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Books by Narendran Kumarakulasingam
Violence, the Third World and International Relations, 2019
Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the deco... more Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the decolonization of international relations, and especially of international security studies, much of which is dominated by a self-sustaining Eurocentrism.
Rather than focusing on the motivations of violence, this volume is concerned with the devastating and debilitating consequences of war against the Third World. Contributors delve into the violent structuring of Third World societies during colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. A wide range of topics are systematically examined, including, but not restricted to, the role of racism in the construction of the international system; evangelical universalism and colonial conquest in Africa; American civilizational security as Grand Strategy in Asia; the colonial roots of guerrilla war in India; the widespread suffering and death inflicted on Iraqis through sanctions; violence against indigenous peoples in Colombia related to ‘war capitalism’; the complicated legacies of genocide in Cambodia; the Saudi-led, (US and UK backed) war against Yemen; the relationalities between violence in the US and the Third World during Obama’s presidency; the structural location of gang violence in Central America in the aftermath of foreign intervention; and a broader understanding of security and insecurity in the Caribbean.
Papers by Narendran Kumarakulasingam
Empire to Globalisation: Violence and the Making of the Third World, 2019
This Special Issue of of Third World Quarterly examines violence in, and against the Third World.
Violence and ordering of the Third World, 2019
The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World cannot be ignored or con... more The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World
cannot be ignored or consigned to the past. Accordingly, we argue for a
more systematic and determined attention to the connections between
the devastation unleashed by colonialism, imperialism, and other forms
of large-scale violence in the post-independence periods. In contradistinction to situating violence in and against the Third World as a backdrop of incomplete modernization, we recognize that its proper location is in the larger dynamics of racialized and colonial international relations. The articles in this volume address these dynamics of violence.
This essay focuses on the conditions of possibility underpinning the visualization of the end of ... more This essay focuses on the conditions of possibility underpinning the visualization of the end of the Sri Lankan war as a site of massive atrocity in need of international intervention. Highlighting the ease with which complex and multiple histories and subjectivities of violent conflict are erased in a series of globally acclaimed investigative documentaries broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4 news, this essay maps the conventions, codes, and histories that govern visual representation of heinous acts of cruelty and their constitution by way of the dead and imperiled body. The paper argues that this tendency to exhibit the corpus extremis as the privileged sign of mass violence should be understood as a geopolitically situated practice that sentimentalizes global power relations, reproducing racialized forms of objectification and inferiorization in the present.
![Research paper thumbnail of 'Introduction', Contexto Internacional 38(3) [Special issue 'Decolonial Temporalities: Plural Pasts, Irreducible Presents, and Open Futures']:](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/52227346/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This special issue of Contexto Internacional, titled Decolonial Temporalities: Plural Pasts, Irre... more This special issue of Contexto Internacional, titled Decolonial Temporalities: Plural Pasts, Irreducible Presents, and Open Futures, engages the colonial question through the prism of time. Approaching the colonial as a temporal encounter, the contributions curated below explore the myriad ways in which the politics of universal time shaped and underwrote colonial domination. They also show, through textual, ethnographic, and poetic means, that colonial temporality was never entirely successful in displacing other ways of relating to time. Together, they highlight the importance of the critique of time for decolonial thinking, and question whether it is possible to engage questions of 'land and bread' without enquiring into the politics of time. As such this special issue draws on and seeks to expand on existing critiques that conceive of colonial domination as more than the juridical-political control of one people by another.
This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of an emergent global discourse of indigene... more This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of an emergent global discourse of indigeneity to offer an oppositional praxis in the face of the depredations of settler colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa. Self-conscious articulations of indigeneity, we argue, reveal the fraught relationship between increasingly hegemonic and narrow understandings of the indigenous and the carceral logic of apartheid. We examine this by focusing on the meanings and attachments forged through indigenous plants in two realms: the world of indigenous gardening practised by white suburban dwellers and that of subsistence farming undertaken by rural black women. This juxtaposition reveals that in contrast to the pervasive resurrection of colonial time that defines metropolitan indigenous gardening, the social relations of a subsistence cultivator challenge the confines of colonial temporality, revealing a creative mode of dissent structured around dreams, ancestral knowledge, and the commons. Our exploration of struggles around botanical indigeneity suggests that anticolonial modes of indigeneity do not necessarily inhere in recognisable forms and that studies of the indigenous need to proceed beyond those that bear familial resemblance to emergent global understandings.
Food sovereignty has become a powerful concept to critique the dominant global food regime. Altho... more Food sovereignty has become a powerful concept to critique the dominant global food regime. Although it has not taken root in South Africa as fiercely as elsewhere, we use this concept to explore how one small-scale farmer seeks to wean herself from the dominant food system in the small town of Mtubatuba, KwaZulu-Natal. Using ethnographic methods and in-depth interviews about this single intense and extreme case, we explore this farmer’s commitment and argue that it constitutes what we call the ‘lived experience of food sovereignty’. If food sovereignty is concerned with small-farmer control over decisions about food cultivation, distribution and consumption, we examine this farmer’s praxis and explore the obstacles she faces. These include gendered and racialized agrarian questions, land struggles, social reproduction and perceptions of her indigenous crops.We also examine the networks, knowledge, systems and methods that have allowed her to cultivate her self-reliance.
We live in a world where machetes and meat cleavers are considered savage and horrific, while ato... more We live in a world where machetes and meat cleavers are considered savage and horrific, while atom bombs and drone strikes are deemed to be civilized, legitimate, or acceptable methods of waging large-scale violence. How is this possible? This essay engages this distinction by tracing the ways in which what is deemed normative violence is narrated and theorized by, for, and in the 'West.' I hone in on specific instances and moments within larger contexts of violence such as World War II, The Vietnam War, and the Global War on Terror, and follow Muppidi (2012) in asking what translation practices enable the reading of various kinds of bodily injury as progressive, civilized, or legitimate. Doing so enables me to show the important role that the racialization of affect plays in the production of this distinction.
Teaching Documents by Narendran Kumarakulasingam
Violence, the Third World and International Relations, 2019
Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the deco... more Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the decolonization of international relations, and especially of international security studies, much of which is dominated by a self-sustaining Eurocentrism.
Rather than focusing on the motivations of violence, this volume is concerned with the devastating and debilitating consequences of war against the Third World. Contributors delve into the violent structuring of Third World societies during colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. A wide range of topics are systematically examined, including, but not restricted to, the role of racism in the construction of the international system; evangelical universalism and colonial conquest in Africa; American civilizational security as Grand Strategy in Asia; the colonial roots of guerrilla war in India; the widespread suffering and death inflicted on Iraqis through sanctions; violence against indigenous peoples in Colombia related to ‘war capitalism’; the complicated legacies of genocide in Cambodia; the Saudi-led, (US and UK backed) war against Yemen; the relationalities between violence in the US and the Third World during Obama’s presidency; the structural location of gang violence in Central America in the aftermath of foreign intervention; and a broader understanding of security and insecurity in the Caribbean.
Empire to Globalisation: Violence and the Making of the Third World, 2019
This Special Issue of of Third World Quarterly examines violence in, and against the Third World.
Violence and ordering of the Third World, 2019
The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World cannot be ignored or con... more The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World
cannot be ignored or consigned to the past. Accordingly, we argue for a
more systematic and determined attention to the connections between
the devastation unleashed by colonialism, imperialism, and other forms
of large-scale violence in the post-independence periods. In contradistinction to situating violence in and against the Third World as a backdrop of incomplete modernization, we recognize that its proper location is in the larger dynamics of racialized and colonial international relations. The articles in this volume address these dynamics of violence.
This essay focuses on the conditions of possibility underpinning the visualization of the end of ... more This essay focuses on the conditions of possibility underpinning the visualization of the end of the Sri Lankan war as a site of massive atrocity in need of international intervention. Highlighting the ease with which complex and multiple histories and subjectivities of violent conflict are erased in a series of globally acclaimed investigative documentaries broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4 news, this essay maps the conventions, codes, and histories that govern visual representation of heinous acts of cruelty and their constitution by way of the dead and imperiled body. The paper argues that this tendency to exhibit the corpus extremis as the privileged sign of mass violence should be understood as a geopolitically situated practice that sentimentalizes global power relations, reproducing racialized forms of objectification and inferiorization in the present.
This special issue of Contexto Internacional, titled Decolonial Temporalities: Plural Pasts, Irre... more This special issue of Contexto Internacional, titled Decolonial Temporalities: Plural Pasts, Irreducible Presents, and Open Futures, engages the colonial question through the prism of time. Approaching the colonial as a temporal encounter, the contributions curated below explore the myriad ways in which the politics of universal time shaped and underwrote colonial domination. They also show, through textual, ethnographic, and poetic means, that colonial temporality was never entirely successful in displacing other ways of relating to time. Together, they highlight the importance of the critique of time for decolonial thinking, and question whether it is possible to engage questions of 'land and bread' without enquiring into the politics of time. As such this special issue draws on and seeks to expand on existing critiques that conceive of colonial domination as more than the juridical-political control of one people by another.
This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of an emergent global discourse of indigene... more This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of an emergent global discourse of indigeneity to offer an oppositional praxis in the face of the depredations of settler colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa. Self-conscious articulations of indigeneity, we argue, reveal the fraught relationship between increasingly hegemonic and narrow understandings of the indigenous and the carceral logic of apartheid. We examine this by focusing on the meanings and attachments forged through indigenous plants in two realms: the world of indigenous gardening practised by white suburban dwellers and that of subsistence farming undertaken by rural black women. This juxtaposition reveals that in contrast to the pervasive resurrection of colonial time that defines metropolitan indigenous gardening, the social relations of a subsistence cultivator challenge the confines of colonial temporality, revealing a creative mode of dissent structured around dreams, ancestral knowledge, and the commons. Our exploration of struggles around botanical indigeneity suggests that anticolonial modes of indigeneity do not necessarily inhere in recognisable forms and that studies of the indigenous need to proceed beyond those that bear familial resemblance to emergent global understandings.
Food sovereignty has become a powerful concept to critique the dominant global food regime. Altho... more Food sovereignty has become a powerful concept to critique the dominant global food regime. Although it has not taken root in South Africa as fiercely as elsewhere, we use this concept to explore how one small-scale farmer seeks to wean herself from the dominant food system in the small town of Mtubatuba, KwaZulu-Natal. Using ethnographic methods and in-depth interviews about this single intense and extreme case, we explore this farmer’s commitment and argue that it constitutes what we call the ‘lived experience of food sovereignty’. If food sovereignty is concerned with small-farmer control over decisions about food cultivation, distribution and consumption, we examine this farmer’s praxis and explore the obstacles she faces. These include gendered and racialized agrarian questions, land struggles, social reproduction and perceptions of her indigenous crops.We also examine the networks, knowledge, systems and methods that have allowed her to cultivate her self-reliance.
We live in a world where machetes and meat cleavers are considered savage and horrific, while ato... more We live in a world where machetes and meat cleavers are considered savage and horrific, while atom bombs and drone strikes are deemed to be civilized, legitimate, or acceptable methods of waging large-scale violence. How is this possible? This essay engages this distinction by tracing the ways in which what is deemed normative violence is narrated and theorized by, for, and in the 'West.' I hone in on specific instances and moments within larger contexts of violence such as World War II, The Vietnam War, and the Global War on Terror, and follow Muppidi (2012) in asking what translation practices enable the reading of various kinds of bodily injury as progressive, civilized, or legitimate. Doing so enables me to show the important role that the racialization of affect plays in the production of this distinction.