Readings of the coloniality of power in the COVID-19 global dynamics: A brief reflection on Global South's socio-political locations

Abstract

The article seeks to understand the position of Global South communities and ethnicities in contemporary global politics, using the COVID-19 crisis to illustrate and evidence the practical application of the decolonial theories. In two separate topics, it chronologically analyzes the racialization of the pandemics through the examples of the Asian and African (diasporic and continental) communities’ respective homogenous stereotypes and their emergence between the outbreak of and attempted cure to the virus, comparing them to the ethno-racial categories historically attributed to the groups.

Crisis politics of dehumanisation during COVID-19: A framework for mapping the social processes through which dehumanisation undermines human dignity

“…Inequities and racist practices in global public health became even more visible during the pandemic. During the first few months of the pandemic, there have been growing public calls for the experimental COVID vaccines to be first tested with Black and African individuals – a historically grounded practice informed by colonial ideologies (Gonçalves, 2021). Dr Ayoade Alakija, the chair of the African Union’s Vaccine Delivery Alliance, characterised vaccine hoarding and experimentation of global South populations, especially Africans, as ‘about greed and it’s about power and it’s about a system that is deep-rooted in generations and millennia of racist attitudes – and sometimes a subconscious bias – that has now become the norm’ (CBC News, 2022).…”

Threading a decolonial feminist response to COVID‐19: One community psychologist's reflection on the assemblages of violence

“…Entwined in COVID‐19 are racism and capitalism, which are rooted in coloniality and colonialism (Gonçalves, 2021; Laster Pirtle, 2020). Rugged individualism, white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy, for example, are some of structures that shaped the pandemic context, and amplified racial capitalism within the U.S. nation‐state.…”

“…The cumulative, systematic, and iterative forms of violence manifest themselves as assemblages of violence for these are reproduced in harmful, oppressive ways within discourses, systems and institutions. COVID‐19 unforgivingly claimed the lives of low‐income and working‐class communities of Color who are subjected to systems of oppression imbedded in colonial power (Fortuna et al, 2020; Gonçalves, 2021; Kantamneni, 2020; Laster Pirtle, 2020). The violence is assembled, arranged, and organized in a multitude of ways through unjust, inequitable, and dehumanizing conditions.…”

“…To grasp the vicissitudes of precarity unearthed by COVID‐19 in the present moment necessitates that we acknowledge the entrenchments of racial capitalism in the United States. To be clear, that we expand an analysis and discourse of COVID‐19 as a global public health crisis to one that is endemic of colonialism (Gonçalves, 2021; Laster Pirtle, 2020). A pandemic that was amplified by the racial capitalism that is rooted in coloniality and colonialism, which has further deepened the assemblages of violence locally, nationally, and globally.…”