this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Fuck the Colonists

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The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography (digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Link is downloadable for free, but lmk if you can't get a copy through this portal.

I thought this paper was a fascinating read on the colonial ignorance and euro-centrism found in not only Liberal theories of Gentrification, but Marxist Geography as well. This paper seeks to expose the gap between Marxist Geography and struggles against gentrification from the perspective of Indigenous communities while using a Toronto neighborhood as a case study. I'll try to post some good blurbs out of this but I read and post it on the go so I'll have to come back.

While approaching from the perspective of dissecting Gentrification, this paper ends up attacking the heart of Settler Colonialism through criticizing the Bourgeois/Settler production of space.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is very interesting!

I myself have read a lot of Marxist Geography works, but never really attempted to synthesize or “interrogate” them with decolonial theories myself.

Not really the most though-provoking or interesting, but this quote stood out to me:

As further proof that Indigenous societies experience place and not space, Smith quotes Ernst Cassirer’s example of “natives” who can easily find their way through a landscape, but are unable to draw a map of it. With this wholly inadequate summation of Indigenous relationships to space, Smith states that the Western conception of space coincides with a “milestone in human history—the origins of philosophy, of conceptual thought which is no longer the direct efflux of practical human activity.”

I am not sure how a self-identified Marxist could even justify Eurocentric/bourgeois property relations, especially with regards to land, as anything close to a net good, by providing a stageist and ahistorical view of Indigenous Land.

However, the author did respond with a smart quip that did put a smirk on my face:

The ethical underdevelopment of the European philosophical tradition is written over with a modernist (in its limited European sense) celebration of philosophical advancement.

What is it with Colonialism that makes many Eurocentric Marxists simply ignore it?