Zed Books Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Against Colonization and Rural DispossessionLocal Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and AfricaBy Dip KapoorZed Books LtdCopyright © 2017 Zed BooksAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-944-4ContentsAbout the contributors, 1 Local resistance to colonization and rural dispossession in South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa Dip Kapoor, 2 Waponahki anti-colonial resistance in North American colonial contexts: some preliminary notes on the coloniality of meta-dispossession Rebecca Sockbeson, 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 Naomi Gordon, 4 Adivasi, Dalit, and non-tribal forest dweller (ADNTFD) resistance to bauxite mining in Niyamgiri: displacing capital and state-corporate mining activism in India Dip Kapoor, 5 Our crops speak: small and landless peasant resistance to agro-extractive dispossession in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia Hasriadi Masalam, 6 Dispossession and neoliberal disaster reconstruction: activist NGO and fisher resistance in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu Raja Swamy and Prema Revathi, 7 Lumad anti-mining activism in the Philippines Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, 8 Coal power and the Sundarbans in Bangladesh: subaltern resistance and convergent crises Sourayan Mookerjea and Manoj Misra, PART II: AFRICAN REGION, 9 Resisting accumulation by dispossession: organization and mobilization by the rural poor in contemporary South Africa Lalitha Naidoo, Gilton Klerck, and Kirk Helliker, 10 Food sovereignty through ecofeminism: re-commoning as resistance to agribusiness dispossession in Kenya Leigh Brownhill, Wahu Kaara, and Terisa Turner, 11 Guided by the Yomo spirit: resistance to accumulation by dispossession of the Songor salt lagoon in Ada, Ghana Jonathan Langdon and Kofi Larweh, 12 Contesting dispossession: land rights activism in Gambella, Ethiopia, and Pujehun, Sierra Leone Rachel Ibreck, 13 Local resistance to large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia Tsegaye Moreda, 14 All that glitters: neoliberal violence, small-scale mining, and gold extraction in northern Tanzania Zahra Moloo, 15 'Oloibirinization', collective identity, and the future of multilocal resistance in the Niger Delta Temitope B. Oriola, Index, CHAPTER 1LOCAL RESISTANCE TO COLONIZATION AND RURAL DISPOSSESSION IN SOUTH AND EAST ASIA, THE PACIFIC, AND AFRICADip KapoorContemporary 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 deny