Postcolonial Historiography Research Articles

The Impact of United States Colonization on the Rizalian Tradition in Cinema and Literature: A View of the Popular Arts as Postcolonial Historiography

The essay analyzes the ideological impact of United States (US) colonization on artistic productions on Jose Rizal, specifically in literature and film and how these works contribute to the discourse of the popular arts as postcolonial historiography. US cultural impact could be gleaned from how US cultural policies influenced Rizalian biographies and how these insipred literacy and cinematic productions on the hero. The Rizalian texts cited are films and novels produced from the time of US colonization to the Centennial celebration in 1988, published biographies and postmodern fictional takes on Rizalian biography. It discusses semiotic/linguistic constructions of Rizal attributed to US influences, artistic/literary forms, models and movements. It also analyzes the issues of spectatorship influenced by the Filipino reception of US culture. Rizalian filmmaking and literary productions are theoretically linked to the Hollywood narrative tradition and the models of literary education brought by the Thomasites. Contemporary historiography and Rizalian cinema are therefore offered as sites of analysis for more open and liberal forms of aesthetic inquiry and theoretical discourses on the subject. This is a revised version of the paper read at the Sangandaan 2003: An International Conference on Arts and Media in the Philippine-American Relations, 1899-2002 held on July 7-11, 2003 at the Philippine Social Science Council in Quezon City.

Princely states, peasant protests, and nation building in India: the colonial mode of historiography and subaltern studies

The postcolonial unity of India as a single nation state incorporating the princely states covering two-fifth of the territory and a quarter of the population that remained outside the direct jurisdiction of the colonial state has not been problematized in the colonial and postcolonial historiography of India. This problematization is nonetheless essential in order to understand the internal dynamics of the colonial social formation in India, especially the agency of peasant movements in princely states in the dissolution of tbe colonial state and in preparing the ground for the postcolonial unity of the Indian state. The tendency to ignore the agency of peasant movements in princely India during the colonial rule is what I have characterized as the colonial mode of historiography. Subaltern Studies project which claims to distinguish itself for its role in restoring the agency of peasant insurgency in colonial India is indeed a continuation of the colonial mode of historiography.

Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process?

Introduction: Postcolonializing. 1. Instrumental and Synoptic Dimensions of Interdisciplinarity. 2. Postcolonial Historiography and the Problem of Local Knowledge. 3. Literature as a Politically Symbolic Act. 5. Feminism, Postcolonialism and the Contradictory Orders of Modernity. 6. Postcolonialism and Postmodernism. 7. Parables from the Canon: Postcolonializing Shakespeare. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Postcolonial cultural studies and imperial historiography

Postcolonial cultural studies and imperial historiography

Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment

Anomalous States is an archeology of modern Irish writing. David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers--Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce.Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural nationalism and argues for the need to understand Irish culture in relation to the wider experience of colonized societies. A central essay reads Yeats's later works as a profound questioning of the founding of the state. Final essays examine the gradual formation of the state and nation as one element in a cultural process that involves conflict between popular cultural forms and emerging political economies of nationalism and the colonial state. Modern Ireland is thus seen as the product of a continuing process in which, Lloyd argues, the passage to national independence that defines Ireland's post-colonial status is no more than a moment in its continuing history.Anomalous States makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that connects cultural theory with post-colonial historiography, literary analysis, and issues in contemporary politics. It will interest a wide readership in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history.