With the British settlement of Australia, Europe’s long history of overseas convict transportation entered one of its most bizarre chapters, as an entire continent was excised as an open-air prison for England’s criminalized lower classes.
Frantz Fanon died 60 years ago today. In his last decade, he was deeply involved in Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle — providing lessons that can still be used in the country's fight against dictatorship today.
In an interview, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese explains how Israel is systematically erasing Palestinian life from Gaza.
The novelist Albert Camus is omnipresent in French cultural life, from TV shows to comic books, magazine covers and one-man shows. Camus-mania isn’t just a literary phenomenon: it draws on a deep well of political revisionism and colonial nostalgia.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s uncompromising opposition to the crimes of empire makes him a taboo figure in French culture. The French political mainstream is still in denial about the bloody history of colonialism.
In an interview, author China Miéville explains why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto is such a remarkable work, defending the book against its detractors and arguing that it remains urgently inspiring and deeply relevant.
On Ibrahim Sharif and the misleadingly-dubbed “Arab Spring.”
How the Puerto Rican left is trying to build resistance to both colonialism and neoliberalism.
In the years before Hitler seized power, a Cameroonian communist was an icon of the Berlin left. Joseph Ekwe Bilé linked the fight against race hate in Germany to the vision of a world free of imperialism.
In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, author of Decolonising the Mind, is one of the most important African intellectuals writing about the politics of post-colonialism today. He told Jacobin how the colonial legacy in Kenya shaped his politics — and why language remains a decisive political battleground.
The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin's own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to end colonial exploitation.
From its vicious occupation in the early 20th century to its military bases in the present, the US has long had a brutal, domineering relationship with the Philippines. And crucially, it’s depended on the labor of colonized Filipinos themselves.
Israel is fast turning Gaza into a wasteland, the result of decades of occupation and apartheid. Israeli journalist Amira Hass explains what life was like for Palestinians before the current genocide.
Hunter College’s announced hiring for a Palestinian studies professor led New York governor Kathy Hochul to order the listing’s removal for “hateful rhetoric” like “settler colonialism.” By that logic, Zionist Jewish texts themselves would be banned.
When British authorities deported Irish rebels to their Australian penal colonies, they also exported a tradition of anti-colonial resistance.
Khalid Bakdash became the first communist MP in any Arab country when he was elected to the Syrian parliament in the 1950s. Bakdash’s party was once a major political force, but it faded into irrelevance after forming a coalition with the ruling Baʿathists.
French writer Albert Camus has become an iconic figure, celebrated by everyone from Emmanuel Macron to George W. Bush. But the idealized public image of Camus as a liberal humanist does not reckon honestly with the impact of French colonialism on his work.
A review of Yitzhak Laor's The Myths of Liberal Zionism.
A review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History.