Terms
Biopiracy:
The appropriation of biological resources or traditional knowledge from indigenous/local communities (often through patents) without adequate consent or compensation. Contested through mechanisms like Geographical Indication.
Anti-Theological Thought
Rejects the idea that history moves to a predetermined fate.
Securitization
When social or political issues are reframed as security threats. Children of Men, the migrants.
Bare Life, and who said it
Agamben: refers to people who have biological life but lack any meaningful political rights or protections. Children of Men.
Primitive Accumulation
A Marxist concept describing the historical process by which landless laborers were created as a precondition for capitalism. Includes enclosure of commons, slavery, and dispossession of indigenous populations—key to understanding colonialism's economic function.
Mcdonaldization
George Ritzer's concept: the spread of fast-food production principles (efficiency, calculability, predictability, control) to all sectors of society. Represents the homogenizing tendency of globalization.
Pastiche
Imitation, borrowing, or combination from styles or history. defining feature of Post-modernism.
Speculation
Acting despite uncertainty in the future. Organizations make judgements despite knowing what is going to happen.
third cinema
A revolutionary film movement theorized by Solanas, Getino, and Espinosa in the late 1960s-70s in Latin America and Cuba. Opposed to Hollywood (First Cinema) and European art cinema (Second Cinema). Aimed to be a weapon of liberation for colonized and oppressed peoples.
“moral hazard” in slums :
Poor people are forced to take the responsibility for the poorness, blame the individual not the structure.
Cathexis:
Emotional investment or attachment to a person or object
Frantz Fanon
Modernity as rupture
The foundational idea of Modernism: that contemporary conditions represent such a decisive break with the past that new cultural forms and orientations are necessary. Both celebratory and critical modernisms shared this premise.
Miscegenation:
The mixing of racial groups, historically forbidden by colonial powers. Connected to Orientalist romantic fantasy: a covert libidinal desire for the Other simultaneously repressed through racial prohibitions.
May 68
Modernism
Intellectual and Cultural movement: emphasizing reason and scientific progress. Believes that the objective truth exists, and works towards improvement.
Post-Modern Irony
Self awareness and playful references to cultural forms. Hairspray.
Living Dead, and who said it
Mbembe: Where populations are forced into living situations, that strip dignity and political value, hard to live in.
Nakba
Arabic for 'catastrophe',refers to the 1948 displacement of Palestinians. An example of contested memory and traumatic history whose political stakes are ongoing. Tied to questions of witness and the politics of remembrance.
colonial epistemic violence:
The destruction of colonized peoples' ways of knowing, belief systems, languages, and cosmologies through the imposition of European knowledge as universal. 'Denigrate, discount, dismiss, destroy the Other.'
Grand NArratives
Large scale theories that explain society and human development. Lyotard says this is part of post-modernalism, as they question grand narratives as they ignore alternate perspectives.
Simulacrum
Baudrillards: a copy of something that no longer has an original. Postmodernism: representation can be more important than the original.
Diaspora
Communities dispersed outside their homeland while maintaining cultural connections from afar.
Flexible Accumulation
David Harvey: What followed the collapse of Fordism. Involved outsourcing and temporary labor. Maximizing profits, minimizing costs and commitment to workers.
Time-Space Compression
David Harvey: technology and globalization accelerates the movements of goods and information. Defining feature of globalization.