endocolonization

noun

Colonization by a state or society of (part of) its own population, especially by taking control of their bodies or bodily integrity.

Scrabble 28

Meanings

nounendocolonization (plural endocolonizations)

plural endocolonizations

  1. human sciencesColonization by a state or society of (part of) its own population, especially by taking control of their bodies or bodily integrity.

    As stated above, no longer is this a situation of partial endocolonization, but instead one of total endocolonization, a situation also referred to by Virilio as total war.

    2013, J. Adams, Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and Resistance after Occupy Wall Street, Springer, →ISBN
    4 more examples

    All of these practices by which the body is voluntarily tortured, disciplined, denied and de(p)leted are part of a larger tendency Paul Virilio calls "endocolonization": "It's no longer exo-colonization (the age of extending world conquest) but the age of intensiveness and endocolonization. One now colonizes only one's own population […]" In the age of endocolonization, then, bodies are disappearng from themselves and (dis)integrating into technology.

    1990, Cincinnati Romance Review, pages 62–63

    Does that dominance produce its own endocolonizations? Is there thus a dominant culture, then, or is all culture and subculture — from the American middle class to cadres of Queer theorists — dominant and dominating to those who live within it?

    2002, Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 31

    But Maslowska's text obeys a different, post-cold war imperative: to mirror a cultural and socioeconomic situation that is precisely not that of the colonial epoch during which Poland was the site of various European endocolonizations, devoured amongst Russian (later Soviet) and Austo-Hungarian empires.

    2006, Ulbandus Review, page 130

    Western national economies were beginning to turn inward, and endocolonization was launched at home. At that point, Western high art could indeed identify its subjects with colonial peoples, as the Westerners were now being subjected […]

    2009, Enda Duffy, The speed handbook: velocity, pleasure, modernism, Duke University Press Books, page 45

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

endocolonization. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/endocolonization

MLA

“endocolonization.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/endocolonization. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “endocolonization,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/endocolonization.

Source: endocolonization on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.