Ashapurna Devi, a prominent Bengali woman novelist (1909–1995) focused on women’s creativity and enlightenment during the colonial and postcolonial period in Bengal, India. She herself displayed immense will power, tenacity and an indomitable spirit which enabled her to eke out a prominent place for herself in the world of creative writing. Her life spanned both colonial India and independent India and these diverse experiences shaped her mind and persona and helped her to portray the emerging face of (...) the enlightened Bengali middle-class woman. Her writings trace the evolution of the Bengali woman as an enlightened and empowered individual struggling against the shackles of discriminatory norms imposed upon her by society. She traces the extremely conservative upbringing that the female members of her generation were subjected to and goes on to show how different individuals responded to these structures in different ways. Some would comply unquestioningly, some would comply simply because they did not dare to protest, while others would break free and find their own niche in the outside world. These issues are addressed by Ashapurna Devi in many short stories as well, but a critical analysis of her trilogy Pratham Pratisruti (1964), Subarnalata (1967) and Bokulkatha (1974) enables us to experience this struggle against a gradually unfolding backdrop where India moves on from being a British colony to an independent country. The trilogy traces the life of three generations of a family — Satyabati, Subarna and finally Bokul and establishes Ashapurna Devi as a path-breaking champion of women’s emancipation in an era when such endeavours were few and far between. (shrink)

Starting with a short review of the postcolonial studies? origins, this paper considers the question of their application in the study of history and contemporary state of the post-Soviet societies. Aspirations of the leading theorists of postcolonial studies not to restrict their field of research on the relation of imperial metropoles and its colonial periphery have not met with the acceptance in post-Soviet societies? academia. With the exception of the famous debates on?the Balkans? that are (...) not the subject of this paper, the paradigm of post-colonialism is rarely used in the interpretation of past and present of the former socialist states. Rejecting the thesis of their own colonial status in most of Eastern European countries is usually based on a rejection of the assumption of the Soviet-style communism?s?civilizing mission?. From the same perspective, the Soviet Union is not considered a colonial metropole, but an occupying force, and the epoch of socialism is interpreted as externally imposed breach of the historical developments based on the European model. On the other hand, the concept of these countries? transition opens up the issue of their colonial status in relation to?Europe? as the center of economic, political and cultural power. Therefore, the postcolonial critique of post-Soviet societies is more often focused on the thematisation of neo-imperial domination and neo-colonial dependency phenomena, than on the explanation of their socialist past. The author?s opinion is that it doesn?t mean that a number of concepts of postcolonial theory - such as?internal colonialism? - cannot be productively used to a fuller understanding of the Soviet past, nor that in the interpretation of post-Soviet realities??hybrid forms? the postcolonial studies cannot be of use. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Colonial Figures and Postcolonial ReadingSuvir Kaul (bio)Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Sara Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Biologists tell us that racialism is a myth and there is no such thing as a master race. But we in India have known racialism in all its forms ever (...) since the commencement of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the herrenvolk and the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them....—Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)Sara Suleri begins The Rhetoric of English India with a critique of “some of the governing assumptions” of the field of colonial cultural studies, which she sees as subject to a debilitating “concept-function”: “While the representation of otherness has long been acknowledged as one of the must [sic] culturally vexing idioms to read, contemporary interpretations of alterity are increasingly victims of their own apprehension of such vexation. Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remains too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires” [1]. Suleri enumerates some of the problems attendant upon “alteritist” methods of reading: “While alteritism begins as a critical and theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was the familiar category of the exotic.” In its single-minded devotion to the analysis of difference, alteritism runs the risk of “representing ‘difference’ with no attention to the cultural nuances that differentiation implies. Instead, alteritism reads to reify questions of cultural misapprehension until ‘otherness’ becomes a conceptual blockage that signifies a repetitive monumentalization of the academy’s continuing fear of its own cultural ignorance” [12].In her account of academic processes, Suleri is surely right in claiming that, “in contravention of the astounding specificity of each colonial encounter... contemporary critical theory names the other in order that it need not be further known” [13], thus providing theoretical models and vocabularies whose easy portability and schematic applicability become the reasons for their institutional success. Now that a loose affiliation of texts, revisionary reading practices, and literary histories are being institutionalized (particularly in departments of English) under the disciplinary rubric of colonial and postcolonial discourse studies, such a questioning of the protean versatility [End Page 74] and analytical usefulness of notions of “otherness” or alterity is timely. 1 In much academic writing, the critique of colonial discourses ends where perhaps it should begin, by positing the many forms of alterity that are invoked in the writing of the imperial, nationalist, or even subaltern subject. Particularly in the work of literary theorists, this dynamic of self and other proves entirely compelling when charted in and through textual representation, and the metropolitan archive, both literally and figuratively open in our moment of decolonization, provides ample opportunity to think about the reiterated motifs of “civilization” and “barbarism,” modernity and its antecedents, trade and empire, warfare and conquest.Yet what is to make such intellectual work “postcolonial” in any significant sense? Today, “postcolonial studies” in the Anglo-US academy often suggests simply the opening up of a new archive or a bringing together, in different ways, of various interpretative or reading techniques developed by poststructuralist theorists. There is little evidence that such intellectual work derives any of its critical functions and polemical urgencies from the present-day cultural and intellectual life of the “postcolonial” nation or nations whose historical legacy is under study. Metropolitan concerns and agendas dictate the nature and process of inquiry, rather than a more appropriate sense of the pressing issues that have priority in the national debates of once-colonized countries. What is required is a different... (shrink)

This collection of original essays provides a thematic discussion of the complex historical, political and cultural links between France and its former colonies. --from publisher description.

The absence of colonial and post-colonial examinations of the conflict-ravaged Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) – a Bangladesh’s distant fringe– warranted me to explore how colonial legacy facilitated the post-colonial statist approach and majoritarian Bengali supremacists’ tendencies to exploit and subjugate the distinct CHT culture. This reconnaissance endeavour finds that the history of extortion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT)indigenous peoples is a suitable example of racism victims, and thus it examines in the light of the (...) class='Hi'>colonial and post-colonial discourses. This explorative study – based on secondary sources of data – finds the very ideas of racism practices, especially identity politics, demographic politics, and women’s subjugation, are prevalent in this postcolonial (and internally colonised) terrain. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#71-72; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2022 P 61-77. (shrink)

"The fields of settler colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, as well as Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of Indigenous persons and more-than-human animals are interconnected. Composed of twelve chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Dinesh Wadiwel, the book is divided into four themes: (...) Tensions and Alliances between Animal and Decolonial Activisms Revisiting the Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples' Relationships with Animals Cultural Perspectives Colonialism, Animals, and the Law This book will be of interest to undergraduate, postgraduate students, activists, as well as postdoctoral scholars, working in the areas of Critical Animal Studies, Native Studies, postcolonial and Critical Race Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as Cultural Studies, Animal Law, Critical Prison Studies, and radical criminology"--. (shrink)

Leading scholars bring together eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory to analyze the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial projects and aspirations.

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring (...) to primary texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey (...) of the literature. Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, contemporary feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger claims that the reality of race and gender is built on unjust social structures and must be resisted. Meanwhile, contemporary social theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the term ‘subaltern’ to Third World Asian women who were rendered inarticulate by centuries of oppressive masculinist, imperialist, and colonial rule. This article examines how a metaphysics of resistance, culled from philosophy and postcolonial studies, can contribute to expanding (...) postcolonial feminist theologizing. (shrink)

The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith’s Parasitism and Disease until (...) after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet’s fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet’s ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ‘‘ecological turn’’ in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet’s conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science. (shrink)

abstract: Evidence from the Pali texts suggests that the Buddha opposed judging people on the grounds of their place of birth, their ethnic identity, or their skin color. In practice, however, Buddhist traditions have not been and are not free of such judgments. This article illustrates this through a case study of Buddhism in colonial and postcolonial Ceylon, with particular reference to the Aryan theory. It argues that the language of race and nation that emerged among Buddhists in (...) this context was influenced by three factors: the academic work of European linguists and ethnographers; Christian missionary representations of Buddhism; and readings of Pali texts that attributed the term ariya (noble, good, pure) to Buddhist communities. The article first examines the concept of ariya (Pali; Sanskrit: ārya ) in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. It then surveys the discourse in colonial Ceylon on the term "Aryan," including the involvement of Christian leaders and the Buddhist internalization of the discourse in the context of Christian missionary activity, as seen particularly in the writings of the Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933). Another strand in the discourse is then isolated, namely the "othering" of the minority, "Dravidian" Tamils in colonial Ceylon, and the consequences of this in the postcolonial period. Finally, the article asks whether this case study can offer insights into the fault lines within Buddhist cultures, and indeed, Christian cultures, that could give rise to racism. (shrink)

Abstract:This article posits Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) as a vital tool for bridging postcolonial and decolonial thought. First, FSTS forms a bridge by providing tools for reading epistemic imperialism and scientific racism as shared conditions of possibility for disparate colonizations. Second, by foregrounding the necessary links between epistemic and material violence, FSTS helps undo the theory/praxis binary that sometimes undergirds their analytic opposition. The authors argue that the careful study of science as a set of ideas, (...) practices, and attendant institutions is vital in order to better recognize and intervene in shifting modes of colonial conquest and governance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Latin American Subaltern Studies Post‐Occidentalism and Border Gnosis Cultural Criticism Concluding Thoughts References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 3-13 [Access article in PDF] Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City Rajeev S. Patke [Tables]Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. [AP] Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the endNot past a thing. —Seamus Heaney, "On His Work in the English Tongue" Preamble Among the several Benjamins to be conjured from The Arcades Project is the (...) one who invites a speculative discourse on the idea of the postcolonial city. We can imagine him first conceding, and then qualifying, three propositions about himself: he mitigates the force of the first—that he was Eurocentric—with the counterproposition that the cities he wrote about were formative of a discourse that can be transposed to other cities whose patterns of urban development were shaped by forces analogous to those he studied in the period of their inception. He then concedes that his work on the city remains problematic in several ways related to an uncertain temperament and method, but urges the recognition that his method came to resemble his object of study; the fortuitous correspondence reinforces the self-reflexive relation between modern cities and the discourse they generate. His third concession—that his use of Marxian ideas mixes them with elements of bourgeois thought—is marginalized by the recognition that he always took his Marx with such a difference that to confine him within such a debate would be to take him in the wrong spirit. He then proceeds to reiterate in the specific instance of the postcolonial a more familiar general claim made by many contemporary readers of the metropolitan experience, that the set of approaches he uncovered continue to remain valid wherever the project of modernity is at work. They help us address "[t]he split image of modernity, modernity's promises for social and individual emancipation, as well as modernity's failures" [Paetzold 216a]. Modern Benjamin would begin by reminding us that his "modern" and "modernity" refer primarily to the industrial transformation of society by technology, as part of the Enlightenment project of progress through the application of reason to nature and society. He would [End Page 3] qualify his sense of the project of "modernity" through the image of "[t]he world dominated by its phantasmagorias" [AP 26]. He would then shrug off the cloak of the Eurocentric by turning, for illustration, to the many Asian manifestations of the postcolonial. Here, he would make the twofold claim that the postcolonial experience brings out the disillusionment latent in the myth of progress, just as the postmodern brings out the phantasmal that is incipient in the myth of an evenly distributed access to capital and goods in the era of globalization. He would argue that the cities of contemporary Asia are the sites for a partial and uneven overlap between the postmodern and the postcolonial. This overlap, he would say, invites us to treat the idea of the city in a generic mode, without discounting the fact that the diversity separating the metropolitan centers in Asia makes little sense of an Asian city except as banal literalism. He would note that colonialism did not affect all of Asia, nor did it follow quite the same course from colony to colony, though the term retains some usefulness in accounting for the general factors that link different cities in Asia to what happened after colonialism. He would treat the postcolonial and the postmodern as three-tiered phenomena: each is a historical phase of world history, a predicament affecting collectivities, and an attitude or state of mind. The aptness of the notion of the postcolonial city, he points out, increases in direct proportion to the degree to which a city has acquired a distinctive identity through colonial administration or commerce, and decreases in direct proportion to the degree of discontinuity between the colonial and postcolonial phases of its history. He would add the corollary that any contemporary city in the developing world approximates to the postcolonial condition when its role in the network of power relations negotiates... (shrink)

The authors suggest that postcolonial science studies can do more than expand answers to questions already posed; it can generate different questions and different ways of looking at the world. To illustrate, the authors draw on existing histories and anthropologies and critical theories of colonial and postcolonial technoscience. To move forward together, rather than remaining mired in regretful contemplation of past biases, the authors offer some analytical and practical suggestions. In reading hegemonic forms of postcolonial (...) computing, this article offers tactics for rereading, rewriting, or reimagining those scripts. (shrink)

When Jesus meets the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s well in John 4, it is a meeting between two colonial subjects in the Roman Empire. In this encounter we find the Samaritan Woman as a triply marginalised body, a woman subject to multiple, intersecting forms of oppression within her patriarchal context. Identified as a Samaritan Woman, Jewish rabbis regarded her as unclean, impure, and being menstruous from birth. It can also be deduced that she is an outcast in her own (...) society because she comes to draw from the well at noon, the hottest part of the day when people did not usually fetch water. This Samaritan Woman is nameless, landless and powerless in an imperial, colonial and patriarchal context. The poem of Diana Ferrus, I’ve come to take you home, in memory of Sarah Baartman, highlights how Baartman was dehumanised and treated as a sexual object by European colonisers. Through a postcolonial reading of John 4, I consider the intersections between the Samaritan Woman and the early life of Sara Baartman in their respective colonial contexts and invite the reader, as the poem invites Baartman, to come home to Africa and resist Western European imperial and colonial patterns and tendencies.Contribution: This article has interdisciplinary implications. This is an interdisciplinary study in the sense that it offers a biblical interpretation of John 4 that is informed by the life of Sara Baartman that has been uncovered through anthropology, history and sociology. It is also integrating the field of postcolonial biblical hermeneutics with the theory of intersectionality. (shrink)

In this article I address the imbalance in the production and circulation of knowledge in the dominant Anglo-American academic circuit, aiming to make visible feminist work in a decolonial vein carried out in Latin America, to recentre the decolonial option with regard to established postcolonial studies and to propose a way of understanding global postfeminist female subjectivity as mediated in mass media. The decolonial option offers a rich theoretical toolbox for exploring contemporary junctions of gender, race and the (...) question of representation. I propose a reworking of the concept of the ‘coloniality of gender’, and briefly discuss how Femen and the figure of the exoticised female pop icon exemplify coloniality at work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article investigates the ways in which the Western theoretical construct of the feminist utopia has been rearticulated within the field of colonial and postcolonial studies. Particularly, it contends that Rokeya Hossain’s literary works innovatively use the framework of the feminist utopia to reimagine a decolonized nation premised on the ideals of gender equity and religious harmony. Using the scholarship of Barnita Bagchi, Sreejata Paul, Sandeep Banerjee, and Ralph Pordzik, among others, as a springboard, this article (...) situates two of Hossain’s literary works—Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag —firmly at the intersections of feminist utopianism and postcolonial studies. By analyzing textual evidence and incorporating historical research on the Indigo Rebellion and the nationalist struggle for independence, the article also establishes ways in which Hossain reconfigures the discourse of nationalism by positioning the subjectivities of colonized women front and center. (shrink)

Based on extensive field work focused on interreligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, this article argues that decolonial accounts of peacebuilding, in line with decolonial interventions in the study of religion, remain captive to the task of epistemological undoing and thus insufficiently relevant to the precarious lives of many invisibalized people in the global South. The question is whether decolonial thinking in the study of religion and theology should concern itself with such pertinence. I first examine the (...) class='Hi'>colonial legacy of “peace” and key features of decolonial interventions in the modernist, civilizational, and developmentalist discourses within which “peace” is embedded. Next, I analyze how interreligious peacebuilding practices both entrench coloniality while improving the lives of people who engage in such practices and how such practices rely on thin or “sticky notes” religiosity, deeply inconsistent with decolonial theologies and religiosity. Finally, I show how, on the ground, mere existence and overcoming hate reside along a spectrum of decolonial politics. (shrink)

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His (...) first novel Things Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary research work designed to be of interest to a broad range of academics. The book examines the relationship between democracy and the (trans)formations of urban spaces in Iran. It engages with the ideas of ‘modernity’ in architecture and investigates how they might align (or not) with other forms of radical power. The topic of the work is novel and aims to examine the relationship between the affordances of public spaces, their micro-histories, and the emergence of (...) critical social events and movements. The breadth of the topic demanded engagement with a rich body of architectural theory and history and relevant texts in urban sociology, colonial and postcolonial studies, political geography, and cultural studies, a challenge to which the book has responded outstandingly. -/- This book offers an understanding of the public spaces through political change, power struggle, and autocratic modernity manifested. It addresses the subject of politics in architecture and built environment by examining the various academic literature in urban studies, architectural history, urban anthropology, urban sociology, cultural geographies, planning history, philosophy, and the broader social and political sciences. Followingly, it will be focused on the less well-known traditions of architecture and democratic values drawing upon western and (non)western perspectives to decolonize the notion of public space in the global south. In better words, the book investigates the mechanisms of power struggles and the transformative dynamism of totalization and state-led modernization, which motivates or shapes a creative tension in the form of the city. The issue is urgent for policymakers and architects, urban designers, political and cultural geographers, and other practitioners working on the built environment to create more democratic public spaces in the global south. (shrink)

This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies from India and Sri Lanka discuss (...) the production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of and changes in caste and racial identities and networks, and securitization-and thereby confirm that no study of contemporary capitalism is complete without thoroughly addressing the postcolonial condition. By challenging the established dualities between citizenship-based civil society and welfare-based political society, exploring critically the question of colonial and postcolonial difference, and foregrounding the material processes of accumulation against the culturalism of postcolonial studies, this volume redefines postcolonial studies in South Asia and beyond. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of South Asian studies, sociology, cultural and critical anthropology, critical and praxis studies, and political science. (shrink)

: This paper discusses the relation between the philosophies of difference and the so-called postcolonial movement of thought. Our main sources are, on the side of the postcolonial studies, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha and, on the side of the philosophies of difference, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. We show that the authors belonging to the postcolonial movement are, to large extent, heirs of a way of thought already practiced by (...) the philosophers of difference. However, the postcolonial authors also reinforce the conceptual apparatus of the philosophies of difference with original contributions and, above all, an attentive consideration of the problem of colonial difference, which remains a big gap for critical thought. Regarding that, with no intention of approaching in depth the singularity and complexity of the ideas of each of the mentioned authors, we draw a minimal map of the points where the philosophies of difference and the postcolonial thought intercept each other. This map also shows points where the postcolonial movement complements the perspective of the philosophies of difference, precisely addressing one of its blind spots: the colonial question. Resumo: Este artigo discute a relação entre as filosofias da diferença e o chamado movimento de pensamento pós-colonial. Suas fontes principais são, do lado dos estudos pós-coloniais, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said e Homi Bhabha, e, do lado das filosofias da diferença, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Mostra-se que os autores do movimento pós-colonial são, em grande medida, herdeiros de um pensamento já praticado pelos filósofos da diferença. No entanto, os autores pós-coloniais também reforçam o aparato conceitual das filosofias da diferença com contribuições originais e, sobretudo, uma consideração atenta do problema da diferença colonial, que permanece uma grande lacuna para o pensamento crítico. Tendo isso em vista, sem pretender abordar, de maneira aprofundada, a singularidade e a complexidade das ideias de cada um dos autores mencionados, traça-se um mapa mínimo dos pontos onde as filosofias da diferença e o pensamento pós-colonial se interceptam. Esse mapa também mostra pontos onde o movimento pós-colonial complementa a perspectiva das filosofias da diferença, abordando justamente um de seus pontos cegos: a questão colonial. (shrink)

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. Bringing (...) the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change. (shrink)

The article explores the ‘significant missed rendezvous’ and posthumous critical dialogue between Victor Segalen and Édouard Glissant. It studies the ways in which the Martinican novelist, poet and theorist identified Segalen as a catalytic presence in his thought and as one of his privileged, lifelong interlocutors. The study tracks the role of Segalen's work in the steady emergence and elaboration of Glissant's thought, but also analyses the place of Glissant's readings in the progressive reassessment of Segalen's own writings. The (...) article contributes to reflections on the formation of communities of thought in which intellectuals from different moments and different ideological niches — in this case colonial and postcolonial — are drawn into dialogue in ways that appear achronological. Segalen and Glissant are presented as part of a wider community of French-language writers, linked with ‘relational’ ties, whose engagements with questions of contact and cultural diversity overlap, intersect and ultimately interact. (shrink)

In the course of his groundbreaking work, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon has employed a splendid array of metaphors to reflect on the essential fabric of a colonized society. However, the Manichean metaphor is the best of them, which he has used to forge a comparison between colonialism and Manichaeism, a dualistic religious movement founded in ancient Persia sometime during the third century CE. This metaphor is singular in the sense that both colonialism and Manichaeism have in common (...) a dichotomic vision to look at the world, a stupendous effort to exert their influences on the better part of the world and a messianic zeal to preach their enlightenment values at every opportunity. In this article, I am going to elucidate the way Fanon has made use of the metaphor to designate the identity formation of both the colonizer and the colonized in addition to critically analysing their similitude in vision, will and enthusiasm. In so doing, I will bring into play the recent accretions of Manichean religious and postcolonial studies in order to situate Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in the framework of post-colonial praxis. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#71-72; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2022 P 153-177. (shrink)

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility (...) of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police. Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology. (shrink)

Addressing a myriad of complex social, economic and political issues in the South African context requires that we draw from a variety of voices. This postcolonial reflection draws on the work of Vuyani Vellem’s African spirituality to highlight how it can help Africans conceptualise race epistemologically. The contribution emerged out of an article presented at a conference themed ‘unthinking West. The article employed the concepts of liminality and threshold to discuss the ambivalence encountered by Vuyani Vellem and highlights how (...) his theological convictions still present unsettling ideological aftershocks within the unjust structures of society.Contribution: This contribution is a black liberation theological reflection, which laments how Vellem did not live to witness the full realisation of his dreams regarding the liberation of the black masses. The article identifies racial discrimination and misconceptions on African spirituality as some examples of the ‘unsettling aftershocks’ regarding challenges, which Vellem confronted within the unjust structures of South African society. (shrink)

The decolonization of France is not over yet. Blind to what was coming , France is now badly hit by the boomerang : linguistic isolation, postcolonial studies in slumber, deafness towards the boys and girls of the suburbs : words are cruelly lacking for institutions to make sense of what’s happening. At a loss, the media can only multiply distortions in media coverage and the authorities produce repression/selection at the borders. In this paper, the author develops the apparent (...) differences between English and French as colonial and postcolonial languages, as well as the difference between the language and politics of young boys and girls from the suburbia in France. (shrink)

With a focus on the areas of theory, literature, culture, society and film, this collection of essays examines, questions and broadens the applicability of Postcolonialism and Islam from a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary perspective.Topics covered include the relationship between Postcolonialism and Orientalism, theoretical perspectives on Postcolonialism and Islam, the position of Islam within postcolonial literature, Muslim identity in British and European contexts, and the role of Islam in colonial and postcolonial cinema in Egypt and India. At a time (...) at which Islam continues to be at the centre of increasingly heated and frenzied political and academic deliberations, Postcolonialism and Islam offers a framework around which the debate on Muslims in the modern world can be centred.Transgressing geographical, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, this book is an invaluable resource for students of Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociolgy and Literature. (shrink)

The relationship between postcolonialism and feminism is often complicated and conflict-laden in its struggles against empire and patriarchy and its related social categories of oppression. The question is, How have African women in former colonies balanced their act? To address this question, the article focusses on Boleo, A Setswana Novel. Firstly, theories of post-coloniality and feminism are explored. Secondly, four creative African women writers are analysed for their take on the intersection of postcolonialism and feminism prior to reading Boleo, A (...) Setswana Novel. Thirdly, the analysis of Boleo indicates boundary crossing and cross-border oppressions and solidarity in the struggle against apartheid that features a female protagonist and other minor characters. It is proposed that because the novel equates apartheid with sin ( boleo ), it thus constructs salvation as the concerted communal efforts of resistance and suspicion towards the institutions of the oppressor, characterised by baitiredi [independent or self-actualising workers], a political movement founded by Boleo. The analysis of the African novel indicates that the struggle against colonial and patriarchy gave rise to the First Things First; Second Things First and Both Things Simultaneously approaches, which are evident within African women creative writers. Contribution: This article adheres to the journal’s scope and vision by its focus on a systematic, historical, exegetical and practical reflection within a paradigm in which the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, social sciences and humanities generate an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

Decolonizing aesthetics requires a philosophical reexamination of art and cultural representation to address ethical conflicts and the legacy of colonial biases. This study explores the suppression and marginalization perpetuated by colonial aesthetics, with a focus on gender, race, and cultural diversity. Drawing on postcolonial theories, the research highlights the disparities and systemic exclusions within artistic traditions, advocating for decolonized practices that restore and celebrate suppressed cultural expressions. Case studies such as Indigenous Futurism and exhibitions promoting the (...) art of formerly colonized communities illustrate the practical application of decolonization efforts. Using primary data analyzed through Smart PLS software, the study examines correlations and causal relationships between decolonization initiatives and shifts in aesthetic valuation. The findings reveal both challenges and opportunities in dismantling colonial legacies, emphasizing the role of art education, public workshops, and community engagement in fostering awareness and inclusivity. Artists and institutions play a pivotal role in promoting decolonized aesthetics by addressing historical biases and amplifying marginalized voices. Decolonization emerges as an ongoing ethical and cultural practice aimed at dismantling colonial power structures in art and aesthetics, ensuring a more equitable representation of global artistic traditions. (shrink)

A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial studies, which implicitly discuss colonial deployments of European law and politics via the concept of ideology.

A critical examination of the history of theories and uses of concepts such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ in the academic study of religion in imperial, colonial and postcolonial contexts is particularly urgent in our time with its demands to decolonise Western models of knowledge production. In Savage Systems (1996) and Empire of Religion (2014), David Chidester has contributed to this project by relating the invention and use of terms such as ‘religion’, ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ by theorists of religion (...) in European imperial metropoles to South African colonial and indigenous contexts. This article intends to take Chidester’s project further by relating Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis of ‘primitive mentality’ (particularly in De primitieve mensch en de religie, 1937) to Chidester’s analysis and postcolonial critique of imperial theories of religion. By taking animism and dreams in Chidester’s and Van der Leeuw’s works as example, it is argued that in spite of the latter’s decontextualised use of ethnological material, a fundamental shift occurred in the judgement of ‘primitive’ religion from Tylor’s evolutionary to Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis, which is contrary to claims according to which modern theories are unanimously denigratory of indigenous religions. (shrink)

Two recent publications investigate the nexus that ties together gender, cultural and postcolonial studies, Les féministes et le garçon arabe by Nacira Guénif Souilamas and Eric Macé, and a French translation of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic : Modernity and Double Consciousness. Both contribute to refresh the Franco-French debate on immigration by linking issues of gender, class and race at work in today’s social conflicts.

Postcolonial studies and decolonial theory make visible the nature and extent of Eurocentrism through a critique of constructed categories as basic as “history” and “culture.” Walter Mignolo asserts a strong claim that the concept of “culture” is itself a colonial construction, and hence all cultural difference bears the mark of coloniality. This thesis presents a challenge to the field of comparative philosophy: What does “cross-cultural” philosophy even mean if all so-called cultural difference is indeed colonial difference? (...) Could comparativists, in the wake of this critique, preserve the possibility of cross-cultural philosophical inquiry even when basic terms of discourse are suspended? This essay is a thought experiment in accepting Mignolo's general premise that all cultural difference is colonial difference, through which I offer three strategies for philosophizing comparatively under this constraint: historical contextualization, subversive categorization, and decen.. (shrink)

This article deals with some earlier applications of psychology for the analysis of the colonial condition offered by three thinkers—Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon and recent applications of Freudian psychoanalytical theory in the poststructuralist approach of Homi K. Bhaba. An attempt is made to compare their standpoints and reflect more broadly on what their implications mean for the future of psychoanalysis’ place in postcolonial critique. Also to answer a vital question in the theoretical project of postcolonial studies: (...) Is psychoanalysis a universally applicable theory for psychic disruption in the colonial context? What are differences in the application of psychological theory for studies of colonial discourse? The conclusion of the paper is: Despite the problematic inheritance of racializing thinking psychoanalysis has proved to be an important and reoccurring methodology in colonial critique and postcolonial theory. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that psychoanalysis itself is a colonial discipline and must become an object of colonial discourse analysis. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in (...) the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Abstract:“Colonial Connections” explores historical connections and patterns between Iberian and British colonialism that have been ignored by conventional anti-Eurocentric and postcolonial narratives. At issue are the erasure of inter-imperial linkages and the omission of the Iberian empires of Spain and Portugal and the colonization Abya Yala/Latin America as well as the importance that Iberian colonialism and indigenous civilizations had in the shaping of the modern world such as capitalism, racism and the coloniality of gender. The article provides a (...) brief examination of anti-Eurocentric literature that rescues Asia, foremost China, from the dustbin of history while ignoring the importance of Iberian colonialism in the fall of China and the role that indigenous and African slave labor played in the development of capitalism and the triumph of the West. It also explores the artificial separation between Iberian and British colonialism that minimizes the role of religion in British colonialism and the commonalities that emerge once religion is accounted for. Finally, the article addresses the coloniality of democracy or the expulsion of the colony from the polity that emerges from conquest and the dehumanization of indigenous women and men of Abya Yala and notes the unevenness and divergences that surface when British and Iberian colonialisms are compared. (shrink)

Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set of politics connecting stakes for the individual and the (...) community. Vaccination also maps on narratives and temporal frameworks of disease with an ultimate goal of ending epidemics. Therefore, the essay takes these three analytical entry points to discuss the historiography of vaccination: the geographical, the political, and the temporal. We argue that through these lenses we can gain a more nuanced understanding of historical narratives we privilege, and in return, this understanding can enable us to explore past and current questions of health inequalities, validation practices, power relations and resistance and vaccine diplomacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 376-379 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, by Diana de Armas Wilson; 254 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, $74.00. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Diana de Armas Wilson describes and analyzes the link between the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the expression (...) of that consciousness in the novels of Cervantes. Those of us whose teaching includes works from both Peninsular and Spanish American literature have long felt the need for a study that goes beyond a cataloging of Cervantes's references to the world beyond Europe, and those Cervantine scholars among us have variously hinted at and side-stepped the fullness of this issue. As it was with those exemplary figures of the age of exploration she examines, it is to Professor de Armas Wilson's great credit that she has risen to the challenge. Her analysis is well-organized, reasoned, thoughtful, and readable.De Armas Wilson's knowledge of previous and current research in Cervantine studies as well as genre, colonial and postcolonial, and gender studies is impressive. She also admits to participating "in the kinds of critique currently associated with cultural studies, although not without reservations regarding the alleged presentism of that discipline or its tendency to turn primary texts into commodities." I would respond that de Armas Wilson's concerns and techniques in this study are precisely the tools we need to help us define "cultural studies" to our students and to ourselves as scholars of various literatures and cultures.To begin her study, de Armas Wilson mentions many of Cervantes's literary and personal references to geographies, customs, and other contacts with the [End Page 376] world outside Spain. The first chapter, "The Americanist Cervantes," focuses on that material and includes a brief review of recent research--the latest "grande escrutinario" (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter VI)--regarding what works might have been in Cervantes's library and/or the texts potentially available to him. Professor de Armas Wilson looks at Cervantes's references and the texts available to him through three lenses: imitation, influence, and intertextuality. She sees these methodologies as interdependent and argues that: "the intertextual practices in this book--based on a revised concept of intertextuality that includes the notion of agency and participates in a historical project--are as American as its central topic." (Finding myself in the process of completing this review on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I can only wonder what texts will not be influenced by the "historical project" of this day.)In the second chapter, "The Novel about the Novel," de Armas Wilson surveys Cervantes's status in Continental and Anglo-American criticism, reminding her readers of the polemic between scholars of the ancient novel and those who, bent on refusing to accept the Greco-Roman works as novels, designate them "romances." De Armas Wilson's contention that the Persiles is a "long exemplary novel," is convincingly depicted. Her arguments are based on the fact of the fictional time of the Persiles being within fifty years of the time when Cervantes wrote it, "its self-conscious theorizing, its rationalizing of 'miracles,' and its avowed imitation of Heliodorus' Aethiopica." She is not alone in arguing that Heliodorus' novel is the antithesis of a romance of chivalry. On these bases de Armas Wilson speaks not only to those who may not have recognized the importance of the Persiles because it has been called a romance (an often "despised or despicable" genre), but also to those of us who view consideration of the Persiles essential to an understanding of Don Quijote, if not a key to comprehending the major goals of all of Cervantes's works and his expression of the consciousness of his day.De Armas Wilson continues by arguing for "coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones." She bases her argument on echoes of widely disseminated accounts of happenings in the New World, (most significantly those of... (shrink)

Abstract:Gayatri Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writings are regularly and justifiably cited in reference to postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Both grapple with the thorny matter of representing subalternity and indigeneity, not only in Eurocentric scholarship, but also by migrant and diasporic academics and national elites. In this commentary, I foreground how Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui's persistent critiques of representation are imperative because they further postcolonial and decolonial feminist scholarship and call for dialogues between them. Such dialogues entail reaching (...) across linguistic, historical, geographical, political, and theoretical boundaries to establish anti-colonial alliances. (shrink)

"Although the feminist debate on the ethics of care has demonstrated that philosophical concepts are gender-laden, the relation of care to justice and autonomy is not self- explanatory. Moreover, given its Western context, the normative relevance of the care debate to non-Western feminisms remains problematic. This book addresses this debate and investigates the extent to which notions of justice and autonomy can be reformulated without Eurocentrism from the perspective of care. In this endeavour, this book maps the shifts in feminist (...) approaches to care from the colonial to the post-colonial periods, taking both inter- disciplinarity and inter- sectionality into account. The book also argues that the feminist debate on care has contributed towards making philosophy's boundaries with culture and social science more porous."--Rabat de la jaquette. (shrink)

Learning from the past prepares one for being able to cope with the future. History is made up of strings of relationships. This article follows a historical line from colonialism, through apartheid to post-colonialism in order to illustrate inter-religious relations in South-Africa and how each context determines these relations. Social cohesion is enhanced by a post-colonial theology of religions based on the current context. By describing the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the 17th–18th centuries in the Cape Colony, (...) lessons can be deduced to guide inter-religious relations in a post-colonial era in South Africa. One of the most prominent Muslim leaders during the 17th century in the Cape Colony was Sheik Yusuf al-Makassari. His influence determined the future face of Islam in the Cape Colony and here, during the 18th century, ethics started playing a crucial role in determining the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The ethical guidance of the Imams formed the Muslim communities whilst ethical decline was apparent amongst the Christian colonists during the same period. The place of ethics as determinative of future inter-religious dialogue is emphasised. Denial and exclusion characterised relationships between Christians and Muslims. According to a post-colonial understanding of inter-religious contact the equality and dignity of non-Christian religions are to be acknowledged. In the postcolonial and postapartheid struggle for equality, also of religions, prof Graham Duncan, to whom this article is dedicated, contributed to the process of acknowledging the plurality of the religious reality in South Africa. (shrink)

Ireland has struggled with its ‘feminine’ identity throughout its history. The so-called ‘chasmic dichotomy of male and female' is embedded in colonial and postcolonial constructions of Irishness and it continues to manifest itself in contemporary cultural representations of Ireland and Irishness. This study explores issues of gender and nationality via a reading of a 70-second television advertisement for Caffrey's Irish Ale, titled ‘New York’. The article suggests that, although colonial and postcolonial discourse on Ireland continues to (...) perceive the ‘feminine’ in problematic terms, this is gradually changing as Irish women increasingly, in poet Eavan Boland's words, ‘open a window on those silences, those false pastorals, those ornamental reductions’ that have confined us. (shrink)