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Begin New Search Topic Decolonization Journal Contexto Internacional

1. Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out of Time, Part I: Queer Mutations and Repressions

Author:
Emerson Maione and Renan Quinalha
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part I offers dialogues with Out of Time from Trump’s USA and Brazil’s ‘hetero-military’ dictatorship and Portuguese colonial roots. Emerson Maione and Renan Quinalha explore how Rao’s elaborations of homonationalism, homocapitalism, homoromanticism and ‘pink-washing’ more generally travel in new contexts and how the ‘fetishization of law’ can mislead investigations of queer-, homo- and transphobias.
Topic:
Decolonization, LGBT+, Repression, Dictatorship, Queer Theory, Decriminalization, Colonization, and Homonationalism
Political Geography:
Brazil, South America, North America, and United States of America

2. Is Critique Still Possible in International Relations Theory? A Critical Engagement with IR’s Vocation

Author:
Natália Maria Félix de Souza
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
The article offers a critique of recent efforts to read international relations theory – and its theorists – as especially positioned to offer a critique of international politics. It does so by engaging Daniel Levine’s claim that international relations theory has a special vocation for critique which is unparalleled by other disciplines. By problematizing Levine’s political, ethical and epistemological approach to sustainable critique, I argue that international relations theory has been particularly engaged with a politics of crisis that centers Western modes of subjectivity as the only frame of reference for thinking about politics and history. As a consequence, Western international relations theory has become both inadequate and dispensable for many critical theorists of international politics in much of the world, even when it comes to its most critical approaches. By way of conclusion, I offer an approach to critical international relations theory that starts from the politics of colonialism, instead of crisis.
Topic:
International Relations, International Relations Theory, Decolonization, Sustainability, and Eurocentrism
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Rethinking Polanyi’s Fictitious Commodities Based on the Brazilian Nuclear Segment

Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to show evidence of the undetermined expansion of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities within the Brazilian nuclear context. The issue of the marketification of social agendas has drawn a lot of attention to the data, collected through in-depth interviews. The analytical process was guided by the decolonial theory approach and by critical discourse analysis. Among the analysis’ main findings, it is possible to point out the elaboration of a framework which reveals the mechanisms employed by the Brazilian nuclear segment as a way of exercising parallel power and silencing social agendas. The main contributions are the temporal and geopolitical updating of Polanyi’s thesis; and the definition of the mechanisms used by the company Eletronuclear and by institutions as a way of co-optation, naturalisation and marketification of social and political agendas.
Topic:
Energy Policy, Neoliberalism, Decolonization, and Nuclear Energy
Political Geography:
Brazil and South America

4. The Political Import of Deconstruction—Derrida’s Limits?: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part I

Author:
Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Dan Bulley, and Bal Sokhi-Bulley
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Political Theory, Philosophy, Decolonization, and Deconstruction
Political Geography:
Global Focus