Field Of Postcolonial Studies Research Articles

EMPIRE AND THE RIGHT TO PREACH THE GOSPEL IN THE SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA, 1535–1560

AbstractThe sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca are well known for their sophisticated reflections on the Spanish conquest of the New World. But the nature of their responses seems far from clear and is subject to historiographical debate. Recent studies from the discipline of intellectual history suggest that the Salmantine theologians challenged the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Americas. Scholars associated with the field of post-colonial studies, on the other hand, forcefully stress their entanglement in Spain's imperial venture overseas. This article, however, argues that these seemingly irreconcilable approaches are not in fact mutually exclusive. It shifts our attention to the sorely neglected ius praedicandi, the right to preach the gospel, which served to translate the Spanish theologians’ deeply rooted belief in the hegemonic truth of the Christian faith into a discourse of otherwise ‘secular’ natural rights. In adopting this novel lens, the article makes a case for assessing the language of the university theologians in its own terms while simultaneously exposing the support of Salamanca for Spain's imperial venture.

Review Essay: World Literature

For the past 15 years the rapidly advancing field of World Literature has revitalized comparative literary studies, given rise to a series of on-going debates, and also brought about a noticeable increase in university offerings and publishing ventures focused on that elusive concept. Besides the substantive books that have been steadily coming out ever since David Damrosch dusted off the notion of World Literature – then mostly a preserve of publishers of anthologies – we have also seen several readers, companions and introductions being published to serve what clearly is perceived as a rising and expanding market. In part this has to do with the varying, sometimes conflicting, forms of conceptualizing the field. Even if most still refer back to Goethe’s notions of an idealized Weltliteratur, twenty-first-century interpretations necessarily expand and problematize the basic concept from a variety of comparative and theoretical perspectives. This could not but be considering the claims made in the name of World Literature to reshape literary studies, especially in relation to the discipline of Comparative Literature and the field of Postcolonial Studies.

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

It is now widely acknowledged that the field of postcolonial studies has been by and large averse to exploring aesthetic matters (see Boehmer 2010; Hiddleston 2011; Hitchcock 2003), save for discus...

Introduction: Thinking Caryl Phillips Out of the Box

In 1979, I started to write because I had something to say. I had no desire to be either famous or to become a celebrity. I still have no desire to embrace either fame or celebrity. These are terrible accidents that can destroy the privacy of a writer's life and impair his ability to see clearly. Caryl Phillips, Preamble 7-8 This extract from Caryl Phillips' notebooks, which he read at a conference held in his honour in 2006, summarizes some of the major ideas contained in his contribution to this special issue of ARIEL devoted to his wide-ranging body of writing, which includes ten novels, five non-fiction books, and several plays and scripts. Although Phillips' essay in this issue is entitled Nothing Personal--a reference to a collaborative book published in the 1960s by writer James Baldwin and his photographer friend Richard Avedon--his piece is eminently personal. It provides indirect yet intimate insight into his status as a writer who seems, in this essay, to be more preoccupied by his artistic integrity than the complex background that has long been his hallmark in the field of postcolonial studies and which comprises his birth in Saint Kitts in the Eastern Caribbean, his early years in the north of England, his residence in the United States, and his interest in his African roots. Phillips' reflections on Baldwin's failure to manage his own celebrity in America following the civil rights movement give us access to the former's questions about the changes that have recently marked the publishing world, in which literary fiction is taken less seriously than it was when his first novel, The Final Passage, came out in 1985. Phillips analyses Baldwin's professional choices while never relinquishing-respect for the writer who was also a literary father figure to him, and he concludes with a refusal to take part in the circus (15) that the literary world has become, join the self-promoting lap dance that it entails (15), or, to borrow Baldwin's words, play the dancing dog (25). Although some readers might wonder about the relevance of this piece to ARIEL's postcolonial agenda, one should insist that it is written by an author who, by virtue of his origins, experiences, and work, definitely has his place in the postcolonial domain and has most often been read as diasporic or migrant. It is also important to keep in mind that, in Phillips' writing, the biographical can often be read performatively as autobiographical (Yelin, Plural Selves 58) and what is left unsaid can, in many cases, prove more important than what is openly expressed. His texts, both fictional and non-fictional, therefore deserve to be read for their submerged meaning, a point obliquely raised by Louise Yelin's and Daria Tunca's contributions, which discuss invisible presences in Phillips' writing (Yelin 103) and his poetics of (in)visibility (Tunca 159), respectively. While Nothing Personal visibly tackles the vagaries of Baldwin's career as an artist and the changing face of a publishing world in crisis, it also crucially suggests--as do most of Phillips' texts--that we should learn the lessons of the past. Moreover, it intimates that fame and celebrity tend to make writers forget their origins. Of course, this turns out to be more problematic for artists who, like Baldwin and Phillips, write in a society in which they are viewed by some as outsiders, in terms of both race and class, and are therefore more likely to be discriminated against, even when they have made it to the centre. Incidentally, this theme is also at the heart of Phillips' fascination with the character of Othello, as shown in two of his essays (A Black European Success and 'Rude Am I in My Speech') and, most notably, his 1997 novel The Nature of Blood. Like Nothing Personal, the next two contributions to this special issue--tributes to Phillips by fellow writers Robert Antoni and Johny Pitts--highlight the centrality of literary friendships and intergenerational relationships in Phillips' development as an artist. …

The World after Empire; or, Whither Postcoloniality?

At the MLA'S annual convention in 2015, a roundtable i had organized, rememberingThe Location of Culture: circulations, Interventions, and Futurity, gathered scholars from across literary periods and fields to reflect on the legacies of Homi Bhabha's seminal work. As new disciplinary shifts in literary studies witness the reinvention of postcolonial literatures as global anglophone literatures, one of the questions that roundtable asked was, Whither postcoloniality? Returning toThe Location of Culture—one of the most influential texts in the fields of postcolonial studies and critical theory—can perhaps illuminate how postcolonial critique resonates anew for the literature of our world after empire.

The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France by Michael A. Osborne

Reviewed by: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France by Michael A. Osborne Richard C. Keller Michael A. Osborne. The Emergence ofTropicalMedicine in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ix + 312 pp. 1ll. $50.00 ( 978-0-226-11452-1). For a literature that scarcely existed twenty-five years ago, the historiography of colonial science and medicine has flourished in the intervening period. As the field of postcolonial studies has expanded, so too has that of the role of science and medicine in the making of empire. Clinicians and experimenters saw the empire as a combination of proving ground and goldmine, a space in which they could safely test the boundaries of scientific practice while also harvesting new illnesses to document and treatments to ratify. From Saigon to Cayenne, from Manila to Havana, from Hong Kong to Bombay to Cape Town to Cairo, if European physicians and scientists set foot there, we have a monograph to document it. So what is there left for historians of colonial medicine to write? [End Page 450] Plenty, as it turns out. Michael Osborne's The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France is a meticulously researched book that breaks important historiographical ground. Osborne calls into question a number of common assumptions about medicine in the French empire, and produces as a result a smart book that will become an essential reference for historians of empire and European medicine. The book challenges the inherited wisdom about the place of Paris in medical education, the centrality of Algeria to the French empire, and, to an extent, the periodization of the new imperial history. Perhaps because of the bloody struggle for its liberation and the sheer scale of European colonization there, Algeria has been for many historians the centerpiece of the French empire. Yet significant colonization in Algeria only began after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, making it a relatively late addition to the empire. Moreover, it was relatively unique among France's colonies, given the French army's critical role in both conquest and administration (although one could certainly add the neighboring Tunisian and Moroccan protectorates to this group). Yet the French Maghreb was anomalous within the empire, as Osborne argues: most of France's colonies were conquered and administered through the navy rather than the army, making this branch of the armed forces the crucible of French imperial management for much of the modern period. Osborne thus begins his book with a chapter on the making of the modern French navy, beginning in 1689. Here, Osborne focuses on the importance of place in the making of institutions, putting the Atlantic ports of Brest and Rochefort as well as the Mediterranean port of Toulon under the spotlight, which became not only significant naval installations, but also critical sites for military medicine in a newly rationalized navy. By the 1730s, these were the central locations for naval surgical training and were among the few locations outside of the rarified world of Parisian academic medicine for medical education. Subsequent chapters follow important developments in the history of tropical medicine. Osborne traces the evolution of hygienism and medical geography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as they developed into a new science of race as viewed through the lens of yellow fever in particular. Throughout the book, the uses of medicine for naval objectives—as well as the capacity of a medi- calized armed force to develop new knowledge in colonial settings—provides useful insight into the transformation of medical paradigms. The book then describes the gradual decline of these naval hospitals under the Third Republic, and their eventual displacement by new colonial medical institutions in Paris and Marseille by the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not a story of Latour's "Pasteurian style" in action. Although Osborne discusses Pasteur and his followers throughout the book, the focus is on naval medicine as the critical armature of colonial medicine through the nineteenth century. Osborne thus provides an important complement to studies of the globalization of the Pasteur Institutes as the foundation of French tropical medicine. He also narrates a fascinating story about how tropical science intersected with naval agendas. Jean...

Aesthetics of Decolonization – The Magazine Souffles (1966–1972)

Abstract The magazine Souffles was published by intellectuals and poets in Morocco from 1966 to 1972. It functioned as a node, medium, and interface in the intellectual, political and artistic production of a post-colonial subjectivity. Going beyond existing studies of Souffles that mainly looked on its relevance for literature production in Morocco, this article highlights the contributions by visual artists and transnational solidarity movements for the magazine’s translocal constitution. This includes encounters, relations and transfers between radical art and political discourses and practices, as well as the transnational context in which the magazine’s post-colonial aesthetic proposals emerged. The article is based on insights conducted in a research project with the same title that studies the magazine’s polyphone character in a trans-disciplinary manner. It combines artistic research, interviews and conversations looking closely at the visual and aesthetic proposals as well as written testimonies in dialogue with a socio-political reading of the publication, considering as well recent theories on aesthetics and concepts developed in the field of postcolonial studies.

Sandra Ponzanesi. Postcolonial cultural industry: icons, markets, mythologies

Sandra Ponzanesi makes a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial studies – a field in which she is a long-time renowned scholar – by addressing a specific aspect of postcolonial studies that remains undertheorized: namely the capacity of postcolonial cultural production to enact postcolonial resistance at the time of global capitalism, when cul­tural production (in general, and postcolonial cultural production is no exception) is regulated by the industry’s mechanisms and market laws...

Screening Indigenous Australia: Space, Place and Media in Frances Calvert’s Talking Broken

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p139Drawing on the fields of postcolonial studies and media theory, this article analyzes Frances Calvert’s 1990 documentary, Talking Broken, which, inter alia, looks at the role of space, place and media amongst Australia’s ‘other’ Indigenous minority, Torres Strait Islanders. The article explores the historical and geographical complexity of the space-place-media relation (particularly in terms of the centre-periphery relations between the Torres Strait and the Australian mainland), and considers the extent to which Calvert – after the Australian bicentenary of 1988 – is able to absorb and playfully challenge such formulations. More broadly, it considers the extent to which contemporary Indigenous media might go further and enact a shift from absorbing and challenging such formulations to taking control of media institutions themselves.

Indigenous Agency and Compliance: Contemporary Literature about Dayaks

Based on an analysis of three literary texts about Dayaks—the indigenous peoples of Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia—this essay argues that strategic submission can play an important role in indigenous peoples' attempts to obtain and maintain agency under the shadow of dominant discourse. Discussions foundational to the field of postcolonial studies have tended to focus on the importance of subversion, resistance, and counterdiscourse in liberating the oppressed subject. Taking reading cues from anthropological and sociological accounts of Dayak compliance with various constructions of Dayaks, this essay looks at how the writing of literature about Dayaks (by both non-Dayaks and Dayaks) functions as an enactment of and meditation on the application of dominant discourse to indigenous peoples and the opportunities that such discourse affords for carving out spaces of autonomy.

Palestine, Postcolonialism and Pessoptimism

This essay traces the belated entrance of ‘Palestine’ into the field of postcolonial studies. It explores the various ways in which the object of Palestine has challenged and complicated many of the premises and presumptions of the discipline, principally in the way it troubles the once frequently embraced idea that the State of Israel is itself the consequence of anticolonial struggle. Rather than affirming the reverse scenario for Palestine, Moore-Gilbert suggests an exploration of its literary culture points to an aesthetic in common with Israel. Thus, rather than championing the ‘two-state solution’ and the cause of self-determination that has been so prominent in some branches of postcolonial studies, this essay suggestively follows the logic of the work of Edward Said, among others, in arguing that Palestinian literature offers us a glimpse of one, binational, state. In so doing it argues that coming to terms with Palestine is critical for the future of postcolonial studies, while reaffirming ‘culture’ as a crucial site for understanding postcolonial politics and identity.

“Unburied Memory”: the Literary Response to Historical Violence

A short essay on trauma studies and other disciplines concerning the field of postcolonial studies.

Physical Activities through Postcolonial Eyes: A Place of Epistemologic and Historiographical Experimentation

This contribution has a triple objective. The first is historical; it is to identify works, analysis, and perspectives covering the history of sport, which relate to the field of Postcolonial Studies developed elsewhere. By discussing anglophone and francophone works, we try to show the differentiated dynamics of research carried out in these two areas, while highlighting what each one owes to the other and vice versa. The second aim is analytical. We try to bring out the main themes of these works while proposing – from a postcolonial perspective – possible areas of research to pursue. Finally, the last objective is epistemologic. It discusses some problematic areas of interpretation around the role of physical activities in the process of colonization and decolonization.

The Nation of Saints: The National Theological Rhetoric of Archbishop Makarios III (1913–1977)

Recent scholarship on postcolonial leadership includes the autobiographies of the founding fathers of such countries as Ghana, India, Zambia, and South Africa, as well as an island-state such as Singapore, which describe the process of producing citizens and leading their country into modernity. The use of first-person writings as an entry point to the discourse about how individual leaders affect the formation of the nation emphasizes the continued contribution of literature to the field of postcolonial studies. This article explores the origin of Greek Cypriot national identity through the highly personalized rhetoric of Archbishop Makarios from the beginning of his leadership as a bishop and throughout the years of his presidency of the Republic of Cyprus. The article suggests that Makarios should be seen as a postcolonial leader from a Mediterranean island who embodies the political views of previous eras, Byzantine and Ottoman, as well as modern and Western concepts of national sovereignty. In that sense, Cyprus becomes a paradigmatic hybrid Mediterranean nation in its foundations, a mixture of religion and secularism, of citizenship, of martyrdom and modernity.

Postkoloniale Lektüren. Perspektivierungen deutschsprachiger Literatur ed. by Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker (review)

Reviewed by: Postkoloniale Lektüren. Perspektivierungen deutschsprachiger Literatur ed. by Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker Mark W. Rectanus Postkoloniale Lektüren. Perspektivierungen deutschsprachiger Literatur. Edited by Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker. (Postkoloniale Studien in der Germanistik. Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Axel Dunker. Vol. 4.) Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Pp. 201. Paper €29.80. ISBN 978-3849810023. This volume includes selected essays based on research that was presented at the XII. Kongress der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (2010). In the introduction, editors Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker underscore the wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches that are currently used in the field of postcolonial studies, many of which intersect with intercultural studies (7–8). This diversity is [End Page 228] indeed reflected in the essays published in the volume. Among the many approaches that have emerged in postcolonial studies, the editors identify two directions in literary studies of the postcolonial: 1) readings of colonial and postcolonial texts per se and how those texts construct social and historical contexts; 2) readings and interpretations of tropes, structures, and characters that are constitutive of postcolonial discourses, but are not limited to postcolonial literature (8–9). With regard to the latter, the editors reference discursive linkages to issues of migration, diaspora, and exile in colonial and postcolonial analyses. In this volume, the boundaries between postcolonial and intercultural analyses are, as the editors observe, very fluid. Rather than attempting to define those boundaries, the editors suggest that the essays can contribute to and stimulate a discussion of the relations between postcolonial and intercultural theories and methodologies (10). The nine essays in the volume are arranged in roughly chronological order. They range from Endre Hárs’s examination of transcultural and transnational discourses as forms of multivocality in Herder’s Adrastea to Gabriele Scherer’s analysis of José F.A. Oliver’s poetry that evokes postcolonial notions of hybridity and a “third place.” Scherer compares Oliver’s work to that of a sculptor who creates “word works of art,” drawing on linguistic, cultural, and discursive elements in Alemannic and Andalusian dialects as well as in standard German and Spanish, in order to explore multiple cultural spaces and modes of experience (190). By reading Oliver’s poetry in the context of his essays in Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf, Scherer reveals transcultural postnational memory as a pivotal dimension of the author’s work (200–201). Eva Blome discusses German colonial discourses in the early twentieth century through a detailed analysis of Robert Müller’s Das Inselmädchen (1919). Blome identifies colonialism’s “excessive” focus on sexuality and sexual contact with “the foreign” as a central aspect of Müller’s work within the context of literary primitivism and the cultural imagination of colonialism, which is problematized through the nexus of “politics and love” (86–88). In her essay “‘Wie ein Indio!’ ‘Whiteness’ und ‘non-whiteness’ in Max Frischs Homo faber” Melanie Rohner uses critical whiteness studies (i.e., the work of Richard Dyer) as a point of departure to discuss the main character’s (Walter Faber) rationality and self-consciousness of “whiteness” as they conflict with his experience of the “irrational” world of “non-whiteness” in Guatemala and Cuba (115). Although Faber remains largely bound to colonialism, Rohner argues that a consciousness of his own mortality and death signal a rupture in identity which ultimately leads to his turn from technology and to an increasing identification with the “Indio” (128–129). Rohner’s reading of Homo faber exemplifies the potential for analyses that reveal the interplay of postcolonial and intercultural discourses. Essays by Iulia-Karin Patrut and Herbert Uerlings examine representations of Sinti and Roma in literary and historical texts, as well as in visual culture, ranging from Patrut’s analyses of European and German discourses related to “gypsies,” Jews, [End Page 229] and Germans in the nineteenth century, to Uerlings discussion of the “Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime” which opened in 2012. Patrut and Uerlings situate representations of Sinti and Roma within the context of discursive constructions of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and Turks and interrogate how they relate to Germany’s projections of (post-)national identities...

Reevaluating the Postcolonial City

This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other ‘Others’, examining Caryl Phillips' case study of the migrant David Oluwale. Oluwale's abhorrent treatment in Leeds necessitates discussion of the burgeoning new current of postcolonial cities research, to which this special issue adds interdisciplinary perspectives. To explore whether or not global and postcolonial cities are actually synonymous, we return to the origins of postcolonial studies to suggest that the postcolonial city has a longer provenance than the global, and retains the double meaning of ‘post’ as signalling both a coming after and a continuation. We go on to argue that the special issue demonstrates that postcolonial cities exclude even as they embrace, and produce both internal and external marginality. The foreword concludes by adumbrating potential problems with the special issue's topic: its neglect of economics in favour of culture, its overlooking of the postcolonial rural, and as terminology not coming from within but without.

“These dogs will do as we say”: African nationalism in the era of decolonization in David Caute’s At Fever Pitch and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

This article examines responses to the impact of colonialism on post-independence national unity in Africa from the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized. Written out of experience of decolonization in Ghana, At Fever Pitch, written by the British novelist David Caute and published by Deutsch in 1959, depicts western models of economic development and nationhood as derailing the emancipatory possibilities of colonial self-determination. It is a preoccupation that was also central to anti-colonial political thought during the era of decolonization, most notably in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1965), and would become highly contested in the field of postcolonial studies. Rather than viewing the perspectives of the colonizer as fundamentally antithetical to postcolonial politics, this article analyses the way in which Caute and Fanon mount two distinct but not oppositional critical responses to the transfer of power from European imperial elites to a self-interested national middle class. By attending to the form of At Fever Pitch, moreover, this article will register the extent to which Caute’s intervention into debates about the rise of nationalism in the colonies disrupts prevailing interpretations of British “end of empire” fiction as mourning the end of British colonial dominance.

Yeats, Said and decolonization

How can Yeats’s cultural nationalism be understood within the context of the constantly evolving field of postcolonial studies? Some critics have argued that Edward Said, in his essay “Yeats and Decolonization”, overlooked W.B. Yeats’s Protestant ascendancy roots and elitism, traits which would actually place Yeats in the anti-revolutionary and colonizing camp rather than the decolonizing, liberationist one claimed for him by Said. However, such arguments ignore the key role of culture in paving the way for either colonization or (as in Yeats’s case) decolonization. The importance of Yeats’s place in this process was eloquently argued by Said. In fact, to separate the cultural from the political is to underestimate the all-important role of culture in the decolonization process, especially as the culture of the colonized is first and foremost placed under erasure. This article argues that Yeats’s Protestant sympathies and disagreements with the Catholic revolutionaries of his day do not make him and his work any less revolutionary and anti-colonial, especially when his Irish situation is seen in comparison with similar contexts in the Arab world.

Postcolonial Literary History and the Concealed Totality of Life

This article attempts to explore some current theoretical problems within the field of postcolonial studies. In particular, I address Ato Quayson's recent complaint that postcolonial theorists generally have failed to ‘provide a persuasive account of literature and history simultaneously’, a problem which I link to what I see as the field's theoretical obsession with the concept of ‘representation’; I argue that the field's disciplinary ambition to represent, authoritatively, the postcolonial per se necessarily but also problematically circumscribes and limits its relation to discourses of historical representation and literary representation. On an aesthetic level, this problematic is expressed through postcolonial studies’ troubled relationship with literary realism as an aesthetic form. In a wider perspective, I connect the field's disparagement of literary realism with Lazarus's notion of the ‘postcolonial unconscious’, i.e. postcolonial studies’ failure to grasp and address some of the deeper global-political contradictions.

Contestations of resource extraction projects via digital media in two Nunavut communities

This study examines the use of digital media in two Nunavut communities in response to proposed resource-extraction projects. Using Dahlberg’s (2011) concepts of counterpublics and deliberative democracy, the study links tactics employed in Baker Lake and Pond Inlet to broader activists’ use of digital media to reorganise social, political, and economic life. Drawing on the field of postcolonial studies, these cases demonstrate that social media are being incorporated into the development of new political imaginaries.