Postcolonial Nation Building Research Articles

Being Portuguese in Malacca: the politics of folk culture in Malaysia

This paper explores what it means to be “Portuguese” in Malacca today and illustrates ways in which the journey has been complicated by issues of class tension, colonial positioning, post-colonial nation building, and modern economic development. The focal point of the analysis is a gala dinner organized by the Malacca Portuguese Eurasian Association in 2002. This constituted a rare moment in which community members made a public political statement. I argue that a detailed reading of the event as a public performance of “Portugueseness” sheds light upon broader politics of cultural identity in Malaysia today. Finally, I suggest that the “Portugueseness” of today is more flexible and multifaceted than in the past and that new transnational and diasporic sensibilities are emerging.

Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul’s Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men

. S. Naipaul's fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s have reflected an unenthusiastic view of postcolonial nationalism and nation building. He has had difficulty believing in the ability of new nations in Africa and the Caribbean to raise themselves to a condition of economic autonomy and cultural authenticity. He has also been against a political rhetoric and agenda that calls for breaking cultural ties with European nations.1 Instead, political skepticism, Western cultural conservatism, and realist and modernist aesthetics have determined the selection and treatment of subjects in Naipaul's writing. These approaches have caused postcolonial intellectuals to complain about his lack of interest in local culture2 and to grumble about his choice of material-such as Mobutu Sese Seko's reign in the Congo and the Michael de Freitas trial in Trinidad-that reflects pessimistically on politics, revolution, and the prospects of national renewal. Naipaul, however, is probably the most honored living author in the British literary world. Even those postcolonial intellectuals averse to his poli

The Postcolonial Crescent

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...

Did Black Literacy Rise After Soweto?: Public Problems and Ethnic Archipelagos in South Africa

Overview Debate continues over the State's relative to political organizations and activists dispersed throughout civil society. This balance of power, of course, varies across different societies and upon the institutional conditions found in particular sectors. These spheres range from the State's attempts at economic regulation to civil contestation over the availability and quality of local institutions, such as schools. Political analysts and social theorists still err in putting forward grand claims about Government's strength or - to the point of this paper - in assuming that the State's local effects will be uniformly felt across diverse groups at the grassroots. Competing theoretical explanations for why mass schooling spreads, especially its quickening expansion under post-colonial nation building, are certainly informative. The State's varies across national settings and historical periods, whether energized by technical-functionalist demands, the mediation of class conflict, or to enable the State to look modern, signalling its world-class institutional status (for review, Fuller and Rubinson, 1992). But once the dull force of policy emerges from the State, it may be thoroughly mediated by local politics, institutions, and cultural patterns (Bradshaw, Kaiser, and Ndegwa, 1995). This paper focuses on the case of post-1976 South Africa, the period following the Soweto uprising when the apartheid regime moved decisively to expand access to local schools within black and coloured communities. The pragmatic question we ask: Was this concerted State action felt differently by different local groups, bounded by their ethnic or gender membership? Pretoria poured substantial new resources into poor townships, building more classrooms and hiring more teachers. But which particular local groups benefitted in terms of rising enrollments and gains in literacy? The paper is organized in three major parts. First, we briefly review how macro theories have attempted to define the State's or weakness. Second, we describe how the apartheid regime attempted to gain legitimacy and by, at least symbolically, pushing to expand educational opportunity during the 1976-1994 period. Third, we model the effects of ethnic and gender membership on actual literacy levels - the locally felt outcome of central State policy - taking into account individual social-class differences and gains in school attainment. We see household and individual-level changes in literacy as one indicator of whether the South African regime, under apartheid, was truly strong and effective in delivering on its promise to expand basic education after Soweto. The earlier paper in this volume by York Bradshaw and Bruce Fuller (Policy Action and School Demand in Kenya) focuses on a related indicator of Government effectiveness or fragility: the ups and downs of family demand for modern schooling. The present paper extends this line of work by asking whether ethnic and gender memberships serve to locally condition the central State's capacity to raise literacy. Within caste-like societies the boundaries and internal logic of and gender roles are institutionally set - stemming from earlier indigenous cultural scripts and historical action by the State. For example, the migratory labor structure, driven by South African mining and manufacturing interests literally constructed black townships to house cheap labor pools, eroding the traditional village household and sharpening gender roles. The apartheid regime's artificial creation of black homelands or bantustans inadvertently stratified these puppet states' commitment to education and the relative quality of their schools.(2) Thus the persisting ethnic and gender differences that mark South Africa have been historically created by traditional cultural patterns and lasting manipulations of race and ethnicity to ensure disunity. …