Postcolonial Politics Research Articles

Sustainability Knowledge Politics: Southeast Asia, Europe and the Transregional History of Palm Oil Sustainability Research

Abstract So far, the field of sustainability history has insufficiently addressed the tricky politics of academic sustainability knowledge making. In response, this paper studies how scientific research on palm oil sustainability, when defining sustainability problems and solutions, enacted a postcolonial politics of difference between Southeast Asia and Europe. Iterating between quantitative database queries (2,500+ sources) and close reading, we found that voices of scientists from both regions were amply represented in palm oil sustainability research, but presented different types of narratives. Research originating from Southeast Asia predominantly foregrounded situated problems originating, experienced and to be redressed within the region itself. By contrast, diverse strands of research led by scholars from Europe addressed universalised global sustainability problems for humanity, notably global deforestation and climate change. This research framed palm oil farmers in Southeast Asia as responsible for causing and solving such problems while attributing to European actors the responsibility of ensuring Southeast Asian actors' compliance with global sustainability standards through certification schemes. Critically, European actors were thereby acquitted of their own historical and future responsibilities, even though the latter had long deforested their own territories and contributed significantly more to climate change, played a pivotal role in establishing palm oil cultivation and trade, and constituted leading importers of soy in the twentieth century. To open up for more equitable and inclusive future sustainability imaginaries, we encourage historical research that studies, situates and unpacks diverse sustainability knowledges and narratives across the globe in a symmetrical manner.

Juxtaposition and Asynchronicity as Postcolonial Poetics in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart

ABSTRACT Literary studies, with the influence of critical theory inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, have sidestepped concerns on aesthetics and poetics. Using Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics, this study aims to explore juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. It discusses how juxtaposition and asynchronicity as postcolonial poetics interrogate the postcolonial politics in the novel and explains the novel’s contribution to enriching Filipinos’ counter-memory and in enabling resistance. The poetics of second-person narrator point of view, flashbacks, free indirect discourse, and elliptical narrative are ways through which the text has explored migrants’ efforts of forging and linking social relations in the interstitial spaces between homeland and host land. At the same time, the novel goes beyond essentialist contours of migrant experience such as heteronormative nationalism and nostalgia for lost origins. The paper demonstrates not only a critical reckoning with power structures but also renewed attempts and continued struggle, which lead to radical hope.

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

The Politics of Exploitation and Oppression, British Colonization, and Chinese Involvement in Zimbabwe

In an analog philosophy by Lobengula of the chameleon and the fly, he unveiled the British occupation of Zimbabwe, which I equally translated or is similar to the 21st-century Chinese involvement in Zimbabwe. In understanding the exploitative nature of colonial and post-colonial politics, the research offered a comparative analysis of the British and Chinese involvement in Zimbabwe. The post-colonial economic colonization neo-colonialism, similar to dependency theory proponents, found the African continent under exploitation and oppression in her post-independence. The researcher utilized qualitative research of documentary review, online sources, and virtual ethnography to unveil and enrich the study phenomenon.

The Green Revolution and transversal countermovements: recovering alternative agronomic imaginaries in Tunisia and India

ABSTRACT This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics of defending political sovereignty and advancing to economic/technological sovereignty. Erasing these dissident voices enabled the legitimisation of the Green Revolution as an ‘inevitable’ way to ensure food security. We argue that recovering this intellectual history is critical to displace the techno-centric Green Revolution narrative, and to inform and support struggles for ecologically attuned alternatives that foreground agroecology.

Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition

This essay proposes nonsynchronous juxtaposition as a narrative device to critically engage with the complex historical legacies of the Bandung Conference 1955 and to reclaim the anticolonial poetic of the Bandung Spirit’s transnational solidarity with a classed and gendered perspective of migrant workers’ contemporary struggles. It argues that juxtaposition forges “Bandung chronopolitics”, a postcolonial politics of time that invokes affective entanglements of historical memories and present anticolonial transnational struggles. To demonstrate the creative and dialogical potential of rewriting solidarities in juxtaposition, this essay performs a close reading that puts side by side two poems titled “Kepada Sahabat Asia Afrika” (To Afro-Asian Friends, 1961) by Sugiarti Siswadi and “Seusai Badai Berpeluk Puisi” (After the Hurricane Embraced a Poem, 2009) by Mega Vristian. This essay summarily positions the poetic of juxtaposition and Bandung chronopolitics as a discursive strategy to avoid unchecked glorification of Bandung legacies and to repurpose the Bandung Spirit as a political imagination that brings historical depth to the works of Third World solidarity from below against the highly coordinated global-imperial capitalism.

Mobilizing Home: Diasporic Agitations and the Global Remakings of Postwar Southeastern Nigeria

AbstractIn the context of shifting global geographies of labor and political volatility, Nigerian migrant associations play a significant role in organizing diasporic life. Yet, far from being a culturally static feature, Igbo Nigerian associations emerge through diasporic agitations, or dynamic mobilizations around particular events, crises, and projects that deliberately engage the postcolonial state. Lu first reconsiders the significance of 1970s post-civil war reconstruction in southeastern Nigeria before tracing subsequent transformations in flexible diasporic organizations within Global South locations such as China and Dubai. These agile and multi-scalar diasporic mobilizations enable their members to negotiate the nexus of postcolonial politics and transnational capitalism.

Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality

Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality

An Analysis of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey

The novel manages brilliantly to portray Indian culture and family life, setting against the backdrop of the subcontinent’s volatile postcolonial politics. The microcosmic family dimension of the story line is not only played upon a political background: quite the contrary, the story shows to which degree political and personal realities are intertwined and how much the microcosm echoes the macrocosm, since the lives of the characters are deeply affected by local corruption and the government inadequacy. The novel itself is a manifestation of the Indian politics on the domestic life of Gustad Noble, thus Mistry mingles public with the private. This novel is a journey of Gustad through the path of sorrow, death, betrayal, disillusion and disappointment. Above all, Mistry’s novels are focused on community differences. Mistry has unfolded the postcolonial condition that affects the community’s identity. Apart from religious identity, historical awareness forms the collective identity of the community

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.

(Anticolonial) Revolution as a Felt Archive

Arwa Salih begins her memoir about Egypt’s anticolonial revolution by invoking haunting: “I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every sentence of this book.” Salih, a prominent Egyptian communist, evocatively named her memoir The Stillborn, referencing a project that was unfinished, that had seemingly “failed”, and yet that haunts us all. This article argues that frames such as feeling haunted or experiencing failure open up possibilities around exploring anticolonialism and its afterlives as an affective landscape. I engage Arwa Salih’s understanding of “haunting” and Dian Million’s work on affective archives and “felt theory” in order to explore anticolonial struggle and postcolonial politics through the lens of feeling. What would it mean to make sense of these moments by attending to feelings such as hope, promise, grief, and more? I argue that the affective understandings of revolutionary events are central to theorising the anticolonial moment and its afterlives.

Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory

AbstractThis essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-Western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. The authors' concern is that these engagements remain too centered on Western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through a reading of Gandhi and Fanon, the authors argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the West, also had a positive or reconstructive theoretical agenda, one that has been taken up in creative ways in postcolonial political thought. Taking cues from the work of Sudipta Kaviraj, Partha Chatterjee, and Mahmood Mamdani, the essay proposes an alternative mode of decolonizing political theory that takes as its central aim the generation of theory from the study of postcolonial politics. It argues for a historically attuned and comparative approach to postcolonial politics that aims to innovate new concepts and reanimate inherited ones. From this perspective, decolonizing political theory is less a recurring critique of Eurocentrism than an effort to shift the terrain of theorizing and thereby reinvigorate the practice of political theory as such.

Measuring progress in megawatt: Colonialism, development, and the “unseeing” electricity grid in East Africa

The electrification of East Africa followed an exceptionally uneven path. After about 50 years of relative neglect under colonial rule, the construction of hydroelectric dams moved electricity generation into the focus of late colonial development policy and became the major field of intervention for foreign donors after independence. The metrics of electricity attained a role as indicator and driver for economic growth, and therefore as a target figure in economic policy, one that was arguably not justified by their actual significance in the energy landscape of East Africa. This paper analyses both the global preconditions of this shift and its local repercussions. Rather than the physical visibility of electricity in the form of large dams and high-tension lines, the paper focuses on the processes that rendered electricity ontologically visible. It traces attempts by engineers, expert advisors, or development consultants to translate the complex information associated with the generation and consumption of electricity into calculable and comparable metrics. The paper scrutinises these commensuration processes in terms of the resources and knowledge they required, the frameworks of agency they opened, and the way they fed into wider discourses of development. It asks how the metrics of electricity themselves became part of the colonial and postcolonial politics of calculation, as they increasingly came to be seen as a medium for conceiving national economies. This trend was reinforced by the ascent of development economics in the 1950s and its influence on the ontological foundations of international development cooperation and post-independence nation-building. Because of the calculability and capital-intensity of its production, electricity lent itself perfectly to an economic policy based on macroeconomic aggregates and abstract growth models. Conversely, the electricity bias of international development agencies and the national government rendered rural, non-commercial, and non-productive energy use largely invisible.

Towards a trans politics of post-coloniality

Towards a trans politics of post-coloniality

Teaching homocapitalism with Rahul Rao’s out of time the queer politics of postcoloniality: navigating against queer inclusivity as a way of shoring up capital

Teaching homocapitalism with Rahul Rao’s out of time the queer politics of postcoloniality: navigating against queer inclusivity as a way of shoring up capital

Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality

Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality

The State of Human Rights in the African Post-Colonial Politics

"The aim of this study is to identify and critically assess the effects of appropriation of foreign political ideologies and practices in African political systems. This paper argues that there should be no leader, whatever his worth; look on his own personal problems to be exploited for the benefits of western’s Politics. Which will enable the African systems to develop, secondly, argues that Human Rights should be looked at to be an apportioned – responsibility, shared by both the former colonial powers and the current post-colonial political elites, rather than seeing Human rights promotion as yet another excuse to interfere or control other sovereign nations. The study will involve qualitative research involving reviewing other authors' literature, identifying current affairs, and critical assessing the ways in which neo-colonialism affects the different societies in transition from a colonial past to independence. The study is based on the fact that colonized countries, during the Cold War, suffered political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, while alignment either with the capitalist or communist ideology failed. Currently there is a felt pressure to adopt a neoliberal ideology in order to access to have access to aid and investment. The study concludes with recommendations to third world leaders, to look at the people they lead as their responsibility, since no leader, whatever his/her worth, can replace the will of people. This results in a felt need to embrace democracy and such democratic values as: strong institutions, an independent judiciary and the separation of powers, individual and minority rights, and civil rights. Keywords: postcolonial politics, appropriation of foreign politics, human rights, principled values of democracy, the inability of African leaders "

Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan: The Polemics of Myth making and Influence of Gandhi

The present paper represents the three triumvirs of Indian English novel at the critical juncture of the early twentieth century when Gandhian thoughts and polemics were influential throughout India. The paper seeks to explore how under Gandhian presence–both physical as well as metaphorical, these three novelists attempted to explore the myths and mythical narratives of Indian civilization and culture to manifest the ‘collective unconscious’ of the Indian sensibilities. Furthermore, it also tries to understand the polemics of myth-making in the context of post-colonial politics and writing. The nationalist culture of the early twentieth century and the contribution of these writers are being explored to analyze how their narratives are national allegories.

Revamping the Environment for National Development: A Lexico-Semantic Reading of Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth

Environmental poetry is relatively young in the literature of the Nigerian literary writers and critics. Literary scholars of an earlier generation before Osundare – Soyinka, Okigbo, and Okara have dwelt more on the themes and language of cultural heritage, cultural conflicts, colonial and post-colonial political, socio-economic and religious issues. They barely scratched around the themes of environment and ecology. More so, their language may be adjudged obscure and esoteric. Therefore, the present study engages in the exploration of Osundare’s innovative and full-scale venture into pivotal issues of the environment that have become of utmost concern nationally and internationally in contemporary times. Also of interest in this study is Osundare’s efforts to redefine the diction of Nigerian poetry to reach a wider audience. Osundare’s poetry collection, The Eye of the Earth is our focal text. It has been observed that critical studies on this collection are largely centered on literary interpretations. Lexico-semantic exploration of this collection can be considered inadequate, which necessitated the present study to strike a balance in deciphering Osundare’s language and thematic preoccupations. This study is anchored on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and eco-criticism theory with insights from lexical-semantic theory. Poems of environmental background are purposively selected from the collection. The study reveals Osundare’s tactical manipulation of “common” language in exposing man’s pernicious activities in the natural environment. In a similar manipulative skill in language use, the study unveils consequential roles imperative for a man to obviate his adverse activities on nature in order to achieve development at different spheres of life.

Agri-food scholarship: Past, present and future contributions to Australasian rural sociology

The future of food and agriculture in Australasia will be defined by multiple social, economic, political and environmental tensions – with climate change and social inequalities playing a central role in the re-imagining of food systems in crisis. This article argues that rural sociology will continue to be well-served by the sociological research into the farming and food industries undertaken by antipodean scholars – especially those from Australia and New Zealand where agri-food scholarship has flourished. Analyses of the future dynamics of rural social/economic change, natural resource management (including land, water and minerals), new relations of work, labour and identity, emerging agricultural technologies, Indigenous and post-colonial politics, and food system governance will benefit from agri-food studies’ insights into agrarian transformation and governance, social and environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, and the growth of resistance and alternatives.