Nuancing the Patterns of Empire Informal Empire, Anti-imperialism, and Transnationalism (original) (raw)
This journal provides a forum to promote diversity in world literature, with a particular interest in the study of literatures of those neglected countries and culture regions. With four issues coming out every year, this journal publishes original articles on topics including theoretical studies, literary criticism, literary history, and cultural studies, as well as book review articles.
Navigating the Colonial Discourse
This journal provides a forum to promote diversity in world literature, with a particular interest in the study of literatures of those neglected countries and culture regions. With four issues coming out every year, this journal publishes original articles on topics including theoretical studies, literary criticism, literary history, and cultural studies, as well as book review articles. Chinese by authors from all over the world. The manuscript is expected to be of about 5000-8000 words and must follow the MLA style. Submission should be made including an abstract of about 200 words, a short biography of the author, and three to five keywords, as well as the main body of the essay. Manuscripts from America
The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance
Routledge eBooks, 2019
Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in the process of being superseded by Global South studies in the same discipline. Thus far, Global South studies, for the purposes of comparatists, remains undefined, beyond gesturing towards the task of South-South comparatism, a gesture in and of itself premised on postcolonial theory's critique of Eurocentrism. "I think global South is a reverse racist term, one that ignores the daunting diversity outside Europe and the United States," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently written. "We decide to define what we are not by a bit of academic tourism," she continues, "choosing academics to represent the global South at conferences and in journals from countries elsewhere who have class continuity with us and thus resolving our own sense of ourselves as democratic subjects resisting definition by race and gender" (Spivak 2018, 166). While the charge of "tokenization" (Spivak 2018, 167) has been leveled likewise against Euro-American postcolonial theory, my wager is twofold: Global South comparatism can and should find some of its conceptual bearings in postcolonial theory; and the postcolonial here is to be epistemologically and temporally extended to embrace its prehistory in the liberation moment and thus recoup its emphasis on social justice for the purposes of the "New International" (Derrida 1994). I demonstrate this wager through the writings of Edwar al-Kharrat about the Afro-Asian movement. It is of no small significance that the first of two explicit mentions of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, or Bandung, as it came to be known, in Edward Said's Orientalism occurs in the context of a citation from Anouar Abdel-Malek's 1963 article "Orientalism in Crisis." Abdel-Malek, the Egyptian Leftist intellectual and political scientist, had argued that "the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations" was what it took to "provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat's texts Hala Halim
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2014
Volume 16 (2014) Issue 3 Article 16 P Po os st tcoloni colonial S al Studies in the T tudies in the Twe wen nt ty y-firs-first C t Ce en ntur tury: A B y: A Bo ook R ok Rev eview A iew Ar rt ticle a icle ab bout N out New W ew Wor ork b k by A y Ashcr shcroft oft, M , Me endi ndis, s, M Mc cGoneg Gonegal al, M , Muk uke er rjee a jee and C nd Ca ar rr re er ra S a Suá uár re ez z, Dur , Durá án A n Alm lma ar rz za a, M , Me ené nénde ndez T z Ta ar rr ra azo zo A Alej leja andr ndra M a Mor ore eno no
American Literary History, 2004
The heightened climate of xenophobia and compulsory patriotism, as well as the rallying together behind "Western" values by many intellectuals in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, makes painfully clear the necessity of interrogating US culture through the lens of postcolonial studies. Repeated invocations of diierences between our civilization and their barbarity, entreaties for a "new imperialism," and calls for reinstating a nineteenthcentury type of colonialism, now with the US replacing Britain and France, are ample proof that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate. 1 Hardt and Negri's postulation of the contemporary world as the age of unlocalized, nonimperialist empire is surely being tested (xiv, 134). Nevertheless, although the present moment might warrant a postcolonial understanding of US literature and culture, the relevance of postcolonial analyses to American studies has not always been clear. After all, the master-texts of American studies were consolidating American exceptionalism at the very moment that radical anticolonialist treatises questioning the humanity and universality of modernity were being written by Third World intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is widely credited for having inaugurated the Weld of postcolonial studies, and with Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Ranajit Guha, and the subaltern studies scholars, the major questions of postcolonial studies were laid out. These questions included the analysis of Western texts as colonial discourse, the investigation of representations of the colonized, the study of forms of resistance to colonization in the literature of the formerly colonized, and issues of neocolonialism, comprador natives, and subaltern representation. Yet despite revisionist histories such as R. W. Van Alstyne's The Rising American Empire (1960) and Carl Eblen's The First and Second American Empires (1967), and later works such as Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (1980), which demonstrated imperialism as central to national identity from the beginning, much of American studies remained remarkably insular, thus reinforcing
Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse
Kunapipi, 1987
As George Lamming once remarked, over three quarters of the contemporary world has been directly and profoundly affected by imperialism and colonialism. Although it is clear just how profound an effect this has had on the social and political structures of the twentieth century and on the relations which exist between nations in our age, it has until recently been less clear how profoundly this has influenced the perceptive frameworks of the majority of people alive now. The day to day realities of colonized peoples were in large part generated for them by the impact of European discourses. But the contemporary art, philosophies and literature produced by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European models. The processes of artistic and literary colonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered 'reality', free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, with its pandemic brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable. But as the contradictions inherent in a project such as Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike's The Decolonization of African Literature demonstrate,' such pre-colonial cultural purity can never be fully recovered.
The Invention of Race and the Postcolonial Renaissance
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022
An academic generation before mine, early modern studies, although primarily based in the global north, became the beneficiary of ground-making work along two key intellectual strands emerging from wider connections. First, there was the rich scholarship in premodern critical race studies, with Kim Hall, Ian Smith, Margo Hendricks, and Ayanna Thompson, among others, using the towering intellectual energies of US-based but transatlantic-movement-informed intersectional Black studies. Second, there was the influence of globe-spanning, globequestioning, postcolonial studies-with Eldred Jones, Imtiaz Habib, Ania Loomba, Jyotsna Singh, and Poonam Trivedi, among others, variously using the works of such intellects as Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. It is impossible to overstate how deeply this energization of early modern studies as a field has contributed to its continued presence and appeal, even urgency, in the twenty-first century. Without these late-twentieth-century foundations in critical race and postcolonial studies, early modern studies today would have been a far more provincial field than it is, and even more invested in white supremacist fantasies of insular excellence. And arguably, none of the new and generative directions of study, such as of eco-critical early modernisms, transnational early modernisms, borderland and migration studies, global performance studies, food studies, critical book history, Chicanx studies, Dalit Shakespeares, Indigenous studies, and critical disability studies would have found a substrate here on which to grow and build.
World Literature, Critical Approaches: Reading Postcolonial Environments
Course Syllabus, 2023
Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. We will seek to unsettle conventional categories of “world” as we carefully reorient ourselves in relation to the texts under study—novels, stories, and poems that demand a rearticulation of the so-called “archetype.” As we travel across continents, guided by Imbolo Mbue or Helena María Viramontes, we will consider the trajectories of power that they map and the aesthetic forms that are neither universal nor derivative, but persistently and indignantly local—that is, materially and historically situated. We will begin with a consideration of the political stakes of “worlding” literature before embarking on a three-pronged journey: texts that map empire; stories that illuminate the sacrifice zones of our contemporary petrosphere; and narratives that demand a consideration of the role of energy in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of aesthetic form. Required texts: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, ISBN-13: 978-1583670255 Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, ISBN-13: 978-0312428594 Shailja Patel, Migritude, ISBN-13: 978-1885030054 Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus ISBN-13: 978-0452273870 *All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.
COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE: DISCOURSES, DISRUPTIONS, AND INTERSECTIONS
Authorspress, New Delhi, 2021
The term 'Postcolonial' is used for a historical phase that corresponds to the aftermath of European colonisation. The period is witness to the effects of colonialism on languages, cultures and communities in the post-independence era. The ineradicable mark of the European colonisation on the contemporary world has not only resulted in a process of unification as well as diversification but also has caused the most controversial global concerns like economic instability, ethnic rivalries, cultural violation, migration and dislocation, expatriation and hybrid nations formation along with cross culturalism and ethnic inclusiveness. This sets a question of 'identity' as one of its prime deliberations. The people belonging to the pro colonised paradigm quander in the hunt for a consolidated 'identity' while in the process of doing so find themselves consumed by insecurity and self-doubt. This concern of postcolonial dimension of the quest for identity has been widely addressed by one of the leading Indian Parsi writers in English, Boman Desai in Asylum, USA. The present paper endeavors to illustrate how migration and cultural conflicts impacts the immigrants' sense of insecurity which alters their distinctive identity by leaving a permanent deep subterranean chasm in their lives and their persistent efforts to bridge up this gap of identity with reference to the Parsi community in Asylum, USA. Boman Desai, who is born and grew up in Mumbai, is an Indian expatriate himself as he shuttles back and forth between two major cities of the world and their reflections-Bombay and Chicago. His writings are mostly evocative of some predictability in terms of approach, certain consistency in form of narratives, technique, and choice of subject matters-reminiscence of the past, migration, nostalgia, transculturalism, longingness for identity, alienation, and the theme of marriage-all of which mostly revolve around the Parsi Zoroastrian community. He is certainly more inclined towards emphatically affirming his 'Parsiness' through his works. Desai has the powerful skill to blend his memories of India and that of his Works Cited
Review 3 of Dube (ed.) *Postcolonial Passages* by Janaki Nair in *EPW*
Economic and Political Weekly, 2005
A somewhat mealy-mouthed review, which overlooks the simple fact that this book was proposed by Barney Cohn, and the idea supported by Ranajit Guha, to OUP after the Spanish version came out in 1999. This is discussed early in the Preface. (It would churlish and worse to turn down those senior subjects to whom we dedicate our volumes, verdad/right?) Also, this English version has overlaps with but also differs from *Pasados poscoloniales.* All above is said without any rancor: rather, as a discussion of intellectual/academic cultures, at large.