Group items tagged

"This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing-as that of the rights-bearing citizen and as the "subject under erasure" of deconstructive thinking, respectively. The essay then goes on to show how the science of climate change foregrounds the idea of human beings' collective geological agency in determining the climate of the planet, a move that makes the other two figures not redundant but inadequate to the task of imagining the human in the age of the Anthropocene. The article ends by arguing the necessity of our having to think of the human on multiple and incommensurable scales simultaneously, keeping all the three figures of the human in disjunctive association with one another."

This article questions the applicability of received theories of the avant-garde to artistic practices in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it looks at the politics of exhibition and reception of two vanguard groupings operating in Senegal, one in the 1970s, another in the present day, that have been presented within major forums celebrating global art in the neoliberal era. As complex mixes of indigenous and global forms and ideas, these practices address multilayered histories of interaction and imbrication of cultures and challenge pat assumptions of the traditional avant-garde's parameters.

This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author - one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign - the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.

"The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the 'original' homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the 'routed' dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is 'where you're born', rather than 'where you're from'. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland."

"This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford's Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires."

"This article enquires how notions of national identities are still topical in recent scholarship at a time when processes of globalisation appear to be undermining the nation-state and its territorial power. The so-called spatial turn within the social sciences and humanities has exposed transnational, postcolonial and global aspects of identity constructions beyond the narrow borders of the nation and all things national. Stimulating historical and geographical research into nations and identities, this journal is informed by the same epistemology, tentatively located in postmodern thinking. Despite the prophecies of doom of postmodern enthusiasts, this study testifies to the continued relevance of borders and national attachments, albeit in terms of self-reflexivity."

"This essay examines how a recent fictionalisation of post-disaster life in Bhopal, Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007), opens up perspectives on eco-crime, disaster, and systemic injustice on the level of genre. It begins by showing how the novel evokes private eye, noir, and spy genres in ways that present similarly hybrid forms of detective agency and legal subjectivity as a means of responding to the disaster's criminal dimensions. It then shows how this hybridity relates to the way Sinha plays off crime fiction's genealogical relationship with revenge tragedy both to disrupt the disaster's common real-world designation as 'tragedy' and to implicate readers in modes of active witnessing that probe legal-democratic failure. The essay concludes by discussing how these formal techniques shed light on the potential for interdisciplinary exchange between postcolonial ecocriticism and green criminology in relation to transnational crimes such as Bhopal."

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

"This paper develops a critical engagement with 'cosmopolitanism' and specifically the geographical imaginations it implicates. It does so in order to work through some of the geographical closures in the new cosmopolitanism literature and, further, to suggest alternative - more uncertain and speculative - spatial imaginations for modes of living together with radical alterity. The paper is written in the context of the wealth of recent literature that has sought to recuperate cosmopolitanism as a progressive political philosophy and imagination. Part of the paper's intervention, however, is to suggest that mechanisms and political imaginations for living together might in fact gain much by stepping out from cosmopolitanism's conceptual shadow. First, the paper argues that implicated within much of the new cosmopolitan literature is a planetary consciousness that has a long historical antecedence in western thought. The paper stresses the problematic textures of the planetary geographical imaginations embedded within avowedly cosmopolitan discourse, arguing that the 'cosmos' of cosmopolitanism is no geographically innocent signifier. It is in fact tethered to an imperial Apollonian gaze that cannot help but rekindle ancient Greek notions of formal order and beauty, Pythagorean beliefs in a universe of harmony, and their realization in western liberalism and particularly US Cold War imperialism. Second, drawing upon postcolonial re-readings of the planet and critical geographical mobilizations of place, the paper suggests alternative, less certain, and less avowedly 'cosmopolitan' imaginations that have the capacity to engage difference in non-assimilatory terms. Cumulatively, the paper is an attempt to answer one simple question: what difference does it make to think geographically about cosmopolitanism?"

"Historians of imperialism and postcolonial literary scholars have inherited a series of derogatory categories from colonial discourse, labels that were kept firmly in place by local elites in their anti-colonial cultural nationalism. In particular, in the colonial period the category of "mimic" was frequently used to keep distinctive social classes (and also ethnic groups) out of the political sphere. By continuing to recognize and debate mimicry, we indirectly inherit this negative bias. This article debates the ways in which cosmopolitan theory can help us to see the ambivalent mimic-man in a slightly different light from received opinion. If we re-classify colonial "mimics" as cosmopolitans or, more accurately, as local cosmopolitans, an array of new cultural and historical questions comes to the fore highlighting the relationships between elites and sub-elites, and the politics of representation in local contexts."

This paper explores the concept of Re-Orientalism by evaluating contrasting uses of the term, examining their implications and revealing the way they mark ongoing contestations over cultural legitimacy and authority. I explore some of the connections between Re-Orientalism and Graham Huggan's postcolonial exoticism and propose an inclusive working definition of Re-Orientalism that I put to the test in an evaluation of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Christopher Ondaatje's The Man-Eater of Punanai. I suggest that "Re-Orientalism" marks a re-orientation of discursive authorization symptomatic of deep anxieties over cultural legitimacy. At its most radical, I argue, such a re-orientation can prompt a profound revaluation of the position of the diasporic and national subject in ways that provoke productive dialogue between them; at its most reactionary, I suggest, it can work to deepen and entrench the differences generated by Orientalist discourse itself.

"Through a close scrutiny of Janet Frame's life and work, it is my intention in this essay to suggest that Buddhism proved an irresistible magnet for the author's inquisitive spirit and that it played an important part in the shaping of her poetics. In effect, we shall see under what circumstances Frame's encounter with the east took place and the extent to which notions such as the empirical mind or knowledge, the Great Death of the ego and the non-duality of the world permeate her oeuvre. The underlying concern in the second part of the essay will be to buttress the claim that Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, but not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards such alterity. Thus, against the grain of mainstream criticism which maintains that one cannot explore "beyond", a Buddhist navigation of Frame's texts leads one to the surprising notion that the unharnessed world (or the infinite) which human beings are unable to embrace is, so to speak, right under their nose, so that, between "this" world of limited perceptions and "that" world of the beyond, the boundary is as thick or as thin as the walls of a self-made conceptual prison."

"White anti-racists are an influential social group within settler-colonial societies that often escape critical attention. This article explores one aspect of white anti-racist subjectivities as experienced by those who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. Although not usually discussed openly between colleagues, frustration, betrayal, and suffering physical discomfort without complaint are common experiences for whites working in remote Indigenous communities. To explain this suffering, I first develop the novel concept of white stigma. I argue that in progressive spaces where there is a concerted attempt to invert colonial power relations-what I call 'progressive spaces'-whiteness and the privilege it represents is something to be avoided, diminished, and counteracted. When white anti-racists are interpellated as white, this is generally experienced as a stigma. Recognizing whiteness as a stigmatized identity that white anti-racists continuously attempt to rehabilitate and make liveable makes the suffering of white anti-racists intelligible. Drawing on ethnographic research with white anti-racists, I show how suffering works to manage white stigma. This exploration of stigma, suffering and love furthers our understanding of white anti-racists' identities, and through this, liberal governance in settler societies."

"The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums-through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers' perception-play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to 'intervene' into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge."

"The collections, exhibiting techniques and events offered at France's national museum of immigration history are explored through this critical review of Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (CNHI) at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris. The case study considers the extent to which one of the capital's newest museums has successfully and sensitively aligned the colonialist architecture of its building - originally constructed for the 1931 World's Fair - with twenty-first century, postcolonial perspectives on the decolonisation of cultural spaces, and pluralisation of curatorial narratives, to better reflect the histories and lived experiences of diverse audiences."

"This study challenges the common misconception of laughter as simply light-hearted entertainment by exploring its strategic use and subversive effects in two Caribbean novels: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia. Selvon's and Pineau's humorous depictions of the migration to the metropolitan centres of London and Paris after World War II of two elderly female figures, Tanty Bessy and Man Ya, both bring to light and lighten the serious subject matter of Britain's and France's practices of exclusion toward their former colonized subjects. In examining Selvon's and Pineau's use of humour in light of Henri Bergson's theory on the social significance of laughter as a corrective to man's vices and impertinences toward society, this article argues that Tanty Bessy and Man Ya generate laughter at their own expense for the purposes of "correcting" the negative cultural perceptions of the Caribbean migrant population in 1950s and 1960s Europe. This reading of humour uncovers the subversive power of these two seemingly marginalized figures, in turn, serving to overturn and expand upon Bergson's own theory on the normative effects of laughter."

"Over the last three decades, the role played by phenomena linked to the (re-)making of collective memory, or, more precisely, of collective memories in situations of societal and political change, has gained attention in the humanities and social sciences in general. Only in recent years has this subject been researched with respect to colonial and postcolonial settings (Sengupta 2009) and here also with respect to the Middle East.1 Approaches are highly diverse, ranging from cultural studies to psychosocial perspectives. Rare but highly interesting exceptions studying the violent history of the Middle East from a gender perspective and focusing on contesting memories of women include works by Efrat Ben Ze'ev (2010), Ruth Rubio-Marín (2006), and Alison Baker (1998)-in addition to films like The Forgotten by Driss Deiback (2006). These studies link the general trend toward marginalizing or denying female experiences in the field of officially recognized memory production to the continuing hegemony of gender stereotypes that identify women with passive and "helping hand" roles, thus neglecting their distinct collective as well as individual contributions to society and history. Generally speaking, memory studies seem to suggest that representations of women as "self-abandoning" and "self-forgetful" are one common characteristic element of the making of collective memory. This may be explained by the fact that the making of collective memory is often linked to highly gendered and sexualized models of national, religious, or ethnic identity. Though fully aware that most of the terms describing phenomena of collective memory or collective forms of trauma are highly controversial, we decided not to engage in a more general theoretical debate here but rather to test such concepts with respect to the material presented in the case studies"

"In this post-universalist era, the idea of providing guidance for culturally different communities and individuals is rightly condemned as imperialist. Yet this very recognition of cultural limitations ironically encourages further Eurocentrism: fearful of making imperialist claims about political life that apply to all, many contemporary theorists carefully qualify the reach of the problems they examine and the applicability of the normative theories they propose. How may this vicious cycle be truncated? The emerging field of comparative political theory joins postcolonial studies, feminism, and subaltern studies to suggest that more sensitively calibrated forms of inclusion may deparochialize our political thinking, without replicating the homogenizing universalism of earlier centuries. Painfully aware that they are situated within the privileged cultural frames of the modern West, comparative political theorists identify their struggle in terms of understanding differently situated others amid power disparities created by colonialism, American hegemony, and the global flow of capital."

The essays in this issue of Women: A Cultural Review all originated in a seminar series that forms one strand in a research project with which I am involved, in the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Now in its third and final year, the project has been exploring non-linear and fractured narratives in writing and performance, not just in formalistic terms, but in particular through raising questions about the relationship between these forms and some of the intercultural transformations and political changes that have occurred in the modern world.1 How far can such non-linear and multi-stranded narratives be seen as a response to the increasing interaction of different cultures that has resulted from the colonial, postcolonial and post-cold war reconfigurations of the world, and to the complex and contested societies that emerged in their wake? If we are coming to see that cultures can be understood as collections of narratives, not only stories into which we are born, as Lyotard puts it, but also stories we learn to tell, how do these fractured forms explore the competing and conflicting narratives we meet in our culturally diverse society.