Colonial Discourse Research Articles

DEHUMANISATION OF COLONISED HUMANS REVISITED: RACIAL SPECIESISM AND CALIBAN’S “EXPLOD[ING] PROSPERO’S OLD MYTH” IN AIME CESAIRE’S A TEMPEST

The political turmoil between the 1950s and the 1970s that stemmed from the liberation movements in Africa, and in the Caribbean Islands, in which African/ black diaspora is so common, triggered many writers of the time to visit colonial literature in order to be able to find a meaning for the liberation struggles of the blacks. Similarly, Aimé Césaire, a Francophone literary and political figure, revisited Shakespeare’s The Tempest (around 1611), and adapted it into A Tempest (Une Tempête,1969). A Tempest is a play in which Shakespearean Prospero’s strong and univocal status is replaced by strong and rebellious Caliban, who subverts all the colonial discourses that marginalise and dehumanise the blacks. In the light of these discussions, this paper aims to discuss that in A Tempest, Caliban becomes an instrument for Césaire in order to demarginalise the blacks contrary to Prospero’s dehumanising methods applied through racial speciesism. By means of Caliban’s “explod[ing] Prospero’s old myth”, Césaire wants to prove that blacks are humans, too, with a glorious history and identity to be proud of.

Towards a historical geography of girlhood

AbstractThis paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of ‘girl’ was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the ‘girl’—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that ‘girlhood’ is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices.

The Franco-Algerian War: Narrating the Failure of the French Imperialist Project in Norman Lewis’s Darkness Visible (1960)

This article examines the political attitude towards representing French colonialism to Algeria during the Franco-Algerian war (1954-1962) in Darkness Visible (1960) by the Welsh-British Norman Lewis. It probes how Lewis’s novel portrays French colonial project, which was intended to bring civilization to Algerians, as a failure through raising an anti- colonial thought. In the novel, the Mission does not only fail to achieve the goals of its agenda, but also fails in the sense that it exposes more negative consequences of exploitation, oppression, and cultural destruction of the colonized people. The paper also scrutinizes Lewis’s use of immediacy of the narrative and Manicheanism in characterization as literary device to critique French colonial practices against the natives; while, in parallel, Lewis highlights the aspect of nationalist mobilization to unearth the legitimacy of the Algerians fighting for liberty. Therefore, this article ventures thematically into Darkness Visible within anti- colonial discourse parameters. Keywords: Darkness Visible, Franco-Algerian war, immediacy and Manicheanism, nationalist mobilization, Norman Lewis

Portrayal of Violence in Pashto Language Movies and the Perceptions of Modern Youth: A Case Study of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan)

The Pashtun subject is derogatorily portrayed in Pakistani or Lollywood movies as either the brave savage, the violent Islamist, or the unkind father and simple-minded clown. These portrayals have their roots in post-9/11 national and international political discourse as well as colonial discourse, which subsequently influenced Pashto movies. The representation of Pashtun subjectivities in cinematic renditions is crucial in establishing their exclusion from the nation's imagined community and political body. It also serves to reinforce the dominance of specific identities over other marginalized identities. This study also looks at the influence of violence in Pashto films on the behavior of the contemporary youth of KP. The information was gathered from three districts, i.e., Peshawar, Mardan, and Karak, of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa; the data was gathered from 300 university students, Male and Female, by utilizing a simple random sampling procedure. According to empirical findings, most KP youth disagreed with the idea that Pashto Language films depict violence in their narratives. Nonetheless, they think that some Pashto Language movie characters are opposed to the customs of the Pashtoon identity.

The Development of Casta Painting as Visual Genre in New Spain and the Production of Ethnoracial Stereotypes

The aim of this essay is to analyze the ways in which the development of the casta pictorial genre contributed to the production and stabilization of racializing and racist stereotypes. These racial stereotypes still persist in cultural imaginaries in and about Latin America as part of the long duration of coloniality. Casta painting from New Spain is analyzed here as a pictorial genre and as a colonial discourse in connection with situated social and racial concepts, such as Creole, caste, and calidad. The analysis develops through a dialogue with perspectives from Semiology of Art, Visual studies, Postcolonial studies, and Latin American Critique of Coloniality. In this regard, this essay intends to create a conversation among different disciplines and fields of study in order to develop a complex, transdisciplinary approach to a problem from colonial times: the production and circulation of ethnoracial stereotypes and their impact on social relations, lived experiences, and subjectivities.

Memories of schooling amongst trans women and sexuality diverse men in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Drawing from a life history study we examine memories and experience of schooling in Papua New Guinea among 45 trans women and sexuality diverse men. While participants reported regulating their expression of gender and sexuality to ‘fit in’ and avoid physical and verbal abuse at school, others felt able and supported to express their gender and sexuality diversity more freely beyond stereotypical norms. Schools provided a varietyof experience for trans and sexuality diverse youth, unsupportive in many ways but supportive in others. The study highlights the importance of examining the impact of colonial discourses driving homophobia and transphobia in diverse settings, and understanding the socio-cultural climates of schools to identify solutions to the discrimination and violence experienced by trans women and sexuality diverse students. Further research into the current experiences of trans, gender and sexuality diverse young people in school would provide a valuable comparative perspective to our retrospective study.

Postcolonial Entry Points into Networked Learning

It would be overly simplistic to assume that these collaborative pedagogical approaches function uniformly across diverse student cohorts. Postcolonial theory can provide a framework to systematically investigate dynamics that potentially generate differentiated experiences or outcomes within networked learning spaces. This research delves into the pervasive influence of Western-centric discourse within online postgraduate education, shedding light on its dual impact of colonising both knowledge and identities. While networked learning promises a collaborative and inclusive educational paradigm, it becomes evident that the dominance of Western cultural norms acts as a powerful agent of colonisation, silencing non-Western perspectives and erasing their voices in the digital realm. This perpetuates historical colonial power imbalances, thus extending colonial legacies into the landscape of networked learning. The study unearths three critical entry points to this discourse, each of which amplifies the nuanced challenges posed by colonial dynamics in networked learning. First, it elucidates the reinforcement of dominant discourses, revealing how networked learning, when devoid of critical oversight, risks sustaining Western-centric narratives and structures, thereby overshadowing subaltern perspectives. This phenomenon mirrors the experiences of participants and exacerbates colonial knowledge hierarchies. Secondly, the research uncovers the marginalisation of subaltern voices within networked learning. Power imbalances within the network, if left unaddressed, can compel subaltern participants to conform to dominant discourse, leading to unequal engagement. These circumstances closely resemble the experiences reported by participants, highlighting the perils of marginalisation and the need for redress. Thirdly, the study illuminates the unsettling imbalance in knowledge sharing, reflecting the concerns raised by participants. Networked learning may inadvertently exhibit knowledge-sharing disparities, with subaltern voices contributing disproportionately while dominant discourses remain unchallenged. This dynamic impedes the network's potential to facilitate a diverse and enriched exchange of knowledge. The research underscores the pressing importance of explicitly addressing these challenges in networked learning practices. Failure to do so risks the unintentional perpetuation of colonial discourses, hindering the transformative potential of networked learning. By acknowledging these postcolonial entry points and enacting measures to rectify them, networked learning can overcome exclusionary dynamics and more effectively challenge and dismantle colonial legacies, thereby advancing a more inclusive, equitable educational landscape for all stakeholders and providing a comprehensive solution to the complex issue at hand.

Funny Boy, postmemorial potentialities, and the queer diasporic Sri Lankan novel

ABSTRACT As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory as “postmemory” in line with Marianne Hirsch’s theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch’s framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka.

Manifestations of Epistemic Violence in Assumptions of Students in an Undergraduate Classroom in Bangladesh

Epistemic violence refers to the silencing and displacing of a system of knowledge deemed to be inferior by another system of knowledge self-perceived as superior. In postcolonial context, it refers to the dominance and imposition of Western ways of perceiving the world by displacing the non-Western ways of perceiving the world. Colonial discourse is so encompassing in the postcolonial countries that students come to the classroom with assumptions that carry baggage of epistemic violence. According to Freire, the manifestations of this global “theme” may take particular dimensions in particular societies. Critical interrogation of epistemic violence requires identification of the particular manifestations of epistemic violence in particular societies. Following the approach of critical discourse analysis, this paper attempts to explore how epistemic violence manifests itself in the student assumptions exposed in their classroom interactions in an undergraduate classroom in Bangladesh, a postcolonial country. The findings reveal that besides the Western form of epistemic violence, there are local varieties of epistemic violence in Bangladesh. The discourses contributing to epistemic violence have been so ingrained in society that they appear as symbolic capital exercising symbolic violence where education plays a big role. The manifestations of epistemic violence in the context of Bangladesh revealed in this study have implications for framing critical instruction for problematising epistemic violence in postcolonial countries like Bangladesh.

The rhetoric of torture in Henri Alleg’s La Question

ABSTRACT Drawing essentially on David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), this article discusses the discursive mechanisms that accompany the practice of torture as described in Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958). Examining the relation between these mechanisms and the broader discourses of colonialism and subjection, it shows that the inscription of colonial power on the injured and dehumanised body of the tortured is paralleled by the verbal denigration of these victims, reduced to a state of infantilism or, worse, animality, through verbal reflexes such as animalistic adjectives and tutoiement – a form of speech which consists in the use of the singular form of the second person (you) and which is usually reserved for children and those deemed not worthy of respect. More importantly, it argues that, rejecting both the victim status and the dehumanisation to which his jailers attempt to reduce him, Alleg shapes his own empowering rhetorical strategies, in turn debasing the torturers, ridiculing them, or mocking the colonial myths of chivalry and racial superiority. Instead of the latter, Alleg proposes a discourse of humanism and interracial brotherhood that conquers the violence he endures.

Charles Darwin: towards a bio-religious and colonial genealogy of evolutionary being

ABSTRACT While studies have examined Charles Darwin's wide social and political impact, they have not adequately centred the combined influence of colonial systems of human differentiation and religion within them. To address this, I draw from Sylvia Wynter's critique concerning how religious and colonial discourses contribute to the shifting development of Man within the Western tradition. Specifically, I explore how Darwin focused his evolutionary gaze towards one of the unique foundations of what it meant to be human in his time: religion. Tracing the entangled religious and colonial filiations of Darwin's thought, I show that he established an evolutionary link between human and non-human animals by proposing both Indigenous peoples and dogs held superstitious beliefs. To illustrate this, I show that Darwin transposed Victorian anthropological conceptions of religion - as a quantifiable object of knowledge corresponding to the intellect and associated with phrenology, dream theory and the apparitional soul - into a bio-religious conception of evolution. Furthermore, I argue that Darwin's bio-evolutionism assumes Christianity is most closely associated with abstract reason. Finally, analyzing the role of race in Darwin's thought, I suggest that theology is not what was before modern scientific bio-evolutionary conceptions of race, but at its very core.

Revisiting Colonial Encounters in Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die: A Romance: A Postcolonial Perspective

The Indian novelist, Maitreyi Devi’s account of her love story with Romanian novelist, Mircea Eliade came out in 1974 as Na Hanyate in the Bengali language and its English version was titled It Does Not Die in 1976 by the author herself. Following Nirmala Menon’s critical insights on Bhabha’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse, this study aims to reinterpret the novel as an illustrative text of postcolonial “interrogative hybridity.” Devi employs hybridity in such a way that it unsettles a linear narrative with constant shifts in focus and style. It is upheld that her ingenious hybridity originates from her position as an off-center postcolonial female writer who critiques colonial stereotypes and mimicry by revisiting/challenging colonial discourse constructed against the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the study explores how her novel is a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative text to colonial fantasies. To conclude, postcolonial hybridity can only problematize colonial individuations and representations, if it reverses the seemingly sound effects of colonial discourse in such a way that “other ‘denied’ knowledges” enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.

Shauri, Images of Arabs, and Representation of Colonial Hierarchies in the Visual Sources of German East Africa

The article deals with the display of colonial hierarchies in the shauri scene (in German colonial practice shauri was a council, a meeting of the administration of the colony and local residents, where the decisions of the administration were announced and brought to the attention of the population; a court and other meetings with the participation of locals were called shauri too) in the visual sources of the German East Africa, namely on postcards, in photography, sketches, illustrations of memoirs, and on the so-called trading cards. Studying of these sources shows that the position in space and postures of shauri participants are never random: they demonstrate dominance, the presence of might, or, conversely, subordination, and reflect the balance of power that is relevant both for specific participants in the meeting and sometimes for the entire region. Significantly, in this expression of dominance, the Arab-Swahili component of the German East Africa population occupies a special place. Artistic and compositional means emphasize the significant influence of Arabs and Arabized Swahili on shauri; sources depicting them outside the council scenes also demonstrate visual superiority over African inhabitants of the colony. It turned out that there are stable contexts in which Arabs appear in the visual sources, notably in the scenes depicting trade, markets, and slave trade. The constant topos of Arabs’ connection with slavery and their role as brutal slave traders in German verbal and visual colonial discourse is also embodied in the shauri scenes and in the general visual material. These sources allow us to trace the reflection of the racialized and hierarchized picture of the world of both the German colonialists and the local Arab and Arab-Swahili elite.

Exploring relationality in African knowledge systems as a contribution to decoloniality in sustainability science

ABSTRACT The current solutions offered by Western sustainability science to address prevailing global environmental destruction and social injustice are still largely embedded in the Western knowledge system established by colonisation, limiting the efficacy of these solutions for a large part of the planet. Conversely, it may be reasonable to imagine that the concept of relationality is beneficial in all cultures and knowledge systems. Relationality, elementally referring to a web of relationships, as considered from an African Indigenous and local knowledge perspective, could play an important role in decolonising Western sustainability science. Two valuable approaches, namely ubuntu (humanness) and ukama (relatedness), as predominantly observed in southern Africa, are essentially immersed in human-nature relationality. This type of relationality considers everything as interconnected, and therefore that nothing happens in isolation, and that the well-being of humans is inextricable from the well-being of nature. The way relationality is approached in African Indigenous knowledge systems is inclusive, holistic and perpetual, broadening its usefulness to a large audience, making it a sensible contributor to decoloniality in sustainability science. A collective knowledge could emerge, including cooperative, multidirectional interactions with different types of information from diverse human and non-human sources, increasingly eradicating the relational divide among knowledge systems caused by persistent colonial discourse and attitudes.

New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

Beydoun, K. A. (2023). The new crusades: Islamophobia and the global war on Muslims.University of California Press. "How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?” wonders a voice in Wizard of the Crow, a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006, p. 681). One answer to this rhetorical question is addressed by the Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said’s (2003) statement: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” (as cited in Beydoun, 2023, p. 68). Much of the colonial telling happens in the realm of education, whose institutionalized tools of textbooks and policies have been responsible for reproducing the fake history of the imperial narrative, one that silences the oppressed and lets the oppressors shine with nobility. Said’s statement not only answers the above question but also points to the empire’s hegemonic aspirations of constituting the identity of the Other since the Other in colonial discourse is framed as the uneducated who needs to be educated, necessarily, in the logics of the empire. Instilling racism as a major colonial project against the Muslim Other has been the case with the United States of America’s foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a renewed imperialism in the name of fighting “terror.” Therefore, educating the U.S. Muslim youths about themselves as being anti-Western barbaric terrorists is as colonially imperative as educating white American generations about the latter being defenders of White “democratic” civilization against the “barbarity” of the former. Challenging the dominant stories of the empire demands devising tools that shake the grand narrative from within by making the missing narratives visible and heard

Constructions of Racial Savagery in Early Twentieth-Century US Narratives of White Civilization

This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses circulating in this period that imagined that the world's savage peoples were destined to recede in the march of civilization. Here, I examine white Americans’ narratives of African American degeneration through two other imagined hemispheric encounters between white civilization and savagery. In the article's first half, I consider images of Haiti employed in cultural and political texts to signify the durability of innate Black savagery and the apocalyptic potential of Black freedom. In the second half, I consider discourses of Black degeneration in freedom alongside the genocidal construction of the “vanishing Indian.” I focus on two memorial projects: the 1931 monument to the Faithful Slave erected in Harpers Ferry and the never-completed National American Indian Memorial, for which ground was broken in 1913 at Fort Wadsworth.

Power, discourse, and student agency in colonial education

This paper aims to glean valuable insights from critical pedagogy in order to apply them to the field of African literary studies. Specifically, I am interested in how approaches inspired by culturally responsive education can help us revisit the important but under-researched topic of student agency as it features in fictional works that deal with colonial education in Africa. Although colonial education in literature has been the subject of intense focus in postcolonial theory, such theorizations largely examine how colonial education reproduces colonial rule through the dissemination of colonial discourse/ideology. When student agency in the colonial education systems is addressed, conventional postcolonial theory sees it as being overwhelmed or assimilated by colonial discourse and power. Ideas emanating from critical pedagogy and culturally responsive education are of value here in that they can elucidate how students interact with and even resist the pedagogical and political power of the colonial education system. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Weep Not, Child is an illustrative example of how such a critical-pedagogy-inspired approach can help us reorient literary studies of colonial education systems.

A Postcolonial Criticism in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847. It is a novel that in the 19th century contributed hugely to the colonial discourse and the depiction of the colonized other in terms of physical representation, stereotypes, and female agency. It was created during the age of the British colonial expansion at the time when Britain shifted its interest from the West Indies to the East. This paper aims at analyzing colonial issues included by Bronte in the novel. The paper will focus on analysis of the colonialist ideology, sexism, freedom, ethnicity, and injustice of Jane Eyre in the context of colonial discourse. And finally, a study of the colonial wealth and inheritance will be conducted. To do this, a historical and literary analysis of the text will be needed

Unmasking Post-Truth Narratives: Interpreting “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse” through the Prism of Distorted Realities

Post-truth is built as a theory after its recognition by Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, as the word of the year because of the increasing usage by politically active communities and people, among them alt-right and Brexiteer was at the highest use this term in the US for denoting the political situation out there. Post-truth is majorly referring to or indicating situations in which appeals to emotion and personal conviction have a greater impact on public opinion than do factual facts. The signs of the origin of this term can be traced from the word “truthiness” coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, which could be described as being convinced of something's truthfulness even though it isn't necessarily supported by the facts. Chandra TalpadeMohanty in her essay “Under the Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” attacks the bogus Post-truth and monolithic statement of Western feminists and philosophers about third-world women regardless of their race, class, geographic location, or religion and without any knowledge about women of third world nation and their priorities. In order to get the superior position even in pointing out the difficulties faced by third-world women, the first-world feminists judging their way of daily routine in the light of subjugation, suppression, and ostracization, which could be seen through the post-truth theory. The essay was first published in 1986 as the opening chapter of Feminist without Borders. To make her point more clear Mohanty supports her statements with anti-post-truth examples, the gendered division of labour, the veiling of women, or women's financial dependency on males. According to Mohanty, unless these examples are taken into account in context, these data by themselves are not a useful source of knowledge. Western feminists' views will be incorrect and ineffectual in assisting the communities they are attempting to assist if they base them on these observable realities. So the approach of this paper is to analyze these post-truth statements with reference of the essay by Mohanty where she depicts the individual differences of third-world women and asks for strategic essentialism against these postcolonial and post-truth ways of presenting things by third-world nations.

An Africological Excavation of Colonial Discourse

This article argues that epistemologies are significantly relevant to the decolonial project and the advancement of discourse around human interactions. Moreover, it is asserted that the decolonization of the mind can only occur within the context of changing the framework through which we understand the world and its history. As a concept, decolonizing the mind is dependent upon correcting dislocation and disorientation that leads to confusion about reality. However, decolonial discourse is often vulnerable to assume its own colonial orientation and can still be entrapped in centering European and Arab experiences regarding African history; it is the interrogation of those elements that Africology promotes. This paper demonstrates an imperative for a restructuring epistemology that is, inclusive of a multiplicity of perspectives. From the Africological vantage, the universalisms of European and Arab centered epistemes are grounded in cultures that in reifying their own existence, are antithetical to the free existence of those who do not adhere to their beliefs and values.