Postcolonial Moment Research Articles

The end of migration (studies): Contemplating labour deployment in Indonesia’s development planning, and getting on with migration research

In this article, I combine my observation of Indonesia’s desire to end labour outmigration with scholarly reflections on the end of migration studies. Challenging the orthodoxy that takes for granted sending countries’ support of migration as presumed in current optimism of the migration-development paradigm, I trace Indonesia’s successive development plans to demonstrate the treatment of migration as a less-preferred option for job creation, exploring how postcolonial trajectories entail the desire to keep development in situ and lead to persisting view of migration as deeply undesirable. The recent shift to governance works as a way to both discipline workers through required documentation and to allow the government to eschew accountability by advancing a discourse on protection. As the state sets out a future anticipation where those defined as unskilled no longer migrate, a question arises as to how we build a meaningful scholarship around migration as a non-priority and the process towards making a certain migrant category disappear? My critique of development planning turns the analytical lens back to the state, which I see as a way to go on with the study of migration in a more ethical, pro-migrant manner. Rejecting the trap of methodological nationalism, I offer an approach that seizes of the ‘postcolonial moment’ of migration.

Between Economic Nationalism and Liberalization: Ideas of Development and the Neoliberal Moment in Mobutu's Congo, 1965–74

AbstractIn January 1967, under the infamous military head Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the Democratic Republic of Congo nationalized its mining industry based on anticolonial rhetoric of “economic sovereignty.” Only two years later, the same Mobutu government welcomed foreign companies and investors with open arms to the inaugural Foire Internationale de Kinshasa. Even at this crucial postcolonial moment when ideas of economic independence and self-sufficiency had become so highly valued, an attachment to — even affinity towards — foreign capital persisted throughout Congolese politics. This article explores the political and intellectual tensions that arose from the postcolonial utilization of foreign capital for state consolidation and synthesizes these contradictions into a broader understanding of early development approaches in Mobutu's Congo. In contrast to those who have framed the Congolese leader's ideology as a rearticulation of colonial logics or the authoritarian whims of an individual, I argue that these early notions of Mobutist development should be understood as a kind of “worldmaking,” emerging from an anticolonial ideology that asserted Congo’s economic sovereignty while simultaneously inserting itself into the global streams of finance. By tracing the Mobutu government's fluctuating relationship to foreign finance, this research offers a longer history of the “neoliberal moment” in Congo — one in which the intellectual underpinnings for liberalization had percolated in Congolese nationalist politics for several decades.

No Time for Empathy

Between 1956 and 1964, in Calcutta, India, at least seven young children with congenital hemoglobinopathies, perhaps more, were injected with various strains of malaria to test their possible immunity. Some of the children were tested on repeatedly. The experiments exposed the already sick children to additional risks and suffering. Strikingly, these experiments started less than a decade after decolonization and were conducted by Indian doctors, rather than colonial doctors. In this article I argue that such tragic practices can only be understood with reference to a set of entangled temporalities. Specifically, the temporal urgency of the postcolonial moment, the absent time of ethical regulations, and the familial tempo of caring for congenitally sick children. The entangled temporalities that authorized the pediatric experimentation, however, would not be visible without the reflexive hermeneutics developed by the Subaltern Studies scholars and nourished by the experiences of academic immigration.

“Poscolonial Moment” in Foreign Policy Discourse: the Casus of “Global Britain”

The article explores interrelation between the postcolonial discourse and modern British foreign policy, designated as a “postcolonial moment” in the strategic thinking of the political establishment. It is noted that the withdrawal from the EU has again attracted public and academic attention to the imperial past, which is sometimes regarded not only as a possible reason for Brexit, but also as a starting point for design of the country’s foreign policy under the new conditions (the idea of “Global Britain”). The post-imperial discourse in the modern British political environment is analyzed within several aspects: how it affects the strategic reasoning of the elite circles, specific trends in dealing with the former colonies, and postcolonialism components in the new foreign strategy (case of “Indo-Pacific tilt”). Proceeding from the paradigm of postcolonial constructivism, the article shows that the issues of imperial heritage still remain an important aspect in British foreign policy identity, but in the context of strategic planning it takes on new meanings. Firstly, the political establishment continues to search for a new international role and appeals to the former colonies as a resource of their foreign policy (whether it is economy, strategy, or image). Secondly, distancing themselves from the rhetoric of the colonial past, they refer to “common history” and identity as the world politics see the formation of a polycentric system. This trend is reflected in the challenge of building new long-term alliances through “patient diplomacy.” The “Global Britain” discourse, due to its direct connotation with the postcolonial past, becomes undesirable for both the ruling political elite and the opposition.

Analytic philosophy of education and the postcolonial moment

Of all possible future directions for analytic philosophy of education, few are as overdue as thoroughly confronting the legacy of colonialism and the postcolonial moment. Rightly credited with establishing the credibility and standing of philosophy of education, by 1980, analytic philosophy of education was the dominant though not unchallenged approach to philosophy of education in the Anglo-American world. While its dominance has declined and philosophy of education has become more diverse, analytic philosophy of education retains a strong international presence in educational theory. By contrast, postcolonial theory – the critical study of colonialism and its aftermath – has attracted growing interest across many academic disciplines, developing from the 1970s onwards from its early location in literary and cultural studies. After outlining the emergence of analytic philosophy of education, and the subsequent reshaping of philosophy of education, we describe postcolonial theory and the place of education in both colonialism and postcolonial thought. Having thus located analytic philosophy of education and the postcolonial turn in their own times and contexts, we consider the postcolonial challenge to Western philosophy and how analytic philosophy of education could respond, developing our stance on a postcolonial future direction for analytic philosophy of education. We argue that the future of philosophy of education is now inescapably postcolonial and that it should retain its analytical strengths.

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Concerning Violence: Fanon, Africa and temporality

This article examines the political significance of temporal structures in Om våld (Concerning Violence) (), a documentary that takes its title from the chapter of the same name in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The film comprises archive footage shot by Swedish television crews in Africa between the mid-1960s and 1987. It pairs images with extracts from Fanon’s book, read by singer and activist Lauryn Hill. This assemblage both celebrates African campaigns of liberation and complicates the claim to be ‘here and now’ embedded in archival material by overlaying it with a retrospective (often melancholic) vantage point, that of a postcolonial moment. On occasion, Concerning Violence comes close to reproducing a temporal framing that consigns Black Africans to the symbolic immobility critiqued by Fanon and, more recently, Achille Mbembe. How does the film endeavour to avoid this? How successful is it in arguing for the enduring relevance of Fanon’s thought?

Europe as a big house – examining plantation logics in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT As a way to address the current postcolonial moment, characteristic of ongoing relations of resource extraction and border control, we turn to the metaphor of the plantation, offering an interpretation of Katherine McKittrick’s idea of plantation logics. Plantation museums, centered on former planters’ mansions (the ‘big house’) in the U.S., are important vehicles for narrating the historical period of slavery. However, such historical sites have traditionally steered away from addressing the role of enslavement in the production of the space of the big house. This erasure of the enslaved obscures the spatial and social relationality of the plantation. While continental Europe lacks these plantation houses and thus museums, it is no less important for the former colonial states in Europe to narrate their own historical involvement in slavery and, equally important, its contemporary legacies. In both contexts, we see a selective remembering of the past that is grounded in a spatial and temporal distancing of the plantation that renders the centrality of slavery to the production and reproduction of Europe invisible. In this article, we use the metaphor of the big house to illustrate how the logic of the plantation is replicated across scales of time and space. We argue that a failure to recognize the ongoing reality of the plantation logic as embodied by the European big house enables its reproduction, including in the environmental catastrophe of the Plantationocence. A consideration of Maroon geographies explores narrations of the plantation that point to a way forward to alternative futures.

Curating the nation: Collections, ethnographic representations and heritage production at Museum of Malawi

This article specifically concerns itself with Museum of Malawi as an institution of public culture. Particularly it explores how Museum of Malawi collected, exhibited and interpreted its heritage in its displays. Drawn on a combination of historical modes of inquiry that include qualitative interviews, documentary sources and exhibition analysis the article argues that it is largely through ethnographic collections that the Museum of Malawi constructed and continues to construct the identity of the nation or community more than anything else. Its ethnographic collections have become a medium to visualize the nation. However, these ethnographic displays are trapped in coloniality despite being in a post-colonial moment. The article provides a critical analysis of history of Museum of Malawi and its representations as an original contribution to the fields of museums and heritage. Moreover, the article is appropriately situated within the context of post-colonial critiques and decolonial debates of the role of museums and museum collections in post-colonial societies.

Chinua Achebe’s postcolony: a literary anthropology of postcolonial decadence

AbstractCan the African novel work as interlocutor for anthropologists studying Africa’s postcolonial politics today? Conversely, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology? This article draws on Chinua Achebe’s fictional representations of the postcolony in two novels,No Longer at EaseandA Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites, corruption and postcolonial decadence in theearlypostcolony. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Achille Mbembe’s critique of power in the postcolony. Here, I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers such as Achebe mobilized fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.

Prelude: The sleeping song of the Gran Teatro Cervantes de Tangier

The recording through the still and moving image of two buildings of an alleged symbolic nature in the city of Tangier -in the surroundings of the Cornisse- addresses the identity issue in the Mediterranean cultural context and the need to recover a collective memory.The first project, entitled Crossing Lines, registers the Palace of Arts and Culture of Tangier under construction. The second, a videographic performance that gives the title to this contribution, registers as a “reopening” the Gran Teatro de Cervantes in Tangier, currently in ruins, where a Tangerian singer on his stage challenges this devastation with his song. Large erased cartouches with the names of Aeschylus, Corneille, Lope de Rueda, Schiller, Goldoni, Sophocles, Molière or Goethe, peaks of European literature, are revealed in front of his eyes.With both representations, the idea of ​​ruin and that of a project under construction are simultaneously raised to speak of the postcolonial moment of culture and its role in the expanded context of globalization. I intend to open a reflection on the difficulty that currently exists when it comes to articulating cultural meeting spaces between both shores of the Mediterranean.

Hegel, Haiti and revolution: the post-colonial moment

Susan Buck-Morss’s argument that the Haitian Revolution embodied the most universal aspect of the French Revolution, namely the quest for universal freedom, relies on the supposed references to Haiti in the master–slave dialogue in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The revolution’s lodgement at the core of this foundational text of Enlightenment universalism is, for her, about as convincing a demonstration as one can have of the universal significance of the Haitian Revolution. Marxists have opposed her venture, and demonstrated their hostility to post-colonial thinking, principally by claiming that the master–slave is an expression of European class conflict. This paper agrees with Buck-Morss that the Haitian Revolution critically affirmed the principle of universal freedom and, indeed, pushed the revolution in France and Europe in a radical direction. A better affirmation of the universal significance of the Haitian Revolution than the thoughts of Hegel is possible. The latter do not actually provide such affirmation, because racism, Eurocentrism and a hostility to political radicalism are fundamental aspects of Hegel’s thought. The alternative affirmation can be found in Marxist analysis. This paper outlines such an analysis, and concludes that post-colonialism of Buck-Morss’s sort is no substitute for the perspective provided by historical materialism.

Decolonization and Diaspora

Decolonization and Diaspora

Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, & Nikhil Menon. The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia

Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, &amp; Nikhil Menon. <i>The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia</i>

At the Edge of Time: Postcolonial Temporalities in An Intimate Rebuke

Abstract In this response I challenge the neglect of postcolonial theory in Laura Grillo's An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in Côte d'Ivoire and argue instead for its inclusion as a resource for immanent critique. I argue that Grillo's text enhances and enriches the way we may think about time and politics in the postcolonial moment, but that it may in turn also be revitalised and strengthened by speaking with and to postcolonial thought, adding it to the lexicon and strategies of displacement Grillo identifies in practices of female genital power and the matri-archive they reference.

The Charter for the Humanities and the Social Sciences in South Africa- a Post-Colonial Moment?

The Charter for the Humanities and the Social Sciences in South Africa- a Post-Colonial Moment?

Between Order and Justice: Investments in Africa and Corporate International Responsibility in Swedish Media in the 1960s

This article analyzes how the public relations of multinational companies was affected by the double impact of decolonization and spread of television during the 1960s. It contributes to recent theoretical conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility by adding the dimension of home country stakeholders and the border-crossing character of corporate responsibility. The analysis deals with the changing media representations in Sweden of Swedish-owned firms in Liberia and South Africa before, during, and after what has been called the “postcolonial moment” (1960–1963). In its wake, Swedish industrialists faced a new policy problem: firms in overseas markets were no longer expected to do only what was legal in the host country but also what was considered right in their home country. The analysis follows the debates concerning this issue of corporateinternationalresponsibility throughout the 1960s, and how national business organizations and executives in firms such as the Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company publicly sought to defend the role of Swedish foreign direct investment in Africa. The business community developed various public relations strategies to engage with its critics, professionalized their media relations, and organized international study tours for unions and politicians.

Introduction.

Introduction Prakash Kumar (bio) The history of technology of South Asia should justifiably reflect the particularities of South Asian colonial pasts and the trends that became palpable at its postcolonial moment. In what historically specific ways has coloniality intersected with technology in South Asia? The particular questions of colonial power and exclusions, the autonomy of the subaltern voice, and the imagined futures as India at independence grappled with a new socio-economic order in the midst of colonial legacies call upon historians to make purposeful selection of archives and to deploy specific methods. These choices should determine the nature of South Asian technological history. In other words, a technological history of South Asia cannot simply be a history of technology "in South Asia," a one-sided imposition of historiography of technology on a new geographical site.1 The contributors to this volume agree that South Asia should not be treated simply as an empirical site to which the already existing analytics and methodologies of the broader field of history of technology can be "extended." Our implicit claim in writing these technological stories is that South Asia should be (and it already is) also a location to unravel new analytics and methods. The contributors thus aim to demonstrate how looking at the history of technology from South Asia changes what it means to do history of technology. Calling the approach followed by the contributors to this volume post-Marxist and post-nationalist would be eminently inadequate, if a safe label. Just as much as they are distanced from older Marxist and nationalist [End Page 933] approaches, the contributors are also heirs to standard critiques of modernity within a certain mode of analysis in South Asia. Readers will find in these articles a direct engagement with the question of the modern and the place of technology in the construction of the modern. Political modernity and its various institutions, Dipesh Chakrabarty told us, "all bear the burden of European thought and history."2 In a sign that such questioning of modernity's universal claims have become mainstream, all South Asianists proceed with the assumption that the metanarrative of modernity may after all be inadequate to assess all of the lived experiences in South Asia. This reflexivity to "modern" defines all of the contributors' technological histories, and perhaps sets them apart. While questioning modernity is a staple in the historiography of technology, the contributors in this volume will critique modernity from a position firmly within South Asian scholarly conventions. Approach and Themes The articles in this volume display a distinctive crossdisciplinarity that is not out of sync with trends in the field of South Asia, and reflects the way the field has evolved and honed its disciplinary practices over the years. A distinct porosity of the discipline of history in South Asia can be traced to its earliest incarnations. The 1960s works of Bernard Cohn, a pioneer in the field, are instructive. Cohn's work is distinctive, among other things, for exploring conjointly the methods, practices, and theories of two disciplines, what Cohn referred to as "Anthropologyland" and "Historyland." Later, writing a foreword in an omnibus to Cohn's work, Dipesh Chakrabarty celebrated the ease with which Cohn was known to navigate the disciplines of history and anthropology and to call them both "home."3 The 1960s trend was further consolidated with the emergence of the subaltern studies in the 1980s that emerged as a critique of historicism across several disciplines. The active crossdisciplinarity of the subaltern and postcolonial arms of South Asian historiography accelerated the field's spread into disciplines of social sciences and invited the involvement of postcolonial theorists from multiple disciplines.4 The same crossdisciplinarity marks the [End Page 934] approaches in South Asian technological history broadly, which have come to incorporate the practice of radical social history, a new political economy, historical and cultural anthropology, ethno-history, and literary and textual analysis. Historians of technology in South Asia marshal this crossdisciplinarity to address a number of questions that can be seen as central to the historiography of technology. To review every pertinent question would be a herculean task even for a start. But in trying to keep the review of...

Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany by David D. Kim

Reviewed by: Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany by David D. Kim Helen Finch Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany. By David D. Kim. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 248. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810135253. Kim's monograph aims to bring contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism to bear on current debates about postcolonial memory, Holocaust memory, and trauma in German literature. It synthesizes a vast range of contemporary thought on memory, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and capitalism through analyzing three postwall German novels. These "cosmopolitan parables" are Hans Christoph Buch's Speech of the Dead Columbus on Judgment Day (1992), Michael Krüger's Himmelfarb (1993), and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995). Kim claims that these works deploy melancholy aesthetics to break down national containers of memory and trace links between postcolonial memory and Holocaust memory in disruptive ways. As Kim admits, his aim is extremely ambitious: "an investigation of one of the most elusive philosophical concepts and highest political ideals today, seeking to show its many interpretations in the humanities and social sciences as well as the urgent problems associated with them" (183). For Kim, "trauma lies at the heart of transcultural memory as a common good" (13), and his chosen authors respond to this trauma with a form of melancholy aesthetics informed by a leftist consciousness that moves them to call for "world citizenship," a term that Kim uses interchangeably with "cosmopolitanism." Kim chooses to focus on German literature because it held a unique position in the 1990s as a space where memories of the Nazi past, the colonial past, and the East German past intersected. He concludes by suggesting that the three "cosmopolitan parables" "produce dissonant social relations through which readers are able to reflect on their own implicated relationships with strangers in pain" (185). Melancholy cosmopolitan literature, for Kim, is fundamentally didactic, aiming to have an ethical effect on a reader. The first half of the book, "Entanglements," consists of three chapters that establish the theoretical framework for Kim's study. Chapter 1, "Divided Cosmopolitanisms," discusses the conceptual history of cosmopolitanism from the 1990s to the present, starting from Nussbaum's concept of cosmopolitan education and its critiques by postcolonial theorists such as Gilroy, Cheah, and Noyes. Kim also evaluates the debate surrounding the universality of Holocaust memory as a carrier of cosmopolitan duty, expressing concern at the quarrel between postmodern and postcolonial scholars. [End Page 201] Chapter 2, "The Traumas of Unification," discusses the debates on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) in Germany. This chapter relies somewhat on outmoded narratives (e.g., that until the 1960s in Germany "with the exception of Paul Celan's iconoclastic poem 'Death Fugue' … writers and thinkers remained mostly silent about Nazi crimes against humanity" [64], a view that has been challenged by scholars including Ruth Vogel-Klein and Stephan Braese). Nonetheless, it does important work in bringing together the German postcolonial moment with Vergangenheitsbewältigung and also with the German turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s. Chapter 3, "In the Whirlwind of Melancholy," discusses "the problem of too much memory" (79) and argues that melancholy makes literature the ideal platform for cosmopolitan entanglement with memory. Kim engages with the long strand of German thought, particularly Benjamin's work, that links melancholy to resistance. Part 2, "Parables," contains Kim's case studies of authors who, in his words, "have inherited the historical burden of National Socialism … as descendants of Germans who lived through Nazi Germany" (15). He considers that, due to their position as globally oriented, leftist public intellectuals, they are ideally placed to probe a long arc of institutionalized oppression. Chapter 4 on Buch's Speech of the Dead Columbus discusses the title character as an ironic wanderer through five centuries; somehow both Jewish and non-Jewish, the dead Columbus exposes the crossings between German, Jewish, and Caribbean histories. Next, Kim argues that Michael Krüger's Himmelfarb shows the impossibility of a neat German-Jewish partition after World War II, as well as exposing the racist German history of anthropology. Finally, Kim focuses on Sebald's poetics of photography in The Rings of Saturn, showing his "archaeological...

Between Pan-Africanism and a Multiracial Nation: Race, Regionalism, and Guyanese Nation-Building Through the Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), 1972

The first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), held in the Caribbean nation of Guyana in 1972, was a significant and deliberate postcolonial moment that embodied the aspirations of a culturally unified Caribbean grounded in its common African ancestry. Through CARIFESTA, Guyana offered the symbolic and physical space through which to realize the dreams of Caribbean artists and intellectuals to erase Eurocentric cultural prejudices against African-derived cultural forms and embrace a Pan-African cultural heritage that could form the basis of regional unity. Over 1,200 intellectuals and cultural producers from across the Caribbean and Latin America – including Jamaica, Haiti, Surinam, Cuba, and Brazil – participated in this elaborate festival to meet their brethren and forge bonds within the African diaspora in the Caribbean. But this utopian vision and articulation of unity was never divorced from the on-the-ground politics and realities of racial divisions. The abundance, vibrancy, and warm reception of Pan-African cultural performances contrasted sharply with the politicized scarcity of Indo-Caribbean cultural offerings, especially from the host nation of Guyana. Forging an African diaspora in the Caribbean did not only occur within a binary African–European framework, but also centred on the racial and cultural politics experienced by Afro- and Indo-Caribbean peoples.