ISSUE X : Note from the Guest Editor
The colonial present
By Gabriel Vignoli
Our present appears ruptured, out of joint, and open for the taking. It is open to interpretation. If we look below the surface, below the noise and the violence, we realize that it makes little sense without the colony. The following articles come out of The New School course THE COLONIAL PRESENT. The course takes the colony as the experimental site of modernity and traces the colonial genealogies of the political grammar of the present. Many of the keywords of the present are unthinkable without the colony: our collective geopolitical subconscious. The colony is not simply a historical period as much as the key, the methodology, to rethink the present. This methodology is premised on two questions.
First, when we think the history of colonialism, are we on the shores (the “native”) or are we on the ship? And if on the ship, are we above deck (the white conquistador/settler) or below (the black slave/migrant)? These are of course not clean categories, as much as guidelines to be broken in order to trace another history. Second, what, following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, is “silenced” and made “unthinkable” in the weaving of these keywords of the present? These questions force us to then ask: what is the relationship between colonialism and modernity? What happens when Western “reason” defines itself by branding the colonial as “other,” and then reason itself runs amok? How do colonial legacies reflect in today’s political forms? The colony and its subject need to be unthinkable for the present to emerge unscathed: it is our task to make it messy, to unsettle it, to look at the categories we use every day through the lens of the other: what emerges?
In sum, what is the meaning of the colony in the 21st century? Is it José Martí’s idea that “the colony lives on in the republic,” whereby post-colonial nations have not managed to transcend their colonial heritage; or Frantz Fanon’s cry that “Europe is, literally, the creation of the Third World”? Either way, the present, our present, is colonial.
Each of the essays in this collection engages with one keyword.
Isabella Mizerk-Thorrens interrogates the “quiet violence” of tea, experienced as both culture and conquest in the making of European culture. Tea becomes the delicate needle to knit a political economy of British colonialism that takes us to the present.
Issepa Galillea Eddir tackles the coloniality of food. She shows how present-day food inequalities, from obesity to food insecurity and poverty, are markers of colonial erasures that have become normalized in the present neoliberal matrix of the corporatization of food.
Jana Mohamed’s analysis of Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 documentary, A Fidai Film, centers on the Israeli logic of containment toward Palestinian identity. If you want to dispossess a people, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti reminds us “start your story with ‘secondly,’ and the world will be turned upside-down.” Containment in Mohamed’s analysis here operates in a similar way: through introjection resulting in self-surveillance.
Lauren Riley’s rendition of masterpiece, as it “operates as a colonial mechanism that organizes separation, erasure, and extraction, transforming political violence into aesthetic authority.” Riley threads the colonial connections between beauty, religion, authority, erasure, and extraction that we absorb unwittingly looking at a masterpiece in a museum. Who determines what a masterpiece is, and how and why?
Maria Alejandra Acosta Ramos focuses on extraction. The coloniality of extraction in the Americas is about the soil as much as the body and the soul. In linking the harvesting of the HeLa cell line from Henrietta Lacks’ body with the erasure of humanity linked to OpenAI’s safety protocols, unacknowledged extraction is rendered into a paradigm of the present.