Colonial Oppression Research Articles

To Become So Very Welsh: Denis Williams' The Third Temptation and the Effacement of Afro-Caribbean Identity

This essay resituates Denis Williams’s underexplored second novel, The Third Temptation, in terms of racial and colonial violence. Published in 1968, the largely forgotten novel, a highly experimental musing on identity that shares much in common with the Nouveau Roman movement, is seldom addressed in terms of postcolonial or Caribbean literature, in part because all of the major characters are white Europeans—and because the novel is set in Wales. My essay suggests that the novel’s absence of black identity functions as a critique of Welsh colonialism, evidenced in the text both by Williams’s personal experiences in Wales—and repeated, veiled images of Welsh missionary William Hughes, who worked exhaustively to convert African children into Welsh Christians. I suggest the experimental collapse of subjectivity in the novel is designed to mirror the process by which Hughes attempted to efface African identity. Turning to a history of Hughes’s Congo Institute—as well as Williams’s own struggle to reconcile his role as a European artist with his Afro-Caribbean roots—I demonstrate how the novel’s experimentation with perspective is enacted to examine Wales’s often-overlooked involvement in colonial oppression.

Mourning under Siege: The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters

Mourning under Siege:The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters Regine Joseph (bio) « Heureux ceux qui écrivent sous la domination de l'âge dernier : leurs poèmes peuvent faire balles, et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts. » —Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, 19971 «When I wrote Bonjour et adieu à la négritude, one could perhaps read that as "Hello and Goodbye to Politics." If the notion of revolution itself has failed, it would be illusory for me to continue to sleep with a phantom: the great zombie of modernity, it is revolution, alas. The great zombie. » —René Depestre, Interview with Joan Dayan, 19902 Ruins of Dreams3 Patrick Chamoiseau might have articulated the most fundamental dilemma of French Caribbean writing when he claimed early in Ecrire en pays dominé that it was far better for a writer to write under colonialism—the political domination of "l'âge dernier"—than within the "domination silencieuse" of cultural assimilation. In Chamoiseau's view, colonial oppression provided a much more fertile ground to the writer's literary imagination because it offered a visible target against which his craft could "faire balles et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts." In removing the colonial enemy, cultural assimilation disarmed the "guerrier" within the writer, turning him into a mere observer of local reality, "un pauvre scribe, marqueur de paroles."4 This privileging of the writer-guerrier over the writer-scribe expresses Chamoiseau's nostalgia for the ideal of the committed writer—a nostalgia that can be likened to the modern belief in the visionary artist. In the French Caribbean, this (modern) ideal is embodied by figures such as Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and René Depestre whose writings often called for the end of colonial oppression through explosive solutions, radical political change and revolutionary action. Writing fifty years after the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles, Chamoiseau is drawn to the hope (l'espoir) that he imagines had been the explosive impact (faire balles) of that earlier writing. As he examines the livres endormis from the high days [End Page 13] of anti-colonial struggle, Chamoiseau asks a question to which we will return throughout this article: What is left for a writer to write once the glory days are gone? What seems to fascinate, yet trouble, Chamoiseau as a writer is the apocalyptic element (seemingly) inherent to the poetics and politics of this earlier literature. Aimé Césaire's call for decolonization, for instance, is indeed explosive. His Cahier d'un retour au pays natal employs metaphors of explosion in the poet's pathological analysis of the native land ('Les Antilles dynamités d'alcool')5 as well as in his vision of its future salvation ('les volcans éclateront, l'eau emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu'un bouillonnement tiède picoré d'oiseaux marins').6 In the poet's view, cataclysmic change conceived as 'l'apocalypse des monstres… chaude élection de cendres, de ruines et d'affaissements,' seems to hold the highest potential for stimulating 'l'affreuse inanité de notre raison d'être.' The Cahier's poetic thrust seems to arise as much out of an apocalypse—a movement toward an impending cataclysmic end ('La Fin du monde, parbleu')7—as an affirmation of the poet's Negritude.8 Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre provides another example from this l'âge dernier of an apocalyptic conception of revolutionary change. Fanon's ardent attraction to revolution partly stems from the transformative and purifying power of apocalyptic action. In his vision of the decolonizing process, "Tout est permis; en réalité, l'on ne se réunit que pour laisser la libido accumulée, l'aggressivité empêchée, sourdre volcaniquement. Mises à mort symboliques, chevauchées figuratives, meurtres multiples imaginaires, il faut que tout cela sorte. Les mauvaises humeurs s'écoulent, bruyantes telles des coulées de lave...''9 In Fanon's vision, violence (erupted volcanoes) is necessary ingredient that allows revolution to fulfill its destructive and reconstructive purpose; it brings about the end of decolonization by destroying all of its constitutive elements (colonial system, colonizer...

Of Hospitality and Hosting: Tracing Colonial Haunting in W. B. Yeats

Of Hospitality and Hosting:Tracing Colonial Haunting in W. B. Yeats Sean G. Weidman W. B. Yeats champions what now seems a rather anachronistic ideal of hosting in "Coole Park, 1929," a poem that celebrates hospitality both as a means of welcoming outsiders and as a ritual that structures a space conducive to creative freedom. As a paean to Lady Gregory and the productivity engendered through her hospitality at Coole Park, the poem details the "dance-like glory that those walls begot" as well as the "certainty upon the dreaming air" that many found there.1 Hospitality, seen through the poem, functions as a remarkably generative force in the formation of the individual and their community. But this aesthetic and social idealism of hospitality does not hold in much of Yeats's other work, where the concept is routinely complicated by an awareness that the reality of the hosting ideal is at best fading, and at worst was always an idyllic fantasy. Take, in contrast, Yeats's similarly titled poem, "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." Both poems, notably, come from the same collection—placed consecutively, in fact, in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)—but their notions of the hospitality of Gregory and Coole Park differ sharply. "Coole Park, 1929," for example, opens with the speaker meditating quietly "upon a swallow's flight," whereas the speaker's first lines of "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" note more urgently that "under my window-ledge the waters race."2 The latter poem's final stanza signals a similar unrest by remarking that "all is changed […] / where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood" (CP, 46, 48). A tranquil space in one time and disturbed in another—for Yeats, the hospitality of Coole Park appears confused. Whether that hospitality is productive or destructive as a social mechanism differs drastically in these two poems, but that variation does not stem from momentary failures of Coole Park or lapses in the generosity of its host. No, the very natures of hospitable places often change in Yeats's work. A poem Yeats composed almost two decades earlier, for example—"The Wild Swans at Coole"—provides a fascinating combination of the two later Coole poems, wherein Yeats links "the still water, / [and] mysterious, beautiful" (25–26) swans with an apprehension that "some day / […] they [End Page 1025] [will] have flown away" (29–30). The penultimate stanza, the poem's flag-bearer of hospitable hope, suggests that Coole provides a welcome respite to an otherwise "sore" history.3 The final stanza, however, then intimates that not even the hospitality of Coole provides a space "unwearied still"; a gyre-like chaos makes its way into the otherwise tranquil swans of Coole, who "scatter wheeling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings," and "all's changed."4 In these poems and throughout his oeuvre, hospitable spaces carry importance for Yeats, but so too does his insistence that hospitable spaces may become contested, troubled, or haunted in a destructive way that curtails otherwise fruitful offerings of hospitality. When Yeats invokes the ceremonial notion of hospitality, he does so always with an eye toward the value of the practice: hearkening back to early Irish custom, the admirable man for Yeats offers everything he has, generously and unconditionally. But Yeats also addresses systems of hospitality with an apprehension that bears the marks of a complicated and troubling history of colonial oppression—if Yeats portrays hospitality as a valuable albeit archaic virtue that merits celebration, that is, then hospitality also appears always in the midst of an apprehension that hospitable hostings may go awry. Situations crop up repeatedly in Yeats's work where guests, invited or unknown, abuse a host's generosity, refuse to leave, and become an invasive force. For Yeats, though, hospitality as virtue and practice is fundamentally concerned with these contested spaces, and when he negotiates the anxieties of those spaces in his writing, he characterizes the potential dangers of hosting in terms of haunting: material or immaterial occupations of otherwise uncontested spaces. More than just recurring themes, hospitality and haunting invariably go hand-in-hand in Yeats's work, despite their absence in Yeats criticism.5 While Yeats...

Postcolonial Cities as Spaces of Resistance and Contestation: The Cases of Yangon and Colombo

Many postcolonial cities still possess material remnants of colonial rule. Old colonial buildings and squares serve a variety of functions, ranging from housing government offices and private businesses to open spaces where people gather. I argue that such colonial places are constantly being renegotiated and re-appropriated by postcolonial societies who are not foolish enough to fail to understand that the cities they live in were once bastions of colonial oppression and subjugation. This piece attempts to elucidate these creative processes in Colombo and Yangon. My primary objective is to demonstrate the way locals in Colombo and Yangon construct postcolonial urban geographies through seemingly mundane, daily acts and practices in the context of their interactions within the cities’ built, urban environments. I employ two approaches to this work. First, I use a first-person, observational perspective based on my visits to both cities in May 2012 [Yangon] and June 2015 [Colombo]. Second, I utilise the concepts of gazing, placemaking, and visibility to enrich my narrative. I conclude that such “weapons of the weak” are powerful in driving resistance against both colonial and neo-colonial contexts.

What does ‘holism’ mean in Indigenous mental health?

In Canada, suicide and depression rates are much higher among Indigenous populations compared to the general population. Colonial practices, cultural discontinuity, marginalization, and oppression have led to many of the mental health issues faced by Indigenous populations today. Recent literature emphasizes the importance of culture in the treatment and prevention of mental health problems among Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, Indigenous perspectives on mental health or wellness in the peer-reviewed literature are often limited. This review aims to incorporate the grey literature produced by Indigenous organizations to better describe what ‘holism’ is as it relates to the wellness of Indigenous peoples, and to identify some practical implications of this understanding for healthcare providers addressing the needs of Indigenous patients and clients.

Representations of Women’s Agency in African Anti-colonial Struggles: The Case of Sambizanga (1972) and Mapantsula (1988)

Films made during African nationalist struggles and which explore African women’s experiences in these conflicts, such as Sambizanga (dir. Sarah Maldoror 1972) and Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz 1988), often reflect the dominant patriarchal views regarding women’s “place” in society. Sambizanga, set in Angola, and Mapantsula, set in South Africa, create gendered experiences in which women, to varying degrees, occupy less privileged positions than men in the generation and sharing of knowledge, and in participation in the nationalist struggles. Women’s participation in the struggles seems to be limited by their lack of knowledge of the full extent of the conditions of colonial oppression. Women also seem to carry a lesser burden of experiences of physical pain and humiliation at the hands of colonialists. This paper argues that such representations underestimate the suffering of women and their agency during the colonial era and anti-colonial struggles. It also considers the possibility that such representations affirm stereotypical assumptions about, and perceived images of, African women that may not necessarily reflect their “real” experiences. In postcolonial states where having been active in the anti-colonial struggle still carries some currency, such representations may undermine the political legitimacy that women need in order to acquire significant leadership roles in governments.

The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculptureSara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest ofSara Baartmanin explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

안데스 원주민 운동과 공동체 경제: 에콰도르 사례를 중심으로

This article is to analyze what is the main impetus of the andean indigenous movements principally after the 1990s, and what relation does the traditional communitarian economy have with this impetus. Inca Empire was the society based on the reciprocal economic activities. These activities were reinforced because of the vertical network of reciprocity, according to the geographical dissemination of Ayllu members. But the communitarian economic system was distorted and weakened in the colonial oppression and exploitation. In th face of these difficulties, the indigenous people directed their efforts toward the substantiality of this economic system through their strategy of ‘resistance in adaption’. In 1937, the existing indigenous ‘Comunidad’ btained the new legal status, that is, ‘Comuna’. But the communitarian, reciprocal economic activities of Comuna were threatened again and in the more serious manner, with the capitalization of the rural areas, promoted by the name of the Land Reform in 1964 and 1973, and the neoliberal adjustments during the 1980s and the 1990s. In the 1990s, the indigenous people reacted to these threats as massive revolts. In this process, the communitarian economic thoughts served as a mediator to organize resistance and mobilize people against the neoliberal capitalization, after all producing the New Constitutions in the 2000s, that accepted the indigenous traditions and values as their fundamental principle.

PRIBUMI SUBALTERN DALAM NOVEL-NOVEL INDONESIA PASCAKOLONIAL

This research is motivated by colonial problems in the archipelago that still leave traces of oppression as well as efforts of the struggle of the natives to escape from the impact of the ideology. The trail of colonial colonization that still lags behind creates indigenous groups that become subalterns-isolated, oppressed, and discarded groups. In the postcolonial theory of subaltern Gayatri Spivax it is stated that among the most victimized groups of colonialism are women. Relevant to the issue, this study aims to describe the forms of oppression and the struggle of indigenous people, especially women who become subalterns, against the colonial ideology. Data obtained from modern Indonesian novels are then analyzed qualitatively. Based on the research data source, Orang-orang Blanti by Wisran Hadi, Maya by Ayu Utami and Gadis Pantai by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the result of this research shows that indigenous figures, especially women become subaltern because they are marginalized, economically impoverished, labeled, As well as experiencing sexual harassment. Furthermore the form of the struggle of indigenous women in the face of colonial oppression in the context of the subaltern is to foster the spirit of struggle by recalling the glory of the past, practicing the knowledge gained through modern education, maintaining traditional and cultural values, as well as mimicry

Remembering the short stories of Yvonne Vera: A postcolonial and feminist reading of Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals?

The Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera is one of the most important writers to emerge from the African continent over the last two decades. Although she has received widespread critical acclaim as well as academic scrutiny, analyses of her work have mostly focused on her novels. This article attempts to redress this scholarly imbalance by offering a close textual analysis of Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? through a critical lens of postcolonial and feminist theory. In these stories Vera articulates the internal thoughts of her characters in order to explore the way that oppressed people negotiate the fact of their oppression. It is particularly the female characters’ reflections that reveal the complexity of the position occupied by colonised women and the sophistication of their attempts to address the layered marginalisation to which they are subjected. Vera shows that, for them, an unproblematic participation in the nationalist movement for liberating Zimbabwe from colonial oppression is simply not an option. The article explores the specifically gendered expectations and obstacles that shape the female characters’ struggles in the Zimbabwean context.

Second Skin, white masks: Postcolonial reparation in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Melanie Klein’s theory of psychic reparation has been rightly criticized for colonial assumptions about which objects and populations are deemed worthy of political reparation. Yet this article cautions against dismissing Klein’s account of reparation altogether, and advocates reading Klein against herself. Illustrating this argument, I offer an against-the-grain reading of the psychic dynamics of postcolonial conflict in another text widely criticized for its colonial assumptions: Star Trek. I focus on the anticolonial revolutionary character Kira Nerys in spinoff Deep Space Nine, who never forgives her colonial oppressors, but does integrate love and hate in the context of radical anticolonial coalition-building.

Le dernier voyage de Marx : éléments pour une biographie intellectuelle

The last years of Marx’s life have usually been viewed as a period in which, having satisfied his intellectual curiosity, he had ceased working. The analysis of some still unpublished or little known manuscripts allows us to go beyond this legend and to show that he persevered, despite his various health problems, in his research about history. Indeed during the last months of his life Marx was a careful observer of the main events in international politics. His letters furthermore manifest his strong opposition to the colonial oppression of Algeria and Egypt. This work was interrupted by a long and painful illness that forced him to wander through England, France, Switzerland and Algeria, in search of the best climate for a recovery of his health. His sole period of residence outside Europe, two months in Algiers, gave him the opportunity to formulate some precious reflections on the Arabic world and its resistance to French occupation.

An Animal-Centered Perspective on Colonial Oppression: Animal Representations and the Narrating Ox in Uwe Timm’s ‘‘Morenga’’ (1978)

As a result of its topic and its narrative style, Uwe Timm’s novel ‘Morenga’ (1978) marks an important step in the development of postcolonial German literature. The main theme of the book is the bloody suppression of the Herero and the Nama uprisings through the German army in South-West Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. With recourse to historical and fictional documents and by using different narrative perspectives, the text achieves a plurality of voices and thereby destabilizes a one-dimensional view on colonialism. The present article discusses the functions of the nonhuman animals appearing in ‘Morenga’. It is assumed that the animal representations are an essential part of the plot and underscore the criticism of colonial rule in a narrative manner too. The novel contains several descriptions of suffering animals and links them to the harm of the Herero and the Nama in order to point out the ruthlessness of the colonists. Moreover, the book features a story-telling ox, which initiates a reflection process about possible ways of narrating colonial history. The talking ox adds a specific animal-centered perspective on colonial oppression and raises questions about emancipation, self-determination, and the agency of the nonhuman ‘other’

Indigenous Tewa language regimes across time: Persistence and transformation

AbstractThis article attempts to trace and understand the historical development and transformation of the regimes of language Indigenous to the Village of Tewa (northeastern Arizona). It examines the social institutions and cultural practices that first cultivated a particular set of language ideologies and linguistic practices in the precolonial period. It also tracks more recent transformations involving contemporary Tewa adaptations to inclusion in the federally recognized Hopi Tribe and to the hegemony of the larger nation-state. Critical to my argument is the role of theocratic institutions and Indigenous social organization (e.g., clans and moieties) in providing a foundation for ideological production and elaboration. This account provides a better analysis of Tewa linguistic resistance to Spanish colonization than that of Edward Dozier, who attributed language contact outcomes to the historical circumstances of Spanish colonial oppression rather than to the expression of Indigenous language ideologies, including their regimes of temporalization and the crossing of temporal borders in subjective history.

Remembering Algeria: melancholy, depression and the colonising of the pieds-noirs

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the end of colonial Algeria and the subsequent repatriation of the settler population as it was experienced and remembered by the settler (or pied-noir) repatriates in the aftermath of the Algerian war. It argues that the often hostile reception which awaited repatriates arriving in mainland France played a fundamental role in the nascent pied-noir community’s reimagining of its identity, which was shaped by nostalgia, grief and melancholia. Drawing on the work of Ann Cvetkovitch and Kelly Oliver, this article examines the figure of the melancholic as a sufferer not of a pathological malady, but as the object of socially constituted oppression. Using the work of Fanon, it argues that although the pieds-noirs were themselves widely received as colonisers by the metropolitan population, they were subject to a form of discrimination which re-created within the Hexagon the conditions of colonial oppression through the colonisation of psychic space. Drawing on literary works by pieds-noirs, the article traces the experiences of depression and melancholia amongst the repatriates, and conceptualises the pieds-noirs, not as either guilty colonisers or innocent victims, but as individuals in a site of post-colonial conflict in which the discursive categories of coloniser and colonised are renegotiated.

Whose War, Whose Enemy? Gerard Bhengu’s War Imagery in Context

ABSTRACTThe histories of all South Africans are intertwined in an intricate web of expectations, ideals and perceptions—many often in conflict with those of others. It was, however, when South Africans of diverse persuasions and ethnicities were called to arms in the first and second Word Wars, in the interest of what was presented as being of significance both nationally and internationally, that attempts were made to galvanise loyalties, patriotism and national ideals—even across racial divides. For a time, therefore, recent and past histories of colonial oppression were shelved but not without negotiated promises of better prospects for all after the war. The role of black South Africans as part of the allied presence in World War II has been largely neglected. Pioneer local artist Gerard Bhengu’s murals give an account of the idealism and recruitment ploys associated with enlistment of Zulus in World War II, and they reflect significant dimensions on the context that they relate, including the perspectives of the artist and those of his peers. It is this questioning of the meanings and references in the murals that is the focus of this paper.

Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" eds. by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible

Reviewed by: Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" eds. by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible Victor Luftig RETHINKING JOYCE'S "DUBLINERS", edited by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 226 pp. $99.99. This collection demonstrates, at times wonderfully, that there is still much to be said about Dubliners—though I am not convinced that it represents a "rethinking" any more than would any other critical volume. Nor am I convinced that the collection meaningfully escapes the trap its editors bemoan or that Dubliners criticism needs the liberation for which they call. But it does hint at what more radical rethinking might look like. The premise for Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" is that an excessive focus on the trope of paralysis has effectively paralyzed criticism about the stories. That claim, however, seems sometimes to depend on a self-congratulatory stacking of the deck; and the proposed alternatives to paralysis do not always seem so different from the ostensibly rejected trope. That is most apparent in the first essay, by Claire A. Culleton, which argues that "insisting only on treating the paralysis in the stories discourages readers from seeing the incredible movement that was alive and moving about Dublin as Joyce wrote these stories" (11). That "only" seems to me suspect. As I have looked back at the readings that are supposed to illustrate an exclusive focus on paralysis, I find plenty else—for instance, references to Joyce's wish, amidst the same famous exchange in which he refers to "paralysis," to foster the "spiritual liberation" of Ireland (SL 88). Jack Dudley, one of the contributors who most closely follows Culleton's lead in challenging "'the simple paralysis reading'" (a phrase Dudley takes from Dominic Head1), builds his essay on the sound point that we have not taken "the idea of particularly 'spiritual liberation'" seriously enough. It is good that he does so, in relation to "Grace" here, but to say that the idea is "seldom considered" (173), as he also does, is something else again and is belied by my own review of some critical texts that invoke paralysis as a central theme of Dubliners. Does one really generate fresh insights by taking stories long associated with paralysis and associating them instead with fruitless, [End Page 437] foredoomed movement, as the editors recommend? To insist on the importance of the distinction requires Culleton to treat as absolute and literal—"It is different from not moving: one cannot move. In Dubliners, there is no loss of muscle function" (19)—what the "entrenched" criticism has treated mainly, outside of "The Sisters," as metaphor. Culleton's co-editor, Ellen Scheible, begins her excellent piece by making a more subtle distinction, characterizing paralysis in Dubliners as a condition in which "the struggle to identify … progressive movement … occurs inside the mental space of its characters and is impeded, consistently, by the trappings of the body" (94). Scheible needs no critical strawmen to set up her deft deployment of "The Dead" to get at the way that "postcolonial subjectivity must undergo a mirror stage where it recognizes the impossibility of unified nationhood implicit in its development and recognition of a nation" (108). The essays that follow Culleton's lead in positioning themselves mainly as rejecting or rethinking previous critics' ostensibly narrow commitment to the idea of paralysis seem to me a little hamstrung by that insistence. But other essays, beginning with Scheible's, turn fruitfully towards a different set of struggles. Indeed, the collection stages what I think is a really interesting critical debate about the status in Dubliners of colonial Ireland's women and the poor. It begins with Jim LeBlanc's extending Culleton's comment on "Eveline" to claim that the story depicts "the self-imposed rejection of the possibility of escape from Dublin" (55). Indeed, LeBlanc claims that, in Dubliners,"limits to personal freedom are usually self-imposed or intentionally unchallenged" (56); LeBlanc's assignment of an unappreciated Sartrean "existential freedom" to Joyce's characters results in a rather shockingly (at least I was shocked) neoliberal reading according to which Dubliners are actually free, and just unwilling, to overcome poverty, addiction, misogyny, and colonial oppression. But the collection effectively counters...

Chinua Achebe by Jago Morrison, and: Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite by Terri Ochiaghia

Reviewed by: Chinua Achebe by Jago Morrison, and: Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite by Terri Ochiaghia Chengyi Coral Wu (bio) Jago Morrison. Chinua Achebe. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014. Pp xi, 272. £30.00. Terri Ochiaghia. Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite. Rochester: James Currey, 2014. Pp ix, 218. US$80. Chinua Achebe has been recognized as the founding father of African literature for his internationally acclaimed novel Things Fall Apart (1958). His essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1975) also established him as a leading postcolonial studies critic. Two posthumous studies of Achebe, Jago Morrison’s Chinua Achebe and Terri Ochiagha’s Achebe and Friends at Umuahia, re-examine and challenge the conventional and widely held notions about Achebe’s scholarship. Morrison revisits the notion that Achebe is a “cultural nationalist” whose literary writing promotes Nigerian anti-colonial nationalism. For Morrison, far from endorsing Nigeria, the trajectory of Achebe’s novels questions the very premise of Nigerian nationalism. Ochiagha reviews Achebe’s status and relation to his closest contemporaries, including the poet Christopher Okigbo and the novelists Chukwuemeka Ike, Elechi Almadi, and Chike Momah, arguing that Achebe should not be treated as a “founding father” of African literature and thus his contemporaries should not be regarded as his “followers.” Against the notion of “the Achebe School” that has been used to understand Achebe and his contemporaries, Ochiagha foregrounds the “companionship” and “friendship” among them (9). Chinua Achebe begins by elaborating on Achebe’s career as a broadcaster and an editor in the 1950s and 1960s, both occupations which were developed in the context of Nigerian independence. Achebe’s position as the director of the broadcasting program “Voice of Nigeria” required him to promote the ideal of “One Nigeria” (Morrison 11). In the meanwhile, his position as the general editor of the African Writers Series for Heinemann Educational Books aimed to promote the national literature of Nigeria and many other African [End Page 176] countries. Achebe’s public image as a promoter of Nigeria and Nigerian literature thus ties him to the notion that his literary writings provide examples of Nigerian national literature. Morrison highlights contradictions between the contexts of Achebe’s career and the texts he composed (mainly his novels) and argues that Achebe was ambivalent about Nigeria as a political and cultural concept. Morrison’s analyses of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964) show paradoxes of Achebe’s representations of British colonization of Igboland in different time periods and his Igbo characters’ resistance against it. Morrison argues that Achebe’s novelistic critiques of colonialism are often oblique and his representations of British colonization of Igboland are, to some extent, not true to history. Instead, Achebe’s novels, Morrison emphasizes, focus more on weaknesses and conflicts existing within Igbo culture—including the Igbo’s passive resistance against British colonialism, the obsession with masculinity (as dramatized by Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and Ezeulu in Arrow of God), the clannishness and corruptions associated with this obsession (as in No Longer at Ease), and the excess of intra-tribe competition (as dramatized by Ezeulu and his rival Nwaka). Those problems, Morrison argues, highlight Achebe’s reflection on the self-destructive nature of Igbo culture rather than his rebellion against colonial oppression and conquest. In foregrounding Achebe’s portrayals of the internal problems of an indigenous culture, Morrison does not intend to question Achebe’s anti-colonial attitude. Achebe’s novels demonstrate the richness and complexity of the Igbo cultural system in opposition to colonial representations of African indigenous cultures. However, Achebe’s identification with the Igbo does not make him a “nationalist.” Morrison’s analyses of Achebe’s novels about post-independence Nigeria, including A Man of the People (1966) and Anthill of the Savannah (1987), highlight the author’s pessimism about the validity of the Nigerian Federation. Morrison shows how in these two novels Achebe targets the corruption of the Nigerian (male) national and educated elites—a ruling class the author represents as being unable to change the status quo due to their obsession with...

“Invisible” and “unheard” children in fragile contexts – reflections from field research among the Ba’Aka in the Central African Republic

In the present article I outline the situation of children who belong to an indigenous community of Ba’Aka Pygmies, a group inhabiting the Sangha-Mbaéré region of rainforest in the Central African Republic. These children are inscribed in the categories of “invisible” and “unheard” children. They are also deprived of the right to be properly researched. This is due to a number of external and internal factors which shape the contemporary reality of the formerly colonised country. Despite the fact that the Central African Republic broke free from colonial oppression, since 1960s it has been experiencing internal colonisation and civilising missions by the countries of the Global North so as to be “fruitfully” written in the narrative of national development. Thus, referring to key categories, I discuss postcolonial representations: images and narratives perceived through the perspective of a female researcher who, since 2002, has conducted field research among excluded and marginalised children and young people in fragile (vulnerable) contexts in Central Africa.

JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh,The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason(1986),The Shadow Lines(1988),The Glass Place(2000),The Hungry Tide(2004), andThe Ibistrilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land(1992),Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma(1998), andCountdown(1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction,The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published inThe New Yorker, The New Republic, andThe New York Timesand collected inThe Iman and the Indian(2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of love and longing across generations, manifold religious manifestations, and the systematic pain of colonial oppression. The deep and abiding theme of many works is anthropogenic environmental damage, now boldly and directly addressed inThe Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable(2016). Married to accomplished fellow author Deborah Baker, whose work traces the Asian peregrinations of Allen Ginsberg, the literary milieu of Laura Riding, and the complexity of Islamic conversion, Ghosh has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Queens College, and Delhi University. He has won more prizes and honorary doctorates, and been a fellow at more famous institutions and a distinguished visitor in more far-flung places, than you can shake a stick at. He even has two homes: Brooklyn and Goa. In short, Ghosh's profile makes you wonder if there might not be more than one of him.