Postcolonialism and the Study of the Middle Ages (original) (raw)
Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History
Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, 2003
Postcolonial studies have often based their critiques of colonialism on critiques of modernity. As a result, they tend to limit their purview to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay collection "Postcolonial Moves" challenges these conventional limits by questioning prevailing assumptions about periodization. This essay is an introduction to postcolonial studies from the perspective of medieval studies.
Early Medieval Europe, 2007
world in which such features are essential, the problem of movement from the physical to the spiritual, an issue explored also in Chazelle's interpretation of the Codex Amiatinus. Heck describes the overall structure of Hrabanus's work as a movement from prefatory images only framed by text, through the most pictorial of its images, the opening imperial portrait and image of the cruciform figure of Christ, through images that culminate in the entirely naked cross. Heck argues that the famous final poem, with an apparently 'material' picture returning in the form of the author Hrabanus kneeling at the foot of the cross, the purely geometric intersecting letters, which can be read in various directions and have no clear directionality, is not an image of the physical cross but the 'signe du mystère'. He observes that Hrabanus is not looking at the cross/text but forward toward, in effect, the world that can only be seen with the mind's eye. Noting that Hrabanus himself in his prologue insists that his work be read in sequence from the beginning, Heck suggests that the image/text composites move the reader effectively from the physical world to the abstract and spiritual. It is an eloquent and stimulating reading of the work.
Postcolonial Europe: Comparative Reflections after the Empires
2017
How has European identity been shaped through its colonial empires? Does this history of imperialism influence the conceptualisation of Europe in the contemporary globalised world? How has coloniality shaped geopolitical differences within Europe? What does this mean for the future of Europe? Postcolonial Europe: Comparative Reflections after the Empires brings together scholars from across disciplines to rethink European colonialism in the light of its vanishing empires and the rise of new global power structures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the postcolonial European legacy, the book argues that the commonly used nation-centric approach does not effectively capture the overlap between different colonial and postcolonial experiences across Europe.
História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, 2020
We present an overview of the studies on the Middle Ages that exceeds the traditional chronological milestones of the period. Initially, we present the historiography on the Long Middle Ages, a construct that postulates the idea of a medieval world found in the present and thus, beyond the 15th century and the European continent. In contrast, we seek to present the theory of Medievalism which emphasizes the relationship between the contemporary world and the discursive appropriations of the medieval period. This theory is not quite familiar in the Brazilian academic context, but it offers great possibilities to approach the Middle Ages from a more autonomous perspective, rather than the European historiography, on which, historically, medieval studies have been grounded.
Introduction: Rethinking Postcolonial Europe
Postcolonial Interventions, 2022
Introduction to the Special Issue "Rethinking Postcolonial Europe: Moving Identities, Changing Subjectivities" of Postcolonial Interventions, exploring the concept of Postcolonial Europe and offering glimpses of the articles and their thematic foci.
In the Name of Europe. Introduction to special issue on Postcolonial Europe
year 2011…, 2011
Though that [imperial and colonial] history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries. (Gilroy, 2004, p. 2) 'Europe' in a sense is a phantom of the past, a name that 'is history' rather than society, political, or economics, since the flow of capitalization, population, communication and political action, cross its territory, invest its cities and workplace, but do not elect it as a permanent of specific site. Europe is not only de-territorialized, but also de-localized, put 'out of itself', and in the end deconstructed. It may be part of an imaginary, but less and
Bringing postcolonialism home (conference paper)
It is by now commonplace to castigate Edward Said (Orientalism 1978) and his followers for making their own blanket statements about the West. Critics of Anglo-Irish literature in particular have shown the inadequacies of an approach predicated on a homogenized ‘Western world’. And this exclusionary gesture in the introduction to one of the seminal works in postcolonialism has often been pointed out: ‘While it is possible to argue that these societies were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial.’ (The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 33). Though there has been much work on the Celtic peripheries of Great Britain, the only major non-Anglophone speaking Celtic region is neglected. Brittany suffers two layers of neglect. Firstly postcolonial studies have been rather slow in giving serious attention to Francophone material, and this despite relying heavily on French theory. which is one of the motivating factors behind the recent collection of essays: Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy. Secondly postcolonial studies excludes ‘ancient’ colonizations, as suggested above. So it is hardly surprising that postcolonial studies have only very recently begun to have an impact on the study of the literatures of Brittany, notably in the work of critics at the Centre d’Études des Littératures et Civilisations Francophones at the University of Rennes, who have adapted the framework to the particular bicultural situation in modern Brittany, putting it in parallel with other better-publicized examples of ‘métissage’, notably the Maghreb and Québec. This paper will discuss the impact so far of postcolonial thinking on Brittany’s literary culture, while also debating its relevance to a region not normally recognized as postcolonial.