Postcolonial Politics Research Articles

Dangerous memories and entangled temporalities: Irish republicanism and the postcolonial politics of time

ABSTRACT In this article we develop a ‘hauntological’ reading of republicanism in postcolonial Ireland. This reading takes as its object the ways in which the politics of remembering – and remembering republican politics in particular – is equally a politics of time. Exploring the politics of republicanism through the lens of entangled temporalities, we develop an understanding of a particular mode of political desire. This republican political desire holds open the demand for a radical interrogation of the (post)colonial given. As such, it takes the form of a ‘dangerous memory’. Through the concept of a ‘dangerous memory’, we excavate a certain republican politics of refusal, that haunts the legitimacy and automatic reproduction of the postcolonial settlement and the attendant proprietary relations of inequality that it formalizes – culturally, politically, economically and legally. This theoretical interpretation of Irish republican hauntology is empirically explored through three historical layers and entangled temporalities that are organized around the ghosts of Roger Casement, a radical republican figure. The dangerous memories of Casement not only disrupt the canonical or official interpretation of Irish republicanism, but also open up the left-republican possibility to further interrogate the postcolonial present, both in Ireland and beyond.

Gendering visions of the postcolonial modernist state through names: a literary onomastic analysis of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009)

African literature is a crucial arena for deconstructing norms, and imagining communities or alternative modes of sociality and being. In many postcolonial African literary works, particularly those grappling with the legacy of European colonisation and the challenges of nation-building, the modernist state is frequently depicted as an entity emblematic of violence and dispossession inflicted upon the populace. However, it is also sometimes portrayed as offering a degree of hope and possibility amidst the turmoil. Drawing on literary onomastics and insights from Rights and Feminist theories, the article examines Parkes’ strategic use of names to articulate ethicality in Tail of the Blue Bird. Parkes argues for a true decolonisation by radically replacing and reassessing the patriarchal ideology that creates violence and trauma in postcolonial societies. This should happen by embracing the feminine principles represented by the main female characters in the novel. The article shows that the semiotics and character roles of Esi Mensisi and Yaa Somu as women constitute crucial sites for Parkes’ rumination on human flourishing and ethicality in the postcolonial modernist state. The article has implications for studies on literary onomastics, characterisation, and how African writers attempt to reimagine postcolonial politics and sociality.

For the archive yet to come

Abstract This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.

Musical activity, show business and post-colonial politics in socialist Maputo, or ‘the multiple sides of a full circle’ (1975–1994)

ABSTRACT This article evaluates the configuration of musical practices in Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, during the ‘socialist single-party period’ (1975–1994), focusing on changes in dancing venues and entertainment shows organized by companies like Produções 1001, Delta Produções, and the state-owned Empresa Moçambicana de Entretenimento (EME), which aimed to centralize all aspects related to música ligeira (literally ‘light music’) in the country. Through fieldwork interviews with politicians, producers, musicians, and archival research, this article elucidates the significance of musical activity and the entertainment industry in shaping the ‘sonorous construction’ of the ‘new Mozambican man’, as envisioned by FRELIMO. It explores numerous topics, including the initial prohibition of many venues in the early years of independence and the subsequent informal reversal of such decisions by 1994.

Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane

Abstract: This article considers twenty-first-century Mozambican works of fiction that contest the foundational status of nineteenth-century Gazan emperor Ngungunyane (circa 1850–1906) to Mozambique's postcolonial nationalism as a symbolic representation of ongoing imperial patriarchy. A century after Ngungunyane's defeat by the Portuguese, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa published Ualalapi , widely read as a devastating critique of Mozambique's FRELIMO party's postcolonial politics as a continuation of Ngungunyane's bloody reign. A series of subsequent works respond to Ualalapi 's critique: Mia Couto's As areias do imperador trilogy, Khosa's As mulheres do imperador , and Paulina Chiziane's As andorinhas . These works deploy female protagonists and narrative experimentation to respond to Ngungunyane's famous final speech in Ualalapi . I argue that each of the contemporary works break the speech's imperial logic in different ways. Khosa, Couto, and Chiziane show that an excess of empire pervades contemporary rewritings of this history. These works draw on female voices and a constellation of anti-imperial communities of Black women—what philosopher María Lugones has theorized as a coalition and through Michelle M. Wright has analyzed through the dialogic—to break colonial-postcolonial continuities of power and imagine different futures in their wake.

On interregna: Tejumola Olaniyan and the radical normality of theory

In this brief meditation on Tejumola Olaniyan’s theoretical writing, I explore the entanglements between Olaniyan’s widely-cited concept of the “postcolonial incredible” and the notion of an “interregnum,” drawn from Antonio Gramsci. By reconsidering Olaniyan’s use of terms like “overthrow,” “presupposed,” and “normality,” I argue that Olaniyan theorizes the crisis of African postcolonial politics as a crisis of modernity itself. Given that Gramsci used the concept of interregnum to describe a transitional context in which some old order was already dying, while a new one could not yet be born, I ask what it might mean for Olaniyan and the subjects he has researched, such as Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Femi Osofisan—or indeed any radical activist, rebel, or theorist—to overthrow the transition.

Postcolonial Politics and Theology: Unraveling Empire for a Global World, written by Kwok, Pui-lan

Postcolonial Politics and Theology: Unraveling Empire for a Global World, written by Kwok, Pui-lan

Gaming [the] Systems: Critical Analysis through Tabletop Roleplaying Games in Humanities Classrooms

In its very designation, “role play” contains a productive tension: the expectations bound up in roles and the liberating potentiality of play. It comes as no surprise, then, that role play has found expression in the worlds of business, therapy, education, and even the military. Table-top games exist as our culture’s most familiar form of role play but among its least theorized. In this paper, I examine the rich potential of table-top role-playing games in humanities classrooms as a means to fuel cultural critique, critical analysis, class discussion, and self-reflection. My paper lays out a theoretical structure for analyzing games as multi-dimensional texts and a practical guide for bringing them into the classroom. In particular, I look at two free-to-access and permissively concise game systems which can easily fit into an open week of coursework. The games, “Lasers and Feelings” and “The Deep Forest,” depart from the cultural expectations of “Dungeons & Dragons” to rethink, adapt, and challenge our understanding of issues ranging from the formulation of the rational, Western subject to the politics of post-colonialism. I supplement conventional process-oriented pedagogy with Ian Bogost’s “Persuasive Games” and C. Thai Nguyen’s “Games: Agency as Art,” to establish a robust groundwork for students to analyze and critique how game design decisions make arguments about the world. Furthermore, in playing the games in the classroom and debriefing afterwards, students identify their internal systems that reflect and inform their own assumptions about the world.

The State of the Burundi's Post-Colonial Education System: Responsibility of the Former Coloniser or of the Local Politics and Governance?

This article has examined the current state of the Burundian education system by relating it to the contribution of the former coloniser and the action of Burundi's post-colonial politics and governance in a context where what goes wrong in the field is unofficially linked to colonial action and imperialist influence. Data was collected using the qualitative method through interviews with experts in the field of education, historians, teachers at all levels, professionals, parents, students, and officials of the ministry in charge of education. The processing, analysis and interpretation of the data followed the thematic approach, and the results were confronted with the existing literature to conclude that the educational system in post-colonial Burundi suffers from the decline of the language of instruction, the almost non-existence of critical thinking skills in the curricula as well as the almost non-existence of innovative problem-solving skills. Moreover, after more than 60 years of independence, it has been proven that Burundi has no reason to continue blaming the former coloniser for the difficulties that haunt this sector

Science, Law and the Raj: Cultural Fields of Fish(y) Fact

Nineteenth century fact-making in British India was a cultural endeavour shared among its diverse colonial experts. Through a critical sociological reading of archival documents and official records, this paper contributes to aquatic-marine historiography by unpacking utterances and deeds of irrigation engineers, pisciculture proponents, naturalists and administrators regarding the facts of ‘injury to fish supplies’ and the preservation of these supplies by law. It argues that early scientific fisheries investigation and their culmination in the Indian Fisheries Act, 1897 were not the result of a successful separation of science and politics, or of fact from interest. Rather, colonial cultures of fact-making were forged in the interplay of the imperial utilitarianism and hybridity inherent to rule-making in the colony, which renders early fisheries science in India as a field of postcolonial politics by other means.

Time for Tea: Representations of Postcolonial and Chinese Diaspora Culture and Identity in Chuah Guat Eng’s Echoes of Silence

Tea, the second most consumed beverage in the world, originates from China, and was then brought all over the world through trade, affecting the many different cultures that it encounters along the way. The way a person takes their tea can often reveal parts of their cultural identity and upbringing. This paper aims to examine the representations of the hybrid identities of the Chinese Diaspora in Malaysia through a close reading of tea scenes and tea culture in Chuah Guat Eng’s first novel, Echoes of Silence: A Malaysian Novel, first published in 1994. The novel explores the complex race relations and postcolonial politics and identity in Malaysia and provides an excellent springboard for the examination of Malaysian literary cultural politics, as well as postcolonial issues such as cultural hybridity, and the way that culture spreads and is spread from one part of the world to another and is manifested in diaspora identities. Through such an exploration, I hope to examine the negotiation between the hybridizing culture of being overseas Chinese as well as a British subject simultaneously in relation to representations of tea consumption and culture in Anglophone literature, which may provide more insight into the mentality of Anglophone Malaysian writers concerning issues of cultural identity and diaspora.

Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized States, by Martha Wilfahrt

<i>Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized States</i>, by Martha Wilfahrt

A Political History of the Subject: Brij V. Lal on Leadership

ABSTRACT Brij V. Lal was the most prolific writer on post-colonial politics in Fiji. Many of these writings concerned political leaders and the nature of political leadership. Biographies of A.D. Patel and Jai Ram Reddy stand out, but Lal's other writings on politics nevertheless foregrounded people, and the way their personalities shaped, and were shaped by, the times in which they lived. In this article I consider how this biographer’s sensibility implicitly invokes a theory of political leadership and re-read Lal’s contribution to the study of politics in Fiji from this standpoint. I argue that his ‘political history of the subject’ offers both a justification for, and approach to, studying leadership in a person-centred way.

Reading emotion, reading joy: South Africa’s literary non-scenes

ABSTRACT #Fallism has taken South African literature to a precipice. A growing mistrust in the country’s postcolonial politics and the continuing physical and economic oppression of black bodies – captured in the spirit of #RhodesMustFall – has led to a questioning of the rational desire to ‘put into words’. The radical social and political change required, critics imply, can no longer be adequately understood through the certainty of the written form: The path to a true decolonial future is in live art. This paper uses these suggestions as a springboard but refuses to accept the ‘death of the text’ that is implied. Rather I utilise interventions from the 1980s to once again encourage the academy to recognise the power of ‘literary non-scenes’ where the performed and the written interact. Moreover, I argue that scholars should begin to read for emotion and, in so doing, open the space for the expression of Black joy.

Post-Colonial Consumer Respect and the Framing of Neocolonial Consumption in Advertising

Abstract This study of the production, representation, and reception of post-colonial advertising in India reveals a politics of consumer respectability. The post-colonial politics of consumer respectability is located at the intersection of center–periphery relations, class divisions, and colorism in a way that it frames neocolonial consumption. Advertisers depict middle-class consumer respectability by asserting Indian nationalism and by degrading the West as a symbol of colonialism. Such depictions are class- and color-based and show under-class and dark-skinned consumers in subordinate positions. Furthering such neocolonial frames of consumption, Indian advertising advances the middle-class desire for Eurocentric modernity by reinforcing the colonial trope of India as temporally lagging behind the West. Finally, middle-class consumer respectability involves a neocolonial whitening of self with epidermalized shaping of inter-corporeality and agency. In uncovering the theoretical implications of advertising as a site of avenging degradation, desiring modernity, and whitening of self, this study contributes by offering insights into how the politics of post-colonial consumer respectability furthers neocolonial frames of consumption.

A forgotten famine of ’43? Travancore’s muffled ‘cry of distress’

AbstractMass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.

The Gendered Necropolitics of Migration Control in a French Postcolonial Periphery

This article examines the postcolonial politics of migration control in Mayotte, an overseas French department, and argues that these bear necropolitical consequences. It sheds light on the gendered dimension of this necropolitical power by focusing on the life and border-crossing experiences of undocumented Comorian women. Entrenched barriers to the regularization of their administrative status endanger their access to healthcare and degrade the conditions for life long-term. The constant risk of arrest and massive forced removals furthermore engender dangerous border crossings, each instance exposing the passengers to the risk of death. The article also foregrounds that these necropolitics are exacerbated as a result of the postcolonial conundrum in which Mahoran elites find themselves, with the increasing support of Black and Muslim elites for the French far-right political party.

The Gendered Necropolitics of Migration Control in a French Postcolonial Periphery

This article examines the postcolonial politics of migration control in Mayotte, an overseas French department, and argues that these bear necropolitical consequences. It sheds light on the gendered dimension of this necropolitical power by focusing on the life and border-crossing experiences of undocumented Comorian women. Entrenched barriers to the regularization of their administrative status endanger their access to healthcare and degrade the conditions for life long-term. The constant risk of arrest and massive forced removals furthermore engender dangerous border crossings, each instance exposing the passengers to the risk of death. The article also foregrounds that these necropolitics are exacerbated as a result of the postcolonial conundrum in which Mahoran elites find themselves, with the increasing support of Black and Muslim elites for the French far-right political party.

An evolving migration-development nexus: DfID and British politics of race and belonging

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in the connections between migration and development. Within this body of work less attention has been paid to the ways in which ideas of race and racialised histories and geographies shape the migration-development nexus. Focusing on diasporic communities as key actors within this nexus and using empirical material from Great Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), this paper explores the shifting constructions of ‘the diaspora’ within the global development context from DfID’s inception in 1997 to its demise in 2020. Constructions of the diaspora-development nexus can be framed as a (shifting) assemblage, bringing together contemporary post-colonial politics of belonging, the racialised histories and geographies of development and the changing (neoliberal) architectures and cultures of development. The paper concludes that in this context, diasporic-centred development can be considered a racialised socio-political mechanism, shaped by the shifting politics of race and belonging, which are themselves bound to colonial pasts and contemporary colonialities. This attends to processes of inclusion (and exclusion) in the global development sphere in contemporary Britain and speaks to the need to think more widely about how race intersects with the migration-development nexus.

Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism

AbstractFor centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral to forms of orientalism. In Tajikistan, the accounts of opera told today by the daughter of a successful Soviet Tajik composer bring to light the ambiguity of power relations and positionalities in Soviet opera’s production. Her accounts, beyond highlighting opera’s readily apparent orientalist tendencies, reveal surprising cosmopolitan aspirations in Soviet Central Asian opera. Cosmopolitan histories and values also feature heavily in post-colonial politics of knowledge production, but the concept appears worlds apart from, even in opposition to that of orientalism: the latter feeds off center-periphery, knowledge-power relations, while the former aspires to evade them. Through this present-day account of opera’s development in Soviet Tajikistan, this article challenges this opposition, theorizing a conceptual ambiguity and interdependence between orientalism and cosmopolitanism, which has important consequences for knowledge-producing fields like opera, as well as anthropology. Multiple forms of orientalism and cosmopolitanism overlapped and interacted in the development of Soviet Central Asian opera as numerous, intersecting meanings and socio-political agendas went into its production. Ultimately, a conceptual space emergesbetweenthe orientalism(s) and cosmopolitanism(s) at play. This ambiguous space in-between offers a lens for critically evaluating the complex, uneven practice of portraying and engaging with Others.