#post-colonialism

If there is, I can’t find it.

It seems like an important genre. There’s a metal podcast. And lots of documentaries about the history of hip hop.

Did you know France has the biggest hip hop scene of anywhere outside of the US? Afrika Bambaataa traveled there on tour in 1982 and taught the Black culture there about hip hop, and he told them to rap in French because he believed authentic hip hop should reflect local realities and not just be an imitation of the South Bronx.

He established a French branch of the Universal Zulu Nation to address local issues of racism and poverty. He also abused a lot of kids around my age which is really messed up, but that doesn’t erase his positive contributions to music and hip hop culture.

That’s why foraging societies didn’t let anybody get too much prestige or power over them, because they knew that’s how abuse happens, and that’s why they didn’t spend their whole lives developing technologies to take over the world.

Senagalese, Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan people already spoke French before they migrated to France, because they were colonized by the French in the Scramble for Africa, and French colonists made them poor in their own countries then offered them an alternative back at home so they could exploit them locally.

That’s why those countries exist now. Countries didn’t exist before Europe colonized all of Africa, and then by giving them their own countries, they made it look like they were giving them independence, but then they could exploit them by dealing with their governments which were made of the most powerful business leaders, instead of through direct colonization. That’s called neocolonialism.

Nation-states, didn't exist before colonization. My ancestors invented borders so that they could control the world, just like in Palestine and America.

“Without Civilization People Would Starve, Epidemic Diseases Would Break Out and there Would be no Medicine to Heal”

Then ask yourself why the Hadza, for example, survive until today. Hunger didn’t exist in such lifeways, but to a rather high degree in the civilized world. Naturally you can reply that eight billion people can’t be fed by hunting and gathering and you would probably be right, even if food forests appeared overnight where there were once shopping centers, commercial districts, insutrial complexes, and streets. Precisely for that reason, even I don’t advocate for a return to pure gathering and hunting. Perhaps a means of agriculture will be found that is sustainable enough to provide for all people without continuing the colossal ecocide. Monocultures are definitely out. Here also, Indigenous cultures deliver us teachable lessons.

Regarding diseases, it is once again the opposite. Civilization first made possible the serious outbreak of epidemics. We are currently treading into an Era of Pandemics. I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but I can’t imagine any scenario in a decivilized world where something like the current Corona Pandemic could kill millions of people, let alone that such a pandemic could even exist when you have destroyed its very basis for existence. The past should prove me right: epidemics first broke out regularly with the arrival of civilization. There were of course earlier infectious diseases, I certainly don’t want to lie. But never to the extent reached in the civilized world.

Let me be honest. I am so annoyed with the white part of the Solarpunk movement and the people white folks talk about the movement and the genre. Because it seems we always need to have the same kind of conversations again and again and again and again, and people will just not be interested in learning. The same kind of conversations are:

Actually, Solarpunk is like totally not punk! (Answer: Yes, yes it is! You just don't understand what punk means.)

There has to be a way to archive Solarpunk under capitalism!(Answer: No. No there isn't. Sorry to break your bubble. The reason the world sucks is capitalism.)

Solarpunk as a literary genre can only work, if the world it is set in is corrupted, because otherwise there is no conflict in the story! (Answer: ... Have you ever even read another story? Like any other story?)

Why do I reiterate that it is a white-people-problem? Well, because if you look into the history of Solarpunk, the main origin of the genre and movement is in Brazil and generally South America. The origins lie very much with Amazofuturism, which was one of the biggest influences to the genre/movement.

And sure, online you never know what skin color someone has, but I will go so far and say, there is a certain white-ness about some people online. Be it just this very clear white fragility that one can often be found with those people.

One of the big issues here is, that white folks often have a very firm world view, because they grow up in a world that normalizes their culture - and in a way the topics named above.

Today's white people often have a very vague understanding of punk and what punk actually means. If you ask them what punk actually means, they will usually just come up with super vague answers. And if you ask, why Solarpunk is not punk, the answers will not be more defined.

White people come from the culture that invented capitalism, and even more poor white people will relatively profit from the inherent unfairness of capitalism. So many of them - even without consciously realizing it - feel protective of it. Especially of course that most folks in western countries are brainwashed from primary school onwards to accept that capitalism is the be-all, end-all when it comes to economic systems.

About the last thing I have already talked about. These ideas about how conflicts need to be a part of stories - and what might or might not be a proper conflict - is very rooted in western storytelling.

This is something of a hot take, so I might delete this later if it this escapes containment, but I think there's a big problem in post-colonial studies (or rather, the popularized version of post-colonial studies you see in social media discourse and activist communities) where there's this tunnel vision with settler colonialism that magnifies it into the only thing that matters. Because there is also non-settler colonialism, which is at the very least just as bad (if not more so, because you tend to get a higher rate of colonial extraction).

Moreover, when you bring post-colonialism into discussion with the history of the ancient world through to the early modern period, questions of settler vs. indigenous become really complicated. There are a lot of periods of history where population migrations overlapped with military and political transformations that are often described as conquest (both imperial and non-imperial), and those migrations and transformations included intermarriage and cultural change/exchange along a spectrum from voluntary to coercion.

All of us former British colonies who aren't in the Commonwealth should form our own association.