Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people's sense of living under ongoing colonial projects - and not just colonial legacies - and from postcolonial studies' over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and postcolonial critical tendencies, this essay introduces the contributions to this special issue and seeks to prompt further dialogue that continues the project of interrogating subalternity.

This essay critically examines the nature and scope of postcolonial interdisciplinarity. Although postcolonial studies claims to operate on, and forge in, an interdisplinary approach, its intentions are largely interdiscursive. In spite of the vague and elusive claims evident in the catalogue of introductory texts on postcolonial theory, neither postcolonial theorists nor its exponents have adequately established the disciplinary bounds or their methodological fusion(s) specific to, and required for, interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the disciplinary foundations of literature, history and philosophy, this essay demonstrates that postcolonial theory has developed an implicit oppositional critique to eurocentrism. This oppositional critique, while discursive in intention and formulaic in application, is subsequently borrowed by a host of social science disciplines-anthropology, geography and development studies- as a proxy methodology that protects against the perils of eurocentric longings.

"The late-20th-century convergence of post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial theories has engendered a critical discourse network that privileges hybridity. These accounts contend that it (re)inscribes the agency of minority subjects, destabilizing hegemonic discourses, but, paradoxically, hybridity has become a stabilizing trope for - as well as the dominant way to read - the postcolonial novel. This essay discusses three postcolonial novels that "disidentify" with this master narrative of postcolonialism: Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. When reread as performances enacted between the "posts", these novels suggest that hybridity can expose the systemic violence of colonial rationality."

"'Indian' postcolonial writings continue to have a significant impact on contemporary scholarly approaches to nationalism in the subcontinent, and have helped displace the hold of earlier left/liberal approaches to nationalism. While the impact of these recent postcolonial trends on Indian historiography more broadly has been the subject of considerable scholarly discussions and debates, less attention has been devoted to their specific impact on scholarly approaches to nationalism. Through a close and critical reading of the changing historical approaches to 'minority' Tamil nationalism in the subcontinent as well as through comparison of such postcolonial perspectives with that of 'anticolonial' national liberation theorists such as Frantz Fanon, this essay seeks to offer a historical perspective on the strengths and limitations of the currently ascendant 'Indian' postcolonial perspectives on nationalism."

"This article presents recent empirical research into emerging literature in English from four African countries. Employing ethnographic research methods to interrogate the current state of emerging writing in English from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, the research recognises the creative writing medium of 'short stories' to capture contemporary concerns of Africans living in the nations noted above. The short stories in this research project are newly sourced and are treated as data per se from which we are able to question the idea of emerging writing in English in these countries being 'beyond the postcolonial'. In essence, the article presents data which suggest a shift from the classic postcolonial text to new, contemporary texts highlighting fresh departures in theme, genre and use of Englishes. The article demonstrates how the emerging writing captures and represents a sense of the zeitgeist of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya respectively. This article presents distinctive scholarly arguments for the use of interdisciplinary enquiry (ethnographic methods to interrogate the field of literary studies) as well as presenting substantial new empirical data to support the notion that writing in English from former postcolonial countries is less indicative of the classic postcolonial text."

"This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates - and perhaps, reinvigorates - a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is - albeit in a qualified sense - revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of 'writing back' which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, 'writing back' is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision."

I begin with a simple image, that of the frame; an image to which I will return repeatedly over the following pages, as the central structural conceit of the spatial metatheory of postcoloniality I shall propose. As a visual model for the "classical" postcolonial discourse theories that have given rise to such often-cited notions as cultural hybridity, mimicry, and "writing back," 1 the notion of the frame, I argue, offers a powerful conceptual tool for negotiating the operational difficulties of such models of postcolonial criticism, for which neither their originators nor their more recent critics are able fully to account. In particular, I will suggest that what Paul Duro identifies as the frame's "tendency to invisibility" in critical discourse (1) provides us with an apparatus for locating the ever-shifting sites of agency in the complex critical operations of poststructuralism-inflected postcolonial criticism, which I shall argue has a tendency to efface its own presence even as it performs its work.

Recent scholarship in trauma and postcolonial studies has called for more wide-ranging and at the same time more specific paradigms in trauma theory in order to accommodate the complexities of trauma evidenced in postcolonial writing. The work of sociologist Kai Erikson provides a useful model for unpacking the diachronic nature of postcolonial trauma, and for acknowledging the multiple social fractures that trauma inflicts. In a case study demonstrating Erikson's applicability, I show how common tropes of trauma narrative are used as more than an adherence to convention in Marinovich and Silva's memoir, The Bang-Bang Club, which recounts the experiences of white South African photographers covering Soweto's Hostel War in the early 1990s. These narrative strategies produce a space of non-resolution in which the trauma of violence and witnessing can appear.

"The paper argues that earlier literary designations-in this case, "South African literature"-have begun to be subsumed under a generalized category, postcolonial literature or literary studies. It is a category that has been given definitional purpose in North Atlantic literary and cultural institutions and is in danger of settling into orthodoxy: an orthodoxy that is somewhat removed from the palpability of human experience in any particular postcolony. An example is to be found in the treatment by influential postcolonial critics of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, whose concern with the ache of history is made subservient to the intricate abstractions of continental philosophy. If the "post-" paradigm wishes to retain purchase in contemporary times, it needs to establish a greater congruence than is current between a language of generality and its object of study, that is, the literary work."

"In a reconsideration of the role of the postcolonial in the twenty-first century, the article focuses on contemporary issues that have involved what can be characterized as the politics of invisibility and of unreadability: indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism, illegal migrants, and political Islam. It is argued that while none of these fall within the template of the classic paradigm of anticolonial struggles, they all involve postcolonial remains from the colonial past as well as prompting political insights that show the extent to which postcolonial perspectives continue to offer the basis of transformative critique."

"This essay analyzes the cultural functions of Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in postcolonial popular culture. Focusing on the case of Canadian film production, I begin by contextualizing Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture, characterized by 'technological nationalism'. In this context, I consider three Canadian films that adapt Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to represent globalization. David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) borrows from Frankenstein and Marshall McLuhan to critique new media in the 'global village'; Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds (2000) quotes from the Universal Frankenstein film; and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot's The Corporation (2003) uses Frankenstein as a recurring analogy for the modern corporation. This essay signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization"

This article probes a set of problems in the theory and practice of the postcolonial archive that has emerged as the author and her Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues have struggled to create a new media archive in rural northwest Australia. This archive does not as yet exist. If it existed as it is currently conceived, it would organize mixed (augmented) reality media on the basis of social media and operate it on smart phones. The smart phones would contain a small segment of the archive, which would be geotagged so that it could not run unless the phone was proximate to the site to which the information referred. This article argues that if "archive" is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, the postcolonial new media archive cannot be merely a collection of digital artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within-or distinct from-this form of power.

In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under the name of 'the national question' remains decisive. This question is always emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified circuit-process of capital's self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-state. I argue that the history of the prewar debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism, which was itself the fundamental locus for the development of Marxist historiography and theory in Japan, can be a suggestive source of clues for the explication of this relation. In examining the theoretical problems that inhere in this historical moment, I attempt to argue that the national question in Marxist theory can be forcefully renewed through a parallax movement with the question of the postcolonial, that is, the irreversibility of the history of colonialism inscribed in the form of the nation-state. In other words, the national question is not only a question of the levels and stages of capitalist development in given, apparently stable areas; it is also the question of how the logic of capital relates to the historico-epistemological production of 'the national' itself.

"This paper examines intersections between ethnocentric and androcentric desire. To that end it employs a broadly postcolonial analysis of the medicalisation of birth and of women. The paper explores an ambivalence characterised by a simultaneous lust for and loathing of the other through engaging with postcolonial discourse analysis, and it ties those impulses to an imperative of control and to an administration of the other's affairs. That imperative and those impulses represent a point at which the logic of patriarchy and the logic of colonialism converge, and that point is one around which the social production of material disadvantage and negative outcomes can be explored. In the service of modern paradigms of progress and development, both colonial discourses and medical discourses underpin material relationships with the other. Whether that other is racialised or gendered, the manifest result of those relationships is the production of outcomes which are sub-optimal and pernicious in effect, and which result in a material insufficiency in the discursively produced other. The process of colonising childbirth reproduces the material effects of colonial subjectivity within a highly ambivalent and deeply imperialistic encounter. An exploration of that process demonstrates a link between power, paternalism and poor outcomes which highlights a space for self-determination in the optimisation of health and wellbeing amongst members of population groups which are vulnerable to the representations and interests of administrative power."

"In this article we attempt to "seize back the creative initiative" to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re-representing and interpreting data collected through in-depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas."

"First as intellectual ally and then as adversary, Kenyan political scientist Ali A. Mazrui was embraced by the North American discipline of international relations (IR) in the 1960s and 1970s; he was virtually neglected in the 1980s; and a measure of interest in his scholarship revived in the 1990s and beyond. But Mazrui has not found a place in postcolonialism ever since that school emerged in the critical margins of IR. This essay argues that the estrangement between Mazrui and IR was primarily due to the changing nature of the discipline and his unchanging approach to it. Mazrui became the methodological 'Other' in the mainstream discipline. The essay also claims that Mazrui's marginalisation in postcolonialism is ultimately attributable to his image as the cultural and ideological 'Other'."

"This article examines the ways in which the fact of writing about the postcolonial city of Bombay inflects the language of Rushdie's novels. With specific reference to Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the article proposes that a productive analysis of language in Rushdie can be made by replacing the unwieldy and diffuse category of Indian English with the more meaningful contextualization provided by the category of Bombay English. It goes on to argue that while Rushdie's "chutnified" language offers an enabling point of entry into the complex, multilayered and heterogeneous socio-economic fabric of the Third World postcolonial city, it fails to tease out the relations of power and privilege that are intimately tied to the ways in which language, even a "chutnified" one, is deployed."

"In this article, I consider the implications for fiction of Slavoj Žižek's argument that the violence of individual subjects is informed by "symbolic violence" (1-2), that is, the distortions concomitant on language's constitutive, rather than merely referential, relation to the world. Given that the medium of the novel is language, Žižek's contention raises serious questions about this genre's capacity to address violence. I argue that this problem is most apparent in those forms of realism that, in seeking to render language transparent, compromise their ability to recognize the violence of the symbolic order. While my argument in this connection has implications for fiction-writing in general, I confine my discussion to postcolonial fiction that focuses on the racialization of the human body, that is, its reduction to a sign in a discursive system."

"The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking forms of transcendence amidst the desacralised conditions of post-imperial modernities. Drawing on the work done by Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins in varying temporal contexts, this ethnography of ruins in the world after colonialism engages with the paradoxes generated by monuments in diverse urban spaces. Concentrating on the ethnographic sites of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul's Museum of Islamic Art, and the ancient city of Derbent in contemporary Daghestan, attention is drawn to the variability of the ruin as a site of political mobilisation across space and time and particularly in the service of a postcolonial agenda."

"This essay aims to rethink historical difference in light of Walter Benjamin's formulation of mimesis and Frantz Fanon's phenomenology of difference. Divided into three parts, the essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty's account of historical difference, considers how an understanding of mimesis might safeguard against some of the philosophical pitfalls within Chakrabarty's formulation, and revisits Fanon for an explication of a theory of mimesis and difference that may be the grounds for a renewed understanding of historical difference. The essay makes a case for the relevance of Frankfurt School dialectics for postcolonial problematics."