Les Blancs (1970) by Lorraine Hansberry offers a compelling exploration of the violent structures underlying colonial power and their impact on indigenous life and subjectivity. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this study examines how the play reconfigures colonialism as a regime governed not merely by authority or ideology, but by the systematic management of life and death. The analysis focuses on key elements such as missionary intervention, racial dehumanization, militarized authority, and colonial education to reveal how these forces operate as interconnected mechanisms that sustain a necropolitical order. Central to this reading is the construction of the colonial space as a “death-world,” where indigenous populations are subjected to conditions of extreme precarity and reduced to states of living death. The play’s portrayal of racial hierarchies and linguistic violence highlights the ways in which colonial discourse legitimizes disposability and normalizes brutality. Major Rice emerges as the embodiment of sovereign violence, through whom colonial authority is enacted via the regulation of life and death. By foregrounding the psychological and existential dimensions of colonial domination, this study also examines the central character, Tshembe Matoseh, whose internal conflict reflects a condition that may be understood as necropolitical paralysis, wherein agency is constrained within a system that renders all choices ethically and materially compromised. Ultimately, this paper argues that Les Blancs not only critiques colonial violence but also exposes the structural logic through which power operates by producing and sustaining conditions of death.

ABSTRACT This paper examines Portuguese Goa as an object of enquiry in Richard F. Burton’s first travelogue, Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851). Burton’s stay in Goa was slightly longer than a month, and many of his ideas about the place were shaped not just by what he saw firsthand. This needs to be kept in mind, and it explains Burton’s stylistic strategies and the presentation of a self-indulgent Portuguese Goa. Taking Burton to be a representative figure of British colonial discourse during the mid-nineteenth century, this paper focuses on the rhetorical construction of Portuguese Goa that operated in the service of the British Empire. Even though Goa was not a colony of the British Empire, it is in Burton’s imperial discourse that the roots of British anxieties about their self-image and empire can be found – a reaction against what was happening in Britain and India at the time.

ABSTRACT This article explores the circulation of the names Amarildo and Marielle in the online and offline urban space of Rio de Janeiro. These names, and the questions, “who killed Marielle and ‘where is Amarildo?’ refer to Mr Amarildo de Souza, who was forcibly disappeared by the military police in the context of the ‘pacification’ of the Rocinha Favela and the Black congresswoman, Marielle Franco, who was murdered by right-wing militias. Analysing the circulation of these questions on street signs, and its movement to the online space of social media via the hashtags ‘#CadêAmarildo?’ and ‘#QuemmatouMarielle’, I argue that the act of asking for victims of state violence disrupts the urban space envisioned by colonial discourses of the ‘pacified’ and depoliticized city by enacting subjects that are both present and absent, thus disrupting the official discourse and practice of security and development where subjects circulate according to racialised and gendered conceptions of risk, threat and neoliberal productivity.

ABSTRACT The practice of colonial strategy and racial discourses is a deeply intertwined process that developed in tandem, particularly during the height of traditional colonialism and empires from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This article concludes that the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ described by Edward Said in Orientalism (1979) and the usual practice of indirect British colonial rule, in this case, solely the foreign affairs of Bhutan during the 1840s to the 1860s, evolved together to create an exception to regional and temporal trends in indirect British colonial authority. By utilising discourse analysis to examine the process of British colonialism solely in the context of Bhutan's foreign affairs, it is shown that the British opinion of the Bhutanese grew increasingly negative over the course of their colonial interactions, resulting in an ‘Orientalist’ discourse. This regionally unique aspect of ‘Orientalism’ necessitated (in the British view) a more direct colonial strategy. This article examines the development of this deviation by archival research and content analysis of key British colonial documents from the British Library's India Office Records. Specifically, the mission of Ashley Eden to Bhutan in 1863 and the Duar War of 1864 between Bhutan and Great Britain are examined closely as examples of mutual influence between racial discourse and colonial strategy.

Without adequate protection, technologies and materials—from clothing to electronics to binoculars—rapidly deteriorated in tropical environments. While tropical decay may seem a trivial issue today, it posed a serious logistical and strategic problem that prompted the U.S. military to develop a program of environmental testing beginning during World War II to ensure equipment reliability in these harsh conditions. Tracing that history of environmental testing through the Vietnam War, this article argues that the military's management of tropical rot operated through the spatial logic of climatic analogs, where simulated sites on U.S.-controlled soil stood in for battlefields across the global tropics. However, because climatic analogy was never perfect, the environmental testing program needed continual calibration to adjust to sites of “hot” conflicts during the Cold War. While the Panama Canal Zone initially served as a proxy site for the Pacific during World War II, scientific experts cast doubt on its similarity to the Southeast Asian tropics as American involvement in Indochina loomed. To strengthen their environmental testing, they collected environmental data from a site in U.S.-allied Thailand as a proxy for Indochinese environments. In uncovering an overlooked dimension to the U.S. empire's environmental history, this article demonstrates not only how weatherability and environmental testing provided an important, yet hidden infrastructure for the global projection of American power, but also how establishing and calibrating climatic analogs drove the production of environmental knowledge about the tropics. Placing the U.S. military's tropical science against the legacy of colonial discourse on the tropics, this article complicates usual portrayals of the military's environmental ignorance and instead highlights the ambivalent role of military-sponsored tropical decay research in shaping the U.S. empire's relationship to the natural world.

Abstract This article examines the complex dynamics surrounding animal sacrifice in late colonial India, highlighting the tensions between a colonial discourse of a “cruel orient,” indigenous cultural traditions, and emerging animal welfare movements. While British authorities condemned animal sacrifice as a marker of Indian barbarism, their legislative attempts to prevent cruelty were limited by imperial ideology and concerns about interfering with native customs. Meanwhile, Indian intellectuals like Gandhi and M. R. Jayakar and organizations such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals advocated for animal welfare, challenging entrenched customs and promoting alternative values of compassion and nonviolence. This study reveals the intricate interplay between colonialism, animal welfare, and cultural traditions in shaping India's complex history of animal sacrifice.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often regarded as a cornerstone of English literature, reinforcing colonial ideology through its narrative of exploration, conquest, and civilization. However, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) challenges this foundational narrative, using intertextuality, postmodernism, and metafiction to expose the silences and erasures within colonial discourse. This study critically examines Foe through postcolonial and feminist perspectives, drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) to reveal how Coetzee subverts the imperialist and patriarchal assumptions of Defoe’s text. Employing a comparative textual analysis, this research positions Foe within the broader landscape of postcolonial literature and intertextual theory. Through Said’s contrapuntal reading, the study explores how Coetzee deconstructs Defoe’s narrative authority, particularly through the reimagined voices of Susan Barton and Friday. Spivak’s concept of subaltern silence is central to the examination of Friday’s muteness, illustrating how Coetzee critiques the marginalization of colonized subjects in both historical and literary contexts. The findings reveal that Foe is not merely a retelling of Robinson Crusoe but a radical revision that dismantles the myth of the self-sufficient European man while highlighting the epistemic violence imposed on women and indigenous figures. Coetzee’s use of narrative fragmentation, unreliable narration, and metafiction disrupts the traditional colonial framework, emphasizing the instability of historical knowledge. This study argues that Foe serves as a politically charged reconfiguration of literary history, challenging dominant narratives of empire and authorship. By interrogating colonial storytelling and questioning whose voices are heard and whose are erased, Foe becomes a powerful act of literary resistance, creating space for alternative histories that reclaim the voices of the silenced.

ABSTRACT Set against the “oceanic turn” in global humanities, this study examines the insular geopolitics in Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind. It argues that colonial Java, as a part of the Indonesian archipelago, is characterized by a dialectic of isolation and connectivity, simultaneously enabling and resisting Dutch domination. Through a detailed analysis of linguistic hybridity, gendered resistance, and subaltern agency embodied by characters like Minke and Nyai Ontosoroh, this article reframes the archipelago as not just a geographical entity but also a site of anti-colonial re-imagination and resistance, and underscores the role of islands as generative spaces that harbor decolonial potential and present counter-narratives to dominant colonial discourse, thereby opening new avenues for understanding the interplay among geography, culture, and power in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Abstract This paper examines James Legge’s innovative use of comparative apologetics as a translation strategy in his rendition of Chinese classics during the Victorian era. While previous scholarship has often viewed Legge’s work through the lens of either colonial discourse or purely scholarly achievement, this study reveals how his comparative apologetic approach enabled a more nuanced cross-cultural dialogue between Chinese and Western thought systems. Through analysis of his translation choices, paratextual materials, and evolving interpretive frameworks, the paper demonstrates how Legge strategically negotiated between his missionary identity and scholarly commitments. His approach to key concepts like “Shangdi” (上帝), “Dao” (道), and Mencius’ theory of human nature reveals sophisticated comparative frameworks that acknowledge both similarities and differences between traditions. Though constrained by Victorian theological assumptions, Legge’s comparative apologetics created intellectual spaces where genuine cross-cultural understanding could emerge. His translation methodology – combining philological rigor with comparative religious frameworks – established new standards for scholarly translation while facilitating meaningful dialogue across profound philosophical differences. This research contributes to our understanding of how translation functions as cultural mediation in contexts of religious and philosophical difference, with implications for contemporary cross-cultural communication.

Abstract The global wave of anti-racist social movements in the summer of 2020 was marked by calls for the removal or recontextualization of statues in public space. Conservative politicians and pundits, in turn, framed cultural activism as a “culture war” and a crisis that entailed “erasing history” by calling national heroes into question. I argue that framing the toppling of statues as a historical crisis derives from a colonial understanding of knowledge as singular, universal, and fundamentally European. This understanding of knowledge analytically bifurcates the past and refuses anti-colonial histories of insurgency and contestation. To counter this approach, I engage with the concept of postcolonial critical realism, which theorizes the power of colonial discourses to shape material institutions and esthetic forms, as well as the anti-colonial potential of counter-discourses. To illustrate this argument, I consider the history of two contested statues: Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, and Joséphine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France, Martinique. By revisiting this crisis and the responses it engendered, we can make sense of the present “culture war” not as a contemporary crisis but as a response to a longer historical crisis.

This article reconstructs Syed Hussein Alatas’s critique of the “lazy native” myth and the concept of the captive mind as an integrated metatheoretical programme for building autonomous yet globally dialogical sociology from the Global South. Drawing on an interpretive review of Alatas’s primary texts and key secondary debates in decolonial and global sociology, the article brings Alatas into a historically sensitive comparative dialogue with Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, and dependency/epistemic-justice traditions. The comparison is organised around two issues: (1) the disciplinary project (what it means to “decolonise” sociological theory rather than only critique colonial discourse) and (2) the strategy of epistemic emancipation (rupture/delinking, indigenous epistemologies, or selective critical assimilation). The synthesis shows that Alatas’s “pragmatic route” differs from postcolonial critique of representation (Said) and psycho-affective/revolutionary praxis (Fanon) by centring institutional pathways of sociological concept formation, curriculum, and research agendas. It also differs from modernity/coloniality approaches (Quijano/Mignolo) by criticising imperialism and academic dependency without equating modernity with coloniality or prescribing wholesale epistemic detachment. Alatas advances a selective, problem-oriented concept-work as a concrete route to cognitive justice and a genuinely global sociology. The article concludes with implications for curriculum reform, citation practices, and knowledge-production infrastructures in Global South contexts.

ABSTRACT Postcolonial studies traditionally privileges the visual and the vocal, the colonizer’s gaze and the subaltern’s voice. Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) destabilizes this ocularcentric (vision-privileged) hegemony through a strategic olfactory aesthetics. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic ground” and sensory studies, this article traces how smell functions as both a biocentric disciplinary mechanism and a decolonial epistemology. Chandin Ramchandin’s collapse emerges from internalizing olfactory shame, where the “pungency” of domestic labor marks him as physiognomically inferior within colonial taxonomies. His daughter Mala, conversely, reclaims the silenced terrain of “Caliban’s Woman,” the native female subject ontologically erased from colonial discourse. By transforming her garden into cultivated decay, Mala composts the colonial archive, converting material decomposition into alternative forms of knowing. Through close attention to the novel’s sensory registers, we demonstrate that olfactory epistemology operates as a decolonial strategy, challenging sanitized imperial narratives by inhabiting the supposedly “uninhabitable” spaces of abjection.

ABSTRACT This article offers a historically grounded contribution to the debate on the relationship between Zionism and settler colonialism. Rather than determining whether Zionism should be defined as a settler-colonial project, the study employs settler colonialism as an analytical lens to examine how Zionist actors – specifically the Irgun (Hebrew: Etzel, National Military Organisation) – experienced and conceptualised their position within the colonial environment of Mandatory Palestine. Focusing on a key transitional moment in the 1930s – 1940s, this article trace the shifting consciousness of the Zionist Right as it moved from reliance on the British Empire to an increasingly confrontational stance, culminating in the Irgun’s anti-British revolt under Menachem Begin. This study utilises Irgun and Revisionist leaflets, circulars, pamphlets, and internal directives to reconstruct the organisation’s evolving self-perception. The findings challenge narratives that portray Zionist actors as denying the settler-colonial dimension of their enterprise. Instead, an explicit adoption of colonial discourse, including comparisons with British settler societies and the positioning of Jews as ‘European settlers’, is revealed in the Revisionist and early Irgun phases. At the same time, these sources expose a fluid identity spectrum between ‘settler’ and ‘native’, shaped by contemporary colonial classifications and claims of historical rootedness. The article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that the Irgun’s shift from cooperation with Britain to anti-imperial struggle was not a rupture but a gradual, dialectical transformation in settler-colonial consciousness. Beyond the Zionist case, the study proposes a refined model for understanding how settler societies negotiate tensions between dependence on the metropole and the development of independent identity, highlighting how highly different modes of self-understanding can coexist within the same political movement, it thus invites reconsideration of the temporal and ideological dynamics that shape settler-colonial identity formation.

The article examines the transformation of the archetype of “Homeland” in the national historical consciousness of Kazakh literature. The archetype of “Homeland” represents one of the oldest cultural and spiritual concepts in the literature, where spatial and existential meanings intersect. To understand the core meaning of this archetype in Kazakh literary studies, the research is based on the analysis of local poetic texts grounded in nomadic cosmology and cultural semiotics. Using archetypal, mythopoetic, and discursive analysis, the concept of “Homeland” is classified as a structural model consisting of three components, based on spatial anthropology associated with the archetype of “Mother” and the theoretical principles of the Turkic mythopoetic tradition. The results of the analysis show that archetypal spaces such as Ötüken, Zheruyik, and Saryarka in the national literary tradition function as a sacred code within the collective national consciousness. In Alash literature, the transformation of the “Homeland” archetype into the model of the “Wounded Homeland” under the conditions of colonial discourse is substantiated, becoming an artistic system that renews national unity. The analysis of the transformation of the “Homeland” archetype in the national consciousness reflected in literature makes it possible to expand the scope of archetype theory within contemporary literary-theoretical paradigms and to make a significant contribution to the study and conceptualization of its application in literature. The author expects that this research will contribute to a deeper exploration of the archetypal layers of Alash literature

Since gaining independence in 1991, Kazakhstan has been implementing linguistic reforms to entrench the status of the Kazakh language, specifically the transition from Cyrillic to Latin script, officially initiated in 2017. Framed as part of a broader program of modernization, the reform seeks to entrench national identity and align with international standards; yet, it also precipitates complex debates on its geopolitical, socio-cultural, and linguistic dimensions. This narrative analysis examines the Latinization of the Kazakh language from a post-colonial perspective, exploring how the reform serves as both an anti-colonial critique of Soviet legacies and a post-colonial attempt to reclaim cultural sovereignty. From an analytical point of view based on qualitative content analysis, the study interprets policy documents, academic texts, elite discourses, and media reports as meaning-making texts that project the Latinization project as an icon of modernity and differentiation. The analytical approach helped reveal how Latinization is linked to identity formation, nationalist discourses championed by the elite, and geopolitical repositioning— primarily through the incorporation of diasporic kandas and distance from the Russophone world. As great as the reform is, a qualitative break from colonial discourses, it precipitates tensions around inclusivity, intergenerational access, and linguistic segregation. The shift to the Latin script in Kazakhstan is a reimagining of national identity that is both progressive and weighed down by history. There must be an even-handed approach to implementation so that modernizing ambitions can be reconciled with social solidarity. KEYWORDS: Kazakh language, Latinization, post-colonialism, national identity, language policy, linguistic reform, Central Asia

This research paper discusses First Indian on the Moon (1993) by Sherman Alexie, with the elements of mimicry and ambivalence on the creation of Indigenous identity. Being a hybrid literary text that incorporates poetry, narrative prose and some characteristics of oral storytelling, the text represents the nuances of the Indigenous cultural expression in the profile of a postcolonial setting. Though the works of Alexie have been talked extensively in context of identity, trauma, and reservation life, there is a gap in understanding how the postcolonial concepts of mimicry and ambivalence are manifested in the formation of Indigenous identity as relates to the current work. Thus, this paper aims at examining how these concepts operate in the text to mediate over cultural identity and question the pre-eminent colonial discourses. The study follows a qualitative approach to research, which entails a close examination of the texts and thematic analysis. The analytical terms based on the postcolonial views which inform the study include the formulated ideas of mimicry and ambivalence by Homi K. Bhabha. The analysis explores the ways in which the text interacts with Euro-American literary traditions and renews them both in terms of Indigenous thinking and narration practices. The results suggest that the mimicry in the text functions as a strategic act where hegemonic forms of culture are reproduced but twisted to allow the Indigenous voices to interfere with the established literary and institutional practice. Meanwhile, the ambivalence represents the tension and contradictions that Indigenous people may face as they move between colonization and cultural preservation. Through these dynamics, it becomes evident that Indigenous identity in the text is non-fixed but fluid, and a hybrid and is in a state of constant negotiation. This paper concludes that First Indian on the Moon is a creation of Indigenous identity based on the dialectical nature of mimicry and ambivalence, the identity is performative, resilient and historical. The research adds to Indigenous literary studies and postcolonial theory by highlighting these processes and proving that the cultural offensive through literary hybridity to survive, resist, and make official self is the strategy focused on survival and self-representation.

Sachin Kundalkar’s 2022 Indian Hindi-language feature film Cobalt Blue, which streamed on Netflix, is an adaptation of his 2006 Marathi novel of the same name, which Jerry Pinto translated into English. While the novel is set in Pune in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Kundalkar deliberately set the film in Kochi in India’s southern state of Kerala. This article problematizes this mislocation of the film’s setting, arguing that it creates a dialectical tension. On the one hand, the narration embodies a continuum between colonial discourse on tropicality (which codified tropical spaces as exotic, erotic, and perilous) and the capitalist spectacle of the tourist gaze (and Netflix gaze); on the other hand, it reduces the city of Kochi to a consumable place devoid of the logic of affective geography. This article traces the genealogy of colonial tropicality in relation to Kochi and examines how it is reproduced in the film as a continuum, with the city being showcased as a consumable place within the circuits of film tourism. It also demonstrates how the film’s narrative subverts this very continuum by engendering an affective geography. A comparative reading of the novel and the film is furthermore conducted to establish how the paying guest (whose grammar in the narrative enables him to navigate the tropes of being a tourist, alongside subcategories such as ‘drifter’ and ‘post-tourist’) acts as a catalyst affecting the protagonists—the brother Tanay and sister Anuja—when the guest becomes their romantic and sexual interest and thus engenders the affective geography. The article draws on the theories of Dean MacCannell, John Urry, Sara Ahmed, and select philosophical frameworks of Alain Badiou.

Postcolonial theory has had a significant impact on literary criticism, for the time being, yet, colonial works, especially colonial discourse, have a documented effect on literature. Edward Said noted the play ‘Tempest’ by William Shakespeare as one of the foremost representations of those from the so-called third world’s ‘Other.’ Several plays considered postcolonial works that tackle the influence of colonial discourse and operate against it were cited by Helen Gilbert in the ‘postcolonial plays.’ Gilbert has compiled a list of 19 postcolonial plays that deliberate and address issues such as globalization, media representation, and nationalism. The play ‘Details cannot body wants’ written in 1992 by Chin Woon Ping, covers a wide range of topics from the postcolonial era. However, the mistreatment’s mental effect on subaltern women in postcolonial countries is a crucial topic. The researcher concentrates on the position of women in society in this study, demonstrating the type of coping strategy that allows them to be accepted in their communities. It focuses on some of the critical concepts of postcolonial theory to better describe the role of women subjected to long-term mistreatment. The study examines terms like ecofeminism, marginality, hybridity, and mimicry, utilizing examples from the text to sustain the analysis of the play. The study concluded that women’s roles and positions were persecuted during the colonial period. There is a need for more rights, necessitating revolution and struggle; that is possible, inevitable, and gradually achievable.

The global spread of English has long been entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and unequal power relations. Although English is now spoken predominantly by multilingual users outside traditionally Anglophone nations, dominant norms continue to privilege so-called “native” speakers from the Global North. This study critically analyzes how English Language Teaching (ELT) materials on Instagram reproduce or resist colonial ideologies through digital discourse. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and a decolonial framework, the research examines the linguistic, visual, and ideological dimensions of ELT content produced by teachers, influencers, and language schools on Instagram. The analysis focuses on how English is represented, commodified, and associated with modernity, prestige, success, and global citizenship. Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (text, discursive practice, and social practice) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal discourse analysis, the study examines how colonial discourses position “native” English as the norm and Global South learners as aspirational subjects requiring linguistic correction despite Anglophone users no longer constituting the majority of English speakers. The study reveals Instagram as a site of digital colonialism where English operates as both symbolic capital and cultural commodity. Findings identified clear colonial echoes in ELT content, including the use of “bule” as a benchmark, the promotion of white accents and accent hierarchy, and the Westernization of “global.” These practices reinforce racial and cultural hierarchies by positioning Western identities, languages, and aesthetics as the standard for English proficiency and global modernity.

Abstract: Long before the French conquest of Algiers, the Maghreb had begun to emerge as a conceptual entity, redefined through colonial discourse as distinct from both Africa and the Middle East. With the end of colonial rule, the urgency to renegotiate borders and redefine identity became pressing. In this context, the Moroccan poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine emerges as a leading figure, shaping and influencing the broader movement. This study examines his literary contribution to demonstrate how postindependence surrealist aesthetics were employed to dismantle and reconfigure the colonial construction of the Maghreb. Through a comparative reading of his works, this study traces the emergence of a land-based philosophy in which the earth serves as a repository of ancestral knowledge. Khaïr-Eddine calls for a "return to the future," a reconnection with the land accessible only to the poet-prophet. By shedding light on the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of his work, this study highlights the ongoing relevance of postindependence surrealist thoughts in today's recontested cultural geographies.