther for its representations of the politics of aid. Ultimately, I argue that although Black Panther challenges some neocolonial assumptions by staging an African country that is developed in ways that break Western norms, it reproduces and even strengthens other aspects of coloniality by portraying Wakanda as an exceptional African nation, equating economic development with morality, and reinforcing the idea of aid as a universal good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Replacing a neocolonial project of financial control by neoliberal forces, with one that represents genuine economic decolonisation has never been more urgent in South Africa and everywhere. The essence of the critique we offer is that the intellectual roots of a decolonising analysis and strategy can be found not only in the classical anti-colonial/capitalist/imperialist analysis of Marx and Luxemburg, but also in works by Africa’s leading decolonial political economist, Samir Amin, as well as by some of the South African writers who specified race-class-gender-environmental oppressions. The main problem in changing economic policy, though, is the ongoing power of a local agent of economic colonisation, the Treasury (regardless of who happens to be Finance Minister). In one recent exception, however, students demanded an extra R40 billion be added to the annual budget, and their power of protest was sufficient to defeat Treasury neoliberals. In other sectoral struggles, the students’ lessons about broader-based coalitions and national targets, as well as the need for much deeper-reaching and militant critique (in the spirit of Amin) have yet to be learned. Ultimately a much more comprehensive critique of how South Africa was economically recolonised may well be necessary, one based on ideologies that link other intellectual and activist campaigns for economic justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that the undifferentiated selfobject is the key to understanding the formation and treatment of disorders that are characterized by preoccupations with destructive thoughts and actions. The undifferentiated selfobject is a fundamental self-sustaining experience of knowing that there are ongoing and unknown happenings to be discovered throughout life that will be surprising, challenging, and self-sustaining. It is an extension of Heinz Kohut's contributions of selfobjects that are necessary to the development of the self. Commonly accepted knowledge that there have been traumatic events in the early life of disordered patients points to disruptions of the development of the undifferentiated selfobject. These disruptions lead to preoccupations that are considered disorders. A treatment example of an obsessive personality disorder clarifies how understanding the undifferentiated selfobject was critical in delinking the patient from his preoccupation and allowing him to perceive and implement new directions in his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to "discipline" us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, presents a theory of change geared toward borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive pedagogy and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In commemoration of the first anniversary of Samir Amin's passing, I present the following collated review of the three volumes of Amin's memoirs, which were only just completed with the posthumous publication of The Long Revolution in 2019. Amin was, I argue, perhaps the first, and certainly the most prolific, global organic intellectual in history. That is, he wrote as a social act, to try and change the world, not simply understand it, and he did so on the world scale proper to his, and indeed our time. His life and work, therefore, ought to be of interest to scholars working to establish the field of global intellectual history, develop critical analyses of global accumulation, and of course, activists interested in a truly global praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement the general idea of sustainable development has been transformed into a policy concept with well-defined goals, indicators for measurement and an implementation process. To reduce environmental impact (e.g. on climate, SDG 13) two basic options are available: efficiency and sufficiency. Eco-efficiency (less environmental impact per unit of GDP) still plays the most important role and has the potential to delink economic growth and environmental impact. Growth could continue (green growth). However, rates of efficiency increase are not (yet) large enough to comply with e.g. climate goals – and efficiency increase is (partly) compensated by rebound effects. Therefore, greater emphasis on the sufficiency option (lower GDP) is necessary, i.e. consumption patterns and lifestyles will have to change; in macro-economic terms: economic growth (in rich countries) will have to end. This has significant consequences for the transformation of economies and societies and for government policies, which have been dominated by growth policy. Nevertheless, given the ambitious environmental (climate) goals and the only small effects of efficiency strategies, strengthening of the sufficiency option is inevitable. Only with policy concepts that integrate the efficiency and sufficiency components is there a chance to fulfill environmental SDGs – which are the foundation for many other SDGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of indigenous hydraulic systems. There is little explicit mention in this work of a then-dominant strand of heterodox Arab and Third Worldist social science – the emphasis on delinking, or removal from Western commodity, technical and financial flows. Yet through an examination of his work in the context of the delinking paradigm, as put forth by scholars like Samir Amin, Fawzy Mansour and Mohamed Dowidar, I show the use and need for independent agronomic expertise to be deployed within analytical paradigms such as delinking, forged by heterodox political economists. Through delinking, countries could proceed on a path of auto-centered development. The possibility and time frame of delinking is necessarily a socio-technical question linked to indigenous capacities, technical and natural, and the social relations with which they are woven. It is also a question of creating and mobilizing a surplus in the agricultural sector. Through examining Amami's life's work, I show the use and need for interdisciplinary methods and research programs, which must braid the social and natural sciences – if not simply take threads from each to create a holistic knowledge – in order to arrive at appropriate developmental programs. Such knowledge and programs were appropriate in that they offered ways of working agriculture without capital-intense inputs – thus resolving rather than aggravating current account imbalances and labor surpluses. They also relied on a decentralization of planning, based on the skills and knowledges of the direct producers. In analyzing such knowledge, systematized in the work of Amami, I will also show how moving from underdevelopment to development requires a mélange of knowledges. Crucial and neglected are those knowledges which have been developed to inform sustainable ways of living on land-bases, in order to produce the rural surplus which is the sine qua non of a successful move beyond developmental malaise in the Global South. I will then link this to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Synthesis Report, showing this paradigm's continuing relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the on-line multimedia project Archivio delle memorie migranti (AMM) as a virtual storytelling space in which migrants in contemporary Italy exercise agency and resistance despite their disenfranchisement as political subjects. Focusing on the section "Self-Representations," I analyze some of the stories and narratives produced by migrants and refugees as powerful examples of "digital ARTivism" in the sense in which this practice has been enacted by contemporary Chicanx and Latinx cultural producers. Through a digital storytelling mode, AMM aims at facilitating the development of transnational migrants' activist consciousness. Such methodology, I argue, aligns AMM and the Italian border archive with the decolonizing epistemological reorientation that has begun to undo the Western project of coloniality/modernity. As migrant and refugee stories migrate from the entangled structures of the web into the intimacy of our homes, we are are called to reflect on the complexity of national identity and belonging. AMM's stories and self-narrations enable a re-visioning of contemporary Italy as a possibility for transnational citizenship and peaceful co-existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the films Casa de areia (2005) and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), time serves as an avatar of the larger colonial matrix. Though both films explore other expressions of coloniality, such as race, ethnicity, gender, assimilation, and politics, what sets them apart is that their disobedience against colonial forces takes place on a temporal plane. Both protagonists, Áurea and Mauro, find themselves on geographic or social islands, wrestling against the power of time. Áurea’s story highlights many of the scientific issues of time reckoning. Mauro’s involves rejecting the fusion of a political and temporal colonial project during the 1970 World Cup. In crucial instances of disorientation for each character, they "delink" from colonial paradigms of time, revealing that neither coloniality nor time itself is absolute.

In our analysis of Comecon's role in the capitalist world system, we gauge its member nations' joint and individual opportunities to take advantage of global processes of modernization and describe the systemic contradictions that hampered their efforts to integrate themselves into a common market. We examine the developmental history of the Comecon countries through the lens of semiperipheral dependent development, that is, from the perspective that these countries' relative positions in the international division of labor limited their access to advanced technology and external financing. In the course of the economic reforms of the 1960s, authorities in the Comecon countries attempted to reduce their dependence on the world system by means of complementary specialization. Regionally dominant world economic forces, however, both obstructed the evolution of this cooperative system and intensified the economic competition among Comecon's member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the films Casa de areia (2005) and O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (2006), time serves as an avatar of the larger colonial matrix. Though both films explore other expressions of coloniality, such as race, ethnicity, gender, assimilation, and politics, what sets them apart is that their disobedience against colonial forces takes place on a temporal plane. Both protagonists, Áurea and Mauro, find themselves on geographic or social islands, wrestling against the power of time. Áurea's story highlights many of the scientific issues of time reckoning. Mauro's involves rejecting the fusion of a political and temporal colonial project during the 1970 World Cup. In crucial instances of disorientation for each character, they "delink" from colonial paradigms of time, revealing that neither coloniality nor time itself is absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the empirical and theoretical basis of the decoupling between energy throughput and economic growth, with a critical view of the use of the decoupling concept as a policy priority. We provide an analysis of the historical trends of the metabolic pattern of European economies over a period of 18 years focusing on the changes in energy throughput and financial assets. The results show that energy consumption per hour of labor has remained constant, suggesting that no significant changes in production processes or technology have taken place in the productive sectors of the economy. The contribution of this paper is to establish a bridge between the economic analysis of financialization and the societal metabolism analysis of the economic process from a biophysical point of view. We argue that this bridge is crucial to draw attention to the biophysical consequences of financialization (a relative decoupling) and critically assess the pertinence of policies aimed at encouraging the decoupling in the context of increasing inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review article the author reads Nagmusiek - Stephanus Muller's monumental metafictional biography of South African composer Arnold van Wyk - as an extended allegory on the geopolitics of academic writing. She argues that the book articulates, through its unusual physical apparatus, narratological techniques and metafictional hermeneutic deconcealment, a valuable theory-in-praxis of the aporetics of peripheral writing. In so doing, Muller materializes Walter Mignolo's notion of ‘epistemic delinking’ in radically original and risky ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the weakness of discourses around food sovereignty in Southwest Asia and North Africa, and examines some older currents resembling the food sovereignty discourse. The author first historically situates the emergence of food sovereignty. He discusses agro-ecology - the ‘technics’ (or social embeddedness of technology) of food sovereignty - and its national-popular content, before then developing elements of the delinking paradigm. He goes on to discuss Tunisian national-popular and Third Worldist agronomists’ and economists’ efforts to develop technics and frameworks for food sovereignty in the 1970s and 1980s. The article compares the food sovereignty paradigm with auto-centred, self-reliant development proposals, and the proposals of the Tunisian economists and agronomists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the "colonial matrix of power" as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the (racial) Other. Those power relations render certain bodies and spaces as (epistemologically) irrelevant. In order to discuss possible models of struggle against such condition, firstly I have addressed the relation between de-colonial theories and postcolonial studies, arguing that decolonial positions are both historicising and re-politicising the postcolonial theory. In my central argument I have focused on the epistemic delinking and political implications of decolonial turn. With reference to Grada Killomba I have argued for the struggle against epistemic violence through decolonising knowledge. Decolonising knowledge requires delinking form Eurocentric model of knowledge production and radical dismantling the existing hierarchies among different knowledge. It requires recognition of the 'Other epistemologies' and 'Other knowledge' as well as liberation from Western disciplinary and methodological limitations. One of the main goals of decolonial project is deinking from the "colonial matrix of power". However, delinking is not required only in the areas of economy and politics but also in the field of epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Links between emission trading programs are not immutable, as highlighted by New Jersey׳s exit from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in 2011. This raises the question of what to do with existing permits that are banked for future use—choices that have consequences for market behavior in advance of, or upon speculation about, delinking. We consider two delinking policies. One differentiates banked permits by origin, the other treats banked permits the same. We describe the price behavior and relative cost-effectiveness of each policy. Treating permits differently generally leads to higher costs, and may lead to price divergence, even with only speculation about delinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the sociopolitical context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress and salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future, but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]