What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.

Ending slavery and creating empire in Africa: from the "Indelible stain" to the "light of civilization"--Law to practice: "certain excesses of severity"--The critiques and defenses of modern slavery: from without and within, above and below -- Mobility and tactical flight: of workers, chiefs, and villages -- Targeting chiefs: from "fictitious obedience" to "extraordinary political disorder" -- Seniority and subordination: disciplining youth and controlling women's labor -- An "absolute freedom" circumscribed and circumvented: "Employers chosen of their own free will" -- Upward mobility: "improvement of one's social condition" -- Conclusion: forced labor's legacy.

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

Examines how “Indianness” has propagated U.S. conceptions of empire

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions. As Indigenous communities encounter the documentary traces of imperialism while attempting to reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on access to and return of cultural heritage.

This book examines the various ways in which colonialism in Zimbabwe is remembered, looking both at how people analyse, perceive, and interpret the past, and how they rewrite that past, elevating some players and their historical agency. Inspired by the ongoing movement on decoloniality, this book examines the ways in which generations of today question and challenge colonialism’s legacies and their role in Zimbabwe’s collective memories and history. The book analyses the memorialising of both Mugabe and Mnangagwa in their speeches and during the political transition, before going on to trace the continuing impact of colonialism across areas as diverse as dress code, place-naming, agriculture, religion, gender, and in marginalised communities such as the BaKalanga. Drawing on the expertise of Zimbabwean scholars, this book will appeal to researchers of decolonisation, and of African history and memory.

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

This book spans a century in the history of the Blackfoot First Nations of present-day Montana and Alberta. It maps out specific ways in which Blackfoot culture persisted amid the drastic transformations of colonisation, with its concomitant forced assimilation in both Canada and the United States. It portrays the strategies and tactics adopted by the Blackfoot in order to navigate political, cultural and social change during the hard transition from traditional life-ways to life on reserves and reservations. Cultural continuity is the thread that binds the four case studies presented, encompassing Blackfoot sacred beliefs and ritual; dress practices; the transmission of knowledge; and the relationship between oral stories and contemporary fiction. Blackfoot voices emerge forcefully from the extensive array of primary and secondary sources consulted, resulting in an inclusive history wherein Blackfoot and non-Blackfoot scholarship enter into dialogue. Blanca Tovias combines historical research with literary criticism, a strategy that is justified by the interrelationship between Blackfoot history and the stories from their oral tradition. Chapters devoted to examining cultural continuity discuss the ways in which oral stories continue to inspire contemporary Native American fiction. This interdisciplinary study is a celebration of Blackfoot culture and knowledge that seeks to revalourise the past by documenting Blackfoot resistance and persistence across a wide spectrum of cultural practice. The volume is essential reading for all scholars working in the fields of Native American studies, colonial and postcolonial history, ethnology and literature.