Postcolonial Strategies Research Articles

Hegel, Colonialism and Postcolonial Hegelianism

AbstractThis article aims to shed light on Hegel's conception of colonialism and its implications for the postcolonial reception of Hegel. Drawing on the abundant literature on the topic, it begins by engaging with Hegel's understanding of colonialism through a close reading of relevant passages of his works, in particular the Heidelberg Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (1817–18), the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts (1819/20, 1821/22, 1822/23, 1824/25) and the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822/23, 1830). Having mapped and reconstructed Hegel's conception of colonialism through his writings and lectures, the article argues that his account of Europe's modern colonial expansion is based primarily on economic considerations, rather than on civilizational assumptions proclaiming the spiritual superiority of European peoples—to which Hegel nevertheless subscribes. The conclusion explores distinct and divergent postcolonial perspectives for engaging with the contemporary legacy of Hegelianism. It addresses, on the one hand, Tibebu's critical reading of Hegel's philosophical enterprise as ‘the coldest rationalisation of genocidal murder and carnage’ based on ‘paradigmatic apartheid’ and, on the other, Brennan's redemptive reading of Hegel, which values his theoretical contribution to the shaping of 20th century anticolonial thought. After contrasting these two interpretations, the article argues in favour of postcolonial strategies for critical reappropriation and sabotage of the legacy of Hegel's philosophy.

Writing Orality as a Postcolonial Strategy: A Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land

Writing Orality as a Postcolonial Strategy: A Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land

Protective exclusion as a postcolonial strategy: Rethinking deportations and sovereignty in the Gambia

In 2019, the tiny West African country of the Gambia imposed a moratorium on all deportation flights from the EU. Though West African countries are notoriously reluctant to cooperate on forced returns, such a moratorium was unheard of and caused an uproar within diplomatic circles in Europe. In the age of deportability, why is deporting ‘unwanted’ migrants an illustration of a nation’s sovereign rights, yet refusing to accept deportees is not? The Gambian government used the moratorium to forestall political destabilization at a time of transition from a long dictatorship. With the moratorium, the government not only sought to protect deportees from violent removal practices but also served the interests of the Gambian population more broadly, among whom deportation remains deeply unpopular. Drawing on original expert interviews and informal conversations carried out between 2017 and 2020, this article shows that the moratorium allowed the Gambia to enact its internal sovereignty through a (temporary) protective exclusion of its citizens. Given the asymmetric and colonial legacy of modern-day sovereignty between states, the moratorium was a legitimate renegotiation of established but questionable standards of interstate sovereignty.

Destroying and Recreating Myths: A Subversive Response to Caste Ideology

Centred on a famous canonical Hindi fiction by Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), Godān (1936), which means ‘a gift of a cow’ and on contemporary Dalit fiction by Roop Narain Sonkar, Sūardān (2010), which means ‘a gift of a pig’, the present article discusses how the hegemonic Indian myths are destroyed and recreated as a subversive response to caste ideology. Godān, which can have a parallel to a popular Hindu myth of a ritual of gifting a cow which, as it is believed, guarantees moka (salvation) after mtyu (death), is condemned by Sūardān, which, in its turn, backs its assault by presenting a parallel myth of pig. Thus, the present article illustrates how the canonical literary texts are revisionized and re-appropriated by the vidrh writers using adaption techniques similar to the postcolonial strategies of ‘writing back’.

Beyond the Veil: Exploring Muslim Women’s Multidimensional Identities in Laila Aboulela’s The Translator and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The article presents a critical analysis of two novels by contemporary Arab Muslim women writers, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf. The article examines how these authors critique, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic discourse that presents Muslim women as a monolithic and homogeneous category. In The Translator and The Girl in Tangerine Scarf respectively, the female protagonists’ religious experiences and identities are studied with reference to resistance narratives and disruptive postcolonial strategies. The unsettling of the monolithic image of veiled Muslim women is hereby pursued through providing an analysis of the cultural imagery of Muslim women, to deconstruct the image of the veil in today’s world.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Perepresentasian Liyan Dalam Novel Ushfur Min Ash-Sharq Karya Tawfiq Al-Hakim

This research is motivated by the imbalance of relations between East and West in Arabic travel literature. The inequality is caused by the representation of the superior (West) and the inferior (East) which is constantly being produced. The novel Uṣfur min al-Syarq by Taufiq al-Hakim as one of Arabic travel literature is considered to offer a different view from other Arabic travel literature by proposing the value of equality between East and West. This research is expected to be able to resolve the problem of inequality in relations between East and West as represented in Arabic travel literature. This research uses another representation strategy from Carl Thompson's travel literary concept which consists of colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial strategies. The results of this study found that the representations of the others made by al-Hakim which were dominated by the use of colonial and post-colonial strategies showed that the author occupied two opposing positions. On the one hand, al-Hakim is still trapped in colonial discourse and on the other hand, al-Hakim is not entirely successful in bringing the post-colonial travel agenda to escape from Western hegemony. The equality proposed by al-Hakim regarding the East is inseparable from Western assistance. To realize the equality of the East and the West, al-Hakim used the superiority of the West to face the West in order to defend the East.

Owning our madness: Contributions of Jamaican psychiatry to decolonizing Global Mental Health.

The contentious debate on evidence-based Global Mental Health care is challenged by the primary mental health program of Jamaica. Political independence in 1962 ushered in the postcolonial Jamaican Government and the deinstitutionalization of the country's only mental hospital along with a plethora of mental health public policy innovations. The training locally of mental health professionals catalyzed institutional change. The mental health challenge for descendants of African people enslaved in Jamaica is to reverse the psychological impact of 500 years of European racism and colonial oppression and create a blueprint for the decolonization of GMH. The core innovations were the gradual downsizing and dismantling of the colonial mental hospital and the establishment of a novel community mental health initiative. The successful management of acute psychosis in open medical wards of general hospitals and a Diversion at the Point of Arrest Programme (DAPA) resulted in the reduction of stigma and the assimilation of mental health care into medicine in Jamaica. Successful decentralization has led to unmasking underlying social psychopathology and the subsequent development of primary prevention therapeutic programs based on psychohistoriographic cultural therapy and the Dream-A-World Cultural Therapy interventions. The Jamaican experience suggests that diversity in GMH must be approached not simply as a demographic fact but with postcolonial strategies that counter the historical legacy of structural violence.

Postcolonial Cultural Hybridity and Cultural Ambivalence in Contemporary Italy: Amara Lakhous's Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008)

ABSTRACTRecent social and political crises in the Middle East and North Africa have forced many people to seek refuge in Europe or elsewhere. Many research studies, films and novels have documented these migrants’ and refugees’ daily struggles to settle and grow roots in an migration space itself permeated by hostility and rejection. This article offers a close analysis of Amara Lakhous's novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) and looks at the act of passing as a postcolonial strategy of cultural and social integration with specific regard to the main protagonist's position and point of view. It draws on the findings and theories of postcolonial studies and comparative approaches to culture. The last section of the article discusses Lakhous's linguistic hybridity as a subversive intervention in contemporary Italian discourse on national identity and national literature.

On the specfics of postcolonial research in the conetmporary Ukrainian literary studies

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.

안창호와 이광수의 탈식민화 전략

본고는 도산이 독립국 국민의 자격을 갖출 수 있는 민족성의 개조를 위해 조직하거나 참여한 대한인국민회, 신민회, 흥사단, 수양동맹회, 수양동우회, 동우회 활동을 통해 정의돈수사상과 실력양성론을 어떻게 실천하고 있는가를 살펴보고, 그것이 춘원의 ｢민족개조론｣과 민족운동에 어떻게 녹아 있는가를 구명하여 춘원이 식민지 근대화론과 거리가 있음을 밝힌 글이다.BR 도산은 1902년부터 동포들의 무정한 삶을 보고 생활개선을 강조하다가 1907년 신민회를 만들면서 민족성 개조까지 언급했다. 흥사단의 약법에도 정신 개조가 중심을 이루고 있다. 그는 독립국 국민의 자격을 갖추기 위해 우리의 경제력과 문화 수준을 향상시키고, 정의를 돈수하여 백성들이 정을 느끼면서 살 수 있는 유정한 사회를 만들어야 한다고 주장했다. 국민의 정신을 개조시키기 위해 민족계몽운동을 하던 도산은 1919년 5월 대한민국 임시정부 국무총리 대리를 맡으면서 독립할 수 있는 실력을 기르기 위해 독립운동방략을 준비하면서 즉시 연통제를 시행하였다.BR 1922년 5월 춘원이 발표한 ｢민족개조론｣은 우리의 민족성의 본질적인 부분을 잘 살려나가고 부속적인 면을 개조하려는 것으로 도산의 정의돈수사상과 무실역행사상을 바탕으로 민족성의 개조를 주장한 글이다. 춘원은 박은식과 신채호의 뒤를 잇는 신민회의 문학적 적자라는 지적을 받을 정도로 도산의 추종자였으며, 일관되게 흥사단, 수양동맹회, 수양동우회, 동우회 활동을 하면서 도산의 정의돈수사상, 무실역행사상, 실력양성론을 실천하였다. 또한 신문 연재를 통한 민족계몽운동은 연통제가 차단된 상황에서 매체를 통해 우리 민족의 독립 의지를 전파하고 민족계몽을 하는 통로였으며, 모범촌 조성에 대한 관심은 신민회의 민족진흥사업운동의 연장선상에서 경제와 문화의 수준을 제고하여 우리 민족의 해외 유출을 막기 위한 유정한 사회 조성 사업이었다.

동시대 미술의 탈식민적 전략으로서 크레올화

동시대 미술의 탈식민적 전략으로서 크레올화

Interface of Linguistics, Literature, and Culture in Translating Singapore and Sri Lanka Postcolonial Poetry

The interface of linguistics, literature, and culture was clear in translation. English Studies in Indonesia had undergone revision by the inclusion of postcolonial literature in its curriculum. Literary works from Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Sri Lanka, India and other Asian countries were introduced and translated. Given that language game was central in postcolonial writing, equitable knowledge and grasps of linguistics, literature, and culture were significant in translation. Through the lens of re-placing language as textual strategies in post-colonial writing, this paper explored the application of this reading method and gave practical examples of translating English poems written in, respectively, Singapore and Sri Lankan postcolonial contexts into Indonesian. The discussion showed that in order to preserve the postcolonial strategies of writing back to the colonial ideology, the translation took into account the reconceptualization and reconstruction of people, language, and culture, instead of literal rendering from the source language to the target language. Adoption of postcolonial theory as the translating method shown in this study is important to add to the theory and practice of translation. This trajectory can be used to translate other literary works written in varieties of English into Indonesian, using as they do, different translation strategies to make the translation products accurate, appropriate, and acceptable.

The otherness of Onesimus: Re-reading Paul’s Letter to Philemon from the margins

Onesimus has so far remained a colonized or marginalized other in the text and history of reception across historical and cultural constraints. In contrast to this colonizing strategy of reading, the thesis of this paper is that Onesimus, as a minor character, plays a major role in liberating himself from the bondage of slavery’s hierarchical structures within the context of Roman imperial rule. There is a commonly held consensus among most, though not all, Western interpreters that Philemon is the letter to Philemon written by Paul on behalf of Onesimus as the other who is marginalized. That is, a “reading for” Onesimus as the other is ultimately doomed to a reading of marginalizing Onesimus as the colonized other. Ironically, such a “reading for” Onesimus has looked down on his agency in the process of interpretation in the fullest sense. Rather, my reading leans towards a “reading with” Onesimus as a subversive character to regain his long-suppressed voice. Toward this end, I propose reading the letter to Philemon from the marginalized perspective of Onesimus rather than from the central perspective of Paul or Philemon. To do so, I first foreground a postcolonial reading strategy as a critical angle of inquiry alongside narrative and deconstructive criticisms. I then reconstruct Onesimus in terms of plot and characterization through a postcolonial lens. Finally, I deconstruct the hierarchy of social structures inherent in the story of Philemon through a postcolonial optic.

Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which magical realist fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has seen magical realist literature rejected as misguided. Critics have recently returned their attention to magical realist fiction, theorizing it in terms of the field of trauma studies. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a pre-colonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book , this paper will intervene in trauma-studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical alongside the historical. It will also argue that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity.

SJTG paper prizes for 2014

We begin volume 36 with the announcement of paper prizes for 2014 (volume 35). This is the second year that prizes have been awarded both to the best paper by a graduate student, and to the best overall paper. Like last year, when the inaugural prizes were awarded to Sai Latt and Janet Sturgeon respectively (Latt, 2013; Sturgeon, 2013), the co-editors compiled a shortlist for each category from which special committees of editorial board members selected the winning papers. The results are as follows. Strategic coupling in ‘Next Wave Cities’: Local institutional actors and the offshore service sector in the Philippines Jana Maria Kleibert Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy Tariq Jazeel ‘The forest is our inheritance’: An introduction to Semai Orang Alsi place-naming and belonging in the Bukit Tapah Forest Reserve Karen Heikkilä Monaco with bananas, a tropical Manhattan, or a Singapore for Central America? Explaining rapid urban growth in Panama City, Panama Thomas Sigler Knowing into oblivion: Clearing wastelands and imagining emptiness in Vietnamese new urban zones Erik Harms Congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors, and especially to Jana Maria Kleibert (author of the best paper by a graduate student) and Tariq Jazeel (author of the best overall paper). Jana Maria Kleibert is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her paper, published in issue 2, concerns the role of local actors and institutions in the development of business process outsourcing in the Philippines (Kleibert, 2014). In addition to contributing to work that shifts analysis of economic globalization beyond structuralist and corporation-centred framings, the paper's comparative analysis furthers understanding of variability in the extent to which localities are ‘successful’ in attracting footloose service investment, and the kinds of local strategies and activities that enable ‘strategic coupling’ to global production networks. The fact that the two comparative cases are both small cities is itself welcome, given the pervasive metrocentricity of geographical scholarship on cities. Tariq Jazeel is a Reader in the Department of Geography at University College London, UK. His paper was published in issue 1 as part of a special issue on ‘Advancing postcolonial geographies’ (see Sidaway et al., 2014). Advancing a dialogue in particular between geographical scholarship and Subaltern Studies, the paper is concerned not with recuperating subaltern subjects and voices, nor with exposing the situated particularity of ostensibly universal geographical knowledge production (Robinson, 2003), but rather with spatialities that are obscured by hegemonic forms of disciplinary theorization and representation (Jazeel, 2014). Possibilities for engagement with what Jazeel terms ‘quite other spatialities’ are demonstrated through work on the politics of nature, environment and religion in Sri Lanka, building upon his recent book (Jazeel, 2013). However, this paper has resonances that extend far beyond Sri Lanka, especially in asserting the continued importance for geographers of critically engaging with questions and strategies of representation. We will award prizes of USD 1000 again next year to the best papers in the current volume. However, a significant difference is that the next pair of winning authors will not get to see their papers in a hard copy version of the journal. Volume 35 in 2014 was the last one to be published in printed form (such that issue 3 of volume 35, which included the special section on ‘Wastelands, degraded lands and forests, and the class(ification) struggle’, has the distinction of being the last ever to appear in print). There has been discussion of a move to electronic-only publication for several years now, and while we appreciate that there are still readers of the journal—including several members of the editorial board—who value print versions, the editorial board as a whole decided that the time is right to make this transition. In 2013, the proportion of direct subscriptions that included the print version fell to only 10 per cent (having accounted for 20 per cent as recently as 2011). In addition, those figures need to be set in a wider context in which direct subscriptions account for a small (and still shrinking) proportion of the ways that SJTG is accessed globally. For every one direct institutional subscription in 2013, there were 25 institutions (3688 in total) with electronic access to the SJTG as part of a wider collection of Wiley journals. Importantly, given the wider mission of the journal (Bunnell et al., 2011), it is also now available in 5217 institutions in the developing world via philanthropic initiatives. These figures mean that papers published in the SJTG are more widely accessible than ever. Our congratulations again to Tariq Jazeel and Jana Maria Kleibert. We look forward to shortlisting and selecting prize winning papers from a similarly strong set of (electronic-only) contributions to tropical geographical knowledge in the current volume.

Nominal Openness and Epistemic Endogamy in ‘Global’ and ‘Provincialized’ Sociologies

Calls for global and provincialized sociologies have emerged in the last decade as thoughtful projects in contemporary sociology. In this article, I criticize the rhetorical nature and epistemic endogamy of some of those calls through case studies of sociologies in Mexico and their institutional and epistemic complexity. Avoiding reductionisms, I will characterize sociologies in Mexico as both central (mainly Westernized) and (semi)peripheral. From a critical stance, I will argue that the latter are constructed upon teleological, prescriptive and pragmatic-theory logics and constitute epistemologically legitimate ( professional) sociologies, given their logics’ internal cognitive affinity and the consistency these logics present in relation to external ideological structures and socio-political discourses. I will then make explicit some of the theoretical and disciplinary challenges these overlooked professional sociologies bring to the fore. I conclude by suggesting a postcolonial theoretical-methodological strategy to address such challenges.

RUANG PASCAKOLONIAL DALAM THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS KARYA ARUNDHATI ROY

This paper discussed about the construction of space in The God of Small Things novel by Arundhati Roy using post-colonial space theory by Sara Upstone to find out the representation of the West and the East inside and and outside the domestic space including the post-colonial strategy used. It was because The God of Small Things seemed to talk about the condition of the dualistic post-colonial Indian society. Then, India itself is one of the dualistic postcolonial societies which means that it still holds its own traditions and runs the culture left by the colonial. Both colonial and Indian culture had their own rules with their borders that controlled people’s life but they were repressive to the society. The result of this analysis proved that in the context of domestic space and its surroundings, The God of Small Things showed the representation of the West and the East that caused transgression and chaos. The chaos led to post-space outside the home. Once, the novel showed that the post-space could also be done inside the home. Thus, the novel was deconstructing the construction, including the construction of post-colonial itself. It happened since the problem began in dualistic conditions of post-colonial Indian. Keywords: colonial, post-colonial, chaos, post-space.

Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy

In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with Subaltern Studies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the Euro‐American power that haunts disciplinary geography. The paper argues that using subalternity like this holds the potential to pluralize geographical interventions, particularly in the light of the discipline's materialist turns since the late 1990s. To make this argument, the paper engages Gayatri Spivak's seminal critique of the Subaltern Studies collective, suggesting how this might speak productively to a postcolonial geographical methodology. It demonstrates the potential of this methodology by weaving it through a broader attempt to critically engage the politics of nature and environment in Sri Lanka.

Beyond the All Blacks Representations: The Dialectic between the Indigenization of Rugby and Postcolonial Strategies to Control Māori

Since the advent of professional rugby, Māori have gained international visibility and attractiveness. The representation of the New Zealand rugby team revolves around their integration and the incorporation of their warrior tradition, suggesting a strong connection between rugby and contemporary Māori society. Rugby has indeed been the object of a process of indigenization, fulfilling goals of sociocultural continuity, political acknowledgment, and, in the professional era, upward social mobility. Nevertheless, rugby has also partly fulfilled its role as a tool of colonization in creating and sanctioning power differentials. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in New Zealand, this article examines the relationship between Māori and rugby as a dialectic phenomenon that has resulted in the diversification of Māori experiences and perceptions of rugby and attests to the heterogeneity of Māori life experiences, aspirations, and formulations of indigeneity in contemporary society.