Postcolonial Subject Research Articles

Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial ed. by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa (review)

Reviewed by: Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial ed. by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa Philip Keel Geheber Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 210. $99.95 (cloth). For this fifth annual volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies, guest editor Janet Wilson and the series editors Gerri Kimber and Delia da Sousa Correa have assembled a cohesive selection of critical essays, creative writing, and archival reports to highlight several recent currents in postcolonial considerations of Mansfield and her oeuvre. Past studies of Mansfield have often subsumed the postcolonial within more pressing critical interventions, like establishing Mansfield’s place in the modernist canon, evaluating her feminist aesthetics, and revising biographical details after recovering those letters, journals, and fragments John Middleton Murry omitted. Thankfully, space has been opened in the field for in-depth critical analyses like this present volume. As a whole, these pieces demonstrate how Mansfield aligns (post)colonialism and modernism, while continually reiterating how her status as “the little colonial” in London catalyzed her growth into the modernist short-fiction writer she became. Wilson highlights Mansfield’s prescient “postcolonial vision,” an “anticipatory discourse” through which Mansfield “demonstrates a consciousness about resistance that precedes the founding of the postcolonial state” (1). Thus, the parentheses in (post)colonial of the title indicate that Mansfield straddles a time and space divide between the colonial and postcolonial state—one of many ambivalences that the volume investigates. Many of these essays draw attention to Mansfield’s consciousness of the position she inhabited, conceptualized through Bhabha’s “third space” and Freud’s Unheimliche—an ambivalence to place heightened by the fact that to become an expatriate from New Zealand she had to return “home” to London, as the white settlers mythologized it. Emmanouil Aretoulakis offers a spatial and chronological sense of the postcolonial through a description of Mansfield’s oscillation between the simulated Britain of New Zealand and the “real” metropolitan Britain. Mansfield was unable or unwilling to fully integrate into both of these places, which allows Aretoulakis to posit her identity and aesthetics as spaces that thrive on impurity, or a synthesis of opposites such as beauty and ugliness, life and death. Also using geographical readings, both Stefanie Rudig and Anne Brown-Berens focus on how Mansfield’s topographies highlight the incongruities in [End Page 212] colonial space. Rudig deftly compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach at Falesá” and its beach/bush dichotomy (wherein the social space of the beach as a site of white habitation and commerce counterpoises the bush as a metaphor for the untamed primitive) with the Burnell family’s move across Wellington in “Prelude” and Kezia’s subsequent explorations of the garden and its mysterious, non-native aloe plant. Similarly, Brown-Berens draws comparisons with colonial New Zealand novels, like Clara Cheeseman’s A Rolling Stone (1886), to illustrate how Mansfield reimagines colonial tropes, wherein “settler and landscape primitivism implies an incongruity and transitoriness”(120). Mansfield’s “transitoriness” becomes “placelessness” (87) in Emily Ridge’s analysis of Mansfield’s December 1920 review of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence for The Athenaeum. Ridge shows how, through this review, Mansfield continued to explore the metaphorical oppositions between the refined and unkempt features of landscape, personality, gender, and relationships. Todd Martin’s narratological and sociopolitical reading of In a German Pension “unmasks” the first-person narrator to convincingly argue that Mansfield’s narrator, while seeking to fit into the pension community, subversively undermines stereotypical British attitudes towards the Germans. Aimee Gasston’s prize-winning essay, “Katherine Mansfield, Cannibal,” reverses colonialist discourses of cannibalism, to argue that Mansfield’s anticolonial aesthetics of incorporation and satire, especially in “Sunday Lunch,” seek to “destabilize established anatomies of privilege and disrupt dominant metropolitan practices” (20). These readings match Mansfield’s aesthetic choices with the disconnectedness of spaces, equivocal identity, and uneasy habitation of the liminal, which are all strong postcolonial themes. The book also gives plenty of space to creative engagements with Mansfield, which highlight her vibrant afterlife within New Zealand literature and the scholarly community. Witi Ihimaera’s story “Waiting for La Petite...

Forms of resistance against the African postcolony in Brian Chikwava's Harare North

The article analyzes the novel Harare North by Zimbabwean diasporic writer Brian Chikwava in the context of African writing of post-independence disillusionment and the Cameroonian thinker’s Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the African postcolony. Mbembe argues that the inhabitants of the postcolony are alienated not only from the state, but also from their own selves, since the postcolony forces them to adapt to permanent change by creating unstable, fragmented identities. Taking its cue from Mbembe, the study explores the forms of political resistance after the break-down of the subject, in whom the identities of victim and oppressor fluidly co-exist. The study concludes by relating Chikwa va’s representation of the postcolonial subject to Homi Bhabha’s unhomeliness.

Comboni Missionary Sisters in Eritrea (1914-2014) / Les Soeurs missionnaires comboniennes en Érythrée (1914-2014)

This article aims at presenting the missionary population belonging to the Comboni Missionary Sisters who served in Eritrea between 1914 and 2014 . The choice of this congregation is due to the quality and reliability of available data found in the Comboni Missionary Sisters’ Private Archives (Verona and Asmara); to their weight in terms of number and activities (health, education, social works) carried out in Eritrea; to the possibility of including a gender perspective in the analysis, and applying the ethnodemographic method. Furthermore, the founder Daniele Comboni’s thought about the importance of female missionaries in implementing his idea of “reconstructing Africa through Africans” opened new opportunities for the missionaries themselves. Thus the CMS missionary experience is contextualized in the socio-political and cultural environment in which it took place, underlining the transition from colonial actors to postcolonial subjects. The main challenge of this article is to outline the demographic history of Italian CMS in Eritrea, highlighting their specificities in terms of mobility, age at arrival, mortality and morbidity.

Diasporic Relationalities: Queer Affiliations in Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street”

This paper offers a critical reading of Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” as an alternative to the neoliberal Indian state's mobilization of diaspora discourse. I suggest that the nationalist construction of an undifferentiated diasporic Indian subject is the outcome of a project of forgetting in which histories of colonial indenture are subsumed by the Indian state's global capitalist ambitions. I read “Out on Main Street” not only as a representation of the residues of British colonialism embodied in multiply displaced postcolonial subjects, but also as a text that theorizes diaspora queerly to critique the essentialism of diasporic nationalisms and imagine queer feminist modes of affiliation and collectivity that resist the beckoning call of exclusionary nationalisms.

Disarming norms: postcolonial agency and the constitution of the international

The aim of this article is to provide a postcolonial reading of norms in international politics. Focusing specifically on the question of postcolonial agency, the article argues that the constructivist literature provides a distinctive spatial and temporal ordering of the ‘international’ that on the one hand can be seen to attribute agency to the postcolonial subject, while on the other can easily be interpreted as denying a presence for this subject. An alternative reading suggests that postcolonial agency is not only constituted by the international and its normative construction, but is also constituting, having the capacity to variously subvert and transform, but within limits. While some constructivist thinkers, primary among them being Christian Reus-Smit, recognise the normative order of the international as historically contested terrain, and where such contestation testifies to the role of the postcolonial world, how this role is articulated, and in what terms it is understood pose distinct challenges for understandings of agency and the constitution of the international. Focusing on Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the article looks to how postcolonial thought can be mobilised to respond to this challenge, and to point to an alternative conception of the transformative potential of postcolonial agency. The turn to Bhabha and Fanon reveals such potential in both discursive and material terms so that where Bhabha can be said to frame agency and the terrain of the international in hybrid ideational terms, complementing Reus-Smit’s understanding of what can be termed the ‘postcolonial international’, Fanon’s more radical materialist ontology envisages agency in terms of embodied presence. This mobilisation of postcolonial thought provides the theoretical tools for conceptualising postcolonial subjectivity and articulations of agency in relation to the international and its constitution.

Forum: Interrogating the use of norms in international relations: postcolonial perspectives

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in International Relations (IR), such as norms. In her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

“Since when has paper any value?”: Reading, materiality, and meaning in M.G. Vassanji’s fiction

Over the last fifteen years scholarship on postcolonial literatures has increasingly turned to readers as the focus of empirical study. While such research has helped make visible the agency of postcolonial readers in global literary exchanges, it has tended to overlook the many ways in which postcolonial subjects’ encounters with texts can exceed or circumvent literal reading. The Asian-African-Canadian novelist M.G. Vassanji has been particularly attuned to the physicality of paper, most definitively in two of his novels set in East Africa, The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1994). In this article I analyse how Vassanji’s characters, both literate and illiterate, engage paper’s physical properties to ground their everyday practices of memory, valuation, and interpretation. By attending to paper’s materiality in Vassanji’s work postcolonial studies can situate its own reading practices in the context of material ways of doing things with texts.

Book Review: International Relations: The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing others in Late Modernity

Book Review: International Relations: The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing others in Late Modernity

Human rights critique in post-colonial Africa: practices among Luo in Western Kenya

This paper is written at a time when post-colonial Kenya has largely embraced the language of rights as both a means and an end to organising twenty-first century states and societies. The idea of rights traverses the human rights discourse as theory and builds on notions of ethnography of the particular. The post-colonial African subjects of human rights develop these notions of human rights by living a life of betwixt: by mingling the “modern” and “traditional” into a genre of rights they produce an approach that is not necessarily reflected in the United Nations-centred international human rights instruments. The paper calls for a re-reading of human rights in post-colonial Africa, not based on its philosophical origins or traces of “African imprints,” but rather by observing how ordinary people import, recast and produce ideas of human rights in their life worlds and everyday Kenya. This is what I call post-colonial critique.

Rebels with a cause: youth, globalisation and postcolonial agency in Moroccan cinema

Moroccan filmmakers have chronicled social change and youth's quest for postcolonial agency since the early 1990s. This article examines the representation of Moroccan youth on screen through a close analysis of two recent films on the alternative cultural scene in Casablanca at the turn of the twenty-first century. I will explore how Farida Benlyazid and Abderrahim Mettour's documentary Casanayda! (2007) and Ahmed Boulane's feature film The Satanic Angels (2007) unveil youth's search for historical agency in Moroccan society in the years leading up to the mass protests of 2011 across North Africa. Focusing on each film's articulation of the postcolonial subjectivity of young Moroccans through a realist aesthetic, the article situates Moroccan youth's quest for agency within the evolution of Casablanca under neoliberal globalisation, since the 1980s. The chosen films foreground the agency of youth through a focus on their alternative constructions of postcolonial subjectivity in a cultural scene that marries local and global influences in the street, on stage and on screen. What is ultimately reclaimed on the screen is not only urban space for an age group, but also the space of justice for an entire society.

Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging: Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It thinks through Lauren Berlant's account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the subject's relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is useful to understand Berlant's ‘materialist context for affect theory’ in light of uneven global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara, designated ‘born criminals’ by British colonial law – a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India. Competing affective structures – sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard – shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political critique.

Re-covered: Wangechi Mutu, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and the postcolonial potentiality of black women in colonial(ist) photographs

By pasting on, cutting into and drawing over images of bodies, artists Wangechi Mutu and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle re-cover colonialist photographs to recover postcolonial black female subjectivities. In her project, The Uninvited, ongoing since 2009, Hinkle has literally and conceptually drawn upon colonial-era postcards that feature photographs of nude West African girls and women, while Mutu has strategically combined images of black African and black American women from ethnographic and pornographic magazines to create her Ark Collection (2006). In the artists’ hands, the black female body is no longer shot, captured, framed or otherwise subjected to the camera. The narrative force and assumed veracity of photography is denied by ambiguous re-presentations of the multifaceted, processual nature of both art and the self. Moreover, rather than merely suggest the subjugation and fragmentation of black women, the works represent the postcolonial potentiality of transformation and agency.

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese Ralph James Savarese (bio) and Lisa Zunshine (bio) This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity, [End Page 17] which is quickly becoming a kind of platitude, some actual neuroscientific content. Talking across conventional disciplinary divides has precipitated questions that we would never have thought to ask. It has also made us hope that an ongoing conversation between cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies will transform both fields. We cannot foresee the exact shape of this transformation, but the formerly distinct trajectories already feel more intertwined. A Postcolonial Neurology Lisa Zunshine (LZ): In her recent contribution to Disability Studies Quarterly, Paula C. Durbin-Westby, an autistic disability rights activist, builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to stress the importance of the “inclusion of autistics as active collaborators in research, rather than mere research subjects to be studied and then written about, often in language that many autistic people find demeaning. We must insist,” she writes, “on being ‘speaking subjects,’ with our participation and input used in meaningful ways, rather than being ‘spoken subjects,’ a position which can lead to misinterpretation of research results and to uninformed experiments.” Would you comment on the ramifications of this practice of adapting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies to disability studies? Ralph James Savarese (RJS): The postcolonial analogy can be traced back to a number of scholars, including Arthur Frank, who in The Wounded Storyteller likens medical patients to colonized peoples: the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered and their indigenous experience of illness or disability has been haughtily disregarded. In its place, an official narrative, in something like a foreign language, has prevailed, leaving patients feeling both alienated and disempowered. But over the last thirty years or so, patients, like postcolonial subjects, have begun to write back to this kind of empire. According to Frank, “Postcolonialism in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than to be spoken for . . . or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely” (13). The rhetoric of postcolonial studies thus helps us to think about the historical circumstances of the neurological other: the subaltern has not only learned to speak, it has also begun to organize, as the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network make clear. Insisting on the right to self-determination and advancing a notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology, ASAN has agitated for progress on a range of issues: from better education, employment, and housing opportunities to better, more respectful medical care and scientific research. The difference between the privileged outsider view and the newly empowered insider one is, however, considerable, and because the scientific community often has trouble with what autistic writer Dawn Prince calls “the superior part of speaking” (“The Silence Between”)—namely, listening—it continues to cause [End Page 18] damage. Think, for instance, of the common claim that autistics don’t experience empathy, which popular novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime have only further promulgated. This claim is prevalent in the many fields that make up cognitive aesthetics.1 If one actually listens to autistics, one hears a different story. Stephen Shore, for example, distinguishes between being...

Rethinking the Diaspora through the Legacy of Slavery in Rachid Bouchareb's <em>Little Senegal</em>

Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal (2001) sheds light on different experiences of African migration, dramatizing the protagonist Alloune’s investigation into the traces of slavery to pinpoint the legacy of forced displacement in the construction of the African diaspora. The film articulates the fantasy of a past through reconstructing Alloune’s genealogical tree, which displays the distance between the African character and his African American counterparts. Bouchareb interrogates the legacy of French colonialism on the postcolonial subject while exposing the limits of the diaspora as a unifying concept among Africans and African Americans.

Współczesne kino francuskie wobec pamięci postkolonialnej

Contemporary French Cinema Facing Postcolonial Memories
 For years little has been said the French public discourse about North and West African contribution to the World War II efforts, the sacrifice in blood of their soldiers was mentioned only rarely and occasionally. However, filmmakers embraced this topic unfamiliar to the public. Rachid Bouchareb – a French director of Algerian descent – is one of them. His film Indigènes (2006) is a tribute of sorts to the “forgotten heroes”, who have lost their lives fighting Germans in the south of France and later Alsace. By portraying four soldiers, the artist poses important questions regarding topics such as ethnicity, equality, discrimination, and racism, but also that of being forsaken, leaving an emptiness in the collective mind of a nation. The author describes the attitude of contemporary French filmmakers towards the postcolonial past and themes of ethnicity, concentrating on a film by Rachid Bouchareb. The picture seems to be especially relevant from the point of mutual relations between ethnicity, the politics and culture.

Postcolonial Myth in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Abstract Postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie often write back to the “empire” by appropriating myth and allegory. In The Ground beneath Her Feet, Rushdie rewrites the mythological story of Orpheus and Eurydice, using katabasis (the trope of the descent into Hell) to comment both on the situation of the postcolonial writer from a personal perspective and to attempt a redefinition of postcolonial migrant identity-formation. Hell has a symbolic function, pointing both to the external context of globalization and migration (which results in the characters’ disorientation) and to an interior space which can be interpreted either as a source of unrepressed energies and creativity (in a Romantic vein) or as the space of the abject (in the manner of Julia Kristeva). The article sets out to investigate the complex ways in which the Orphic myth and katabasis are employed to shed light on the psychology of the creative artist and on the reconfiguration of identity that becomes the task of the postcolonial migrant subject. The journey into the underworld functions simultaneously as an allegory of artistic creation and identity reconstruction.

Claude Simon: situations éd. par Paul Dirkx, Pascal Mougin

postnationalism with critics who dispute its representation of the postcolonial subject as “an uprooted, deterritorialized, unfettered, and free-floating migrant” (xiii). Interestingly, gender is the paradigm that underscores the novelty of her analysis, which dwells on Francophone African migrant literatures. The book breaks new ground by deconstructing previous readings of nationalism that ignore the gender paradigm, and by correlating this oversight to their celebration of postnationalism. Engaging three migrant women writers, Coly notes the continuity between“the gender politics of anticolonial nationalism” and those of male/female postcolonial postnationalist narratives (xxv). Her subsequent analysis of postindependent home and belonging as elusive, exclusivist, inviting, and too heteropatriarchal for migrant African women is refreshing. The critic reveals the connected experiences of Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and Fatou Diome in Africa and Europe. Dealing with Bugul’s novels, the first and second chapters address the female migrant’s experience of the nation and Europe as a non-place and question the reintegration of home and the impact of homesickness on the narrative of homecoming respectively. The relevancy of the nation for women depicted by Beyala is the focus of chapter 3 where Coly correlates the dissident and culturally violent space-clearing gesture of the lesbian desire and their exclusion by the postcolonial/heteropatriarchal nation. If affiliation is positively read as women’s alternative means to attain home, Beyala’s transnationalism is less so, given her obsessive French tropism. In fact, chapter 4 echoes Coly’s critique of Beyala’s Belleville novels as “colonialist narratives of Africa” (71) and addresses the politics of interracial marriage and prostitution as pathways into the French house. Coly also notes how women create contact and appropriate space in France (ch. 5). The final chapters unveil the negative effects of colonial globalization on Senegal and the relevance of the nation, which appear through Diome’s demystification of France and reinstatement of her homeland.Coly ultimately relates identification with the hostland, homeland, and homecoming to gender politics and social status. It features Diome and Beyala’s contrasted depictions of the African woman and the treatment of her body in France. In articulating a bold challenge of the preeminence of the migrant through a concise reading that significantly correlates African women, migration, and nation, Coly refers repeatedly to the ‘nervous condition,’ which informs the trio’s oftentimes ambiguous narrative of home. However, discussing this trope separately would have added valuable substance to this theoretically sound work. Colby College (ME) Mouhamedoul A. Niang Dirkx, Paul, et Pascal Mougin, éd. Claude Simon: situations. Lyon: ENS, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84788-302-2. Pp. 203. 23 a. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1985; added to the required reading for the agrégation in 1997–98; since 2000 Simon has attracted more critical interest than 220 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 221 any French novelist except Proust. In this volume, eleven scholars discuss how Simon’s fictions enfold the personal—autobiography, dwellings, family, and history—without being dominated or shaped by it. He is neither dependent on real-world referents, nor scornful of them like his contemporaries the New Novelists. Simon’s configurations of referents are systemic but not systematic; and he may eliminate toponymics. His Nobel acceptance speech explains that for him the work of writing produces meaning. The newness created by this work is the adventure of writing. Musical metaphors explain his art. His novels resemble the compositions by those classical and jazz musicians who combine citation with transformation.As a writer,he feels an affinity with artisans and their ethos of craftsmanship. Alternatively, he supports or denies the ideal that living with literature can improve humans. He consistently resists the tyranny of aesthetic norms (preached by the New Novelists, particularly Jean Ricardou), as well as the moralistic imperatives of the Existentialists’ littérature engagée. In this volume, the most informative starting point for non-specialists would be Pascal Mougin’s “La mésalliance parentale” (41–52). Simon’s father was a navy captain, a son of peasants, who proved himself and earned advancement through the discipline of enduring harsh climates and facing dangers, deferring the gratification of rewards. His mother came from an aristocratic family of wealthy landowners that...

Violent Modernity: Gender, Race and Bodies in Contemporary South African Politics

In May 2012, an artwork on President Zuma caused a public storm about the relationship between freedom of expression, dignity and the rights of the artist. In subsequent political debates on Brett Murray's Spear, art and politics met in a heightened clash that embodied all the tensions of a country moving imperfectly towards an imagined state of democracy. In that clash, what was said mattered no less than who said it, and the significance of the debate related to the heart of how democracy ought to be understood. This article argues that the question of where gender equality might feature in South African democracy was less widely debated. More specifically, in the angst that characterized responses to the painting and responses to the responses, considerable anxiety was expressed about two aspects of democracy. The first related to whether or not the liberal political norms of the South African constitution were in danger of being eroded by a socially conservative populist movement. The second related to the sense of citizenship: who belongs in South Africa, who has the right to criticize and who is an authentic citizen. There was little attention to a discussion of what is entailed in the making of the postcolonial subject and especially in the way in which gender complicates modern democracy. The article argues for considering race and gender as inextricable. It suggests that the limits of democracy are most clearly visible when bodies become present in the public sphere.

Necessary fictions w polskiej prozie po 1989 roku

The term „necessary fiction” was presented to the Polish postcolonial theory followers by Dariusz Skorczewski in his polemic with Niesamowita Slowianszczyzna by Maria Janion. He disagreed with Janion's vision of the role of Christianity in forming the Polish national identity. Bhabha argues that there is another way of presenting the postcolonial subject than the one founded on the combination of realism and historicism the one, that assumes reality as given, but created on the basis of the criticism of representation. Necessary fiction is a way of „creating the tradition” based on historical, literary historical and cultural continuity. It shows the objective order of things – historically and culturally – and in this way it describes the reality and even designs it. The author observes three way of constructing such a fiction of continuity in the Polish prose and literary criticism after 1989: the Slavonic trail, the Sarmatian trail and the discussion about the similarities between political breakthroughs of 1918 and 1989. Bhabha warns that the component of „necessary fictions” – the imperative to pass down the values – may result not only with limiting literary criticism to nonaesthetic questions, but also with preserving the resentimental, Western complex.

Care of the Postcolonial Self: Cultivating Nationalism in The Philippine Readers

The article examines the cultivation of revolutionary nationalism and the production of postcolonial subjectivity under a foreign regime. The analysis centers onThe Philippine Readers, one of the longest published and most widely adopted reading series for elementary students in grades 1 to 7 in the Philippines from 1920s to 1960s. Due to its use and scope, the Readers significantly impacted the development of Filipino mind, character, teaching, and learning for generations. The article mobilizes Michel Foucault’s notion of care of the self, whereby individuals undergo intensive self-scrutiny through texts that serve as manuals for living. It contends that the Readers functioned as a crucial guide that enabled Filipinos to care for themselves in instilling furtive yet subversive forms of nationalism under United States rule. More specifically, two forms of nationalism are discussed, and the concepts of covert and hybrid nationalism are situated within scholarly discussions regarding colonial complicity and opposition as well as Western and indigenous influences.