Postcolonial Context Research Articles

The American Indian Adivasi: Writing Adivasi Indigeneity in Ranendra’s Lords of the Global Village

Marginal communities in India have often claimed indigeneity in contests over rights to the environment. While the significance of these claims has been analyzed in the context of political identity formation, social movements, and transnational activism, the role of vernacular literature in constructing indigeneity has not received much attention. In this paper, I analyze a contemporary Hindi novel Lords of the Global Village (Global gamv ke devta) within the context of this broader discussion of the meanings of indigeneity in India. The novel, set in the east Indian state of Jharkhand, describes how the Asur, categorized as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) by the government of India, resist the takeover of their lands for bauxite mining. The distinctive feature of the novel is that it describes metropolitan exploitation of the region by invoking the history of displacement of American Indian communities in the Americas. What does this invocation of settler colonial history signal in the postcolonial Indian context? I argue that the novel attempts to craft indigeneity as a far more polyvalent concept than official discourse has allowed.

From English to ‘englishes’: Appropriating Language and Narration in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

The paper examines the problematics of the splintering of English into “englishes” in the postcolonial context and deciphers how the postcolonial exegetical tools have been employed by the Indian English novelists of the late twentieth century. The writers have been successful in creating a new identity by adapting their own linguistic, cultural and sociological contexts in their writings. The new-words which have been invented, borrowed, or however devised in any given culture have their own resonances and their own connotations. The need to preserve one’s identity and culture to resist the hegemony of globalization is one of the most pressing concerns of these writers. To elaborate upon this, the paper will discuss the narrative technique and language as creatively employed by Arundhati Roy in her debut novel, The God of Small Things. It will analyse how the text succeeds in “writing back to the empire” through the linguistic processes of appropriation and abrogation. Roy has freed herself from the shackles of traditional stiffness in the usage of English and has in the process created a new ‘english’ to absorb the nuances of her region. Small Things has been applauded for its fresh innovative language, its narrative energy and its willingness to raise questions that are socially relevant.

Liturgy and non-colonial thinking: Speaking to and about God beyond ideology, religion and identity politics – Towards non-religion and a unbearable freedom in Christ

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police. Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the History of African Literature: A Critical Analysis of a Landmark Novel

This study shows the central position held by Ayi Kwei Aramh’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the African literary world. It tries to prove that the publishing of this work was a landmark in the early post-colonial context of African literature. Through a series of breaks from still prevailing colonial and neocolonial literary discourses, it has initiated an innovative aesthetics which has left a tremendous legacy which is being continued by subsequent generations.

Manning the boundaries: unpacking hetereomasculine complexities among Jamaican inner-city boys

ABSTRACT This research paper presents a section of findings from a 3-month qualitative study investigating the gendered practices and lived experiences of four Jamaican adolescent inner-city boys. It embraced a narrative inquiry approach anchored in case studies to document and assess how school and community gendered practices were impacting the boys’ gendered behaviours and evolving masculinities in a post-colonial context. The data collected from semi-structured interviews, video diaries, created graphic novels, and observations revealed that the boys engaged their gendered identities through conformity to heteronormative hegemonic masculine practices, anti-feminine rhetoric, and homophobic epithets. Further, data revealed that they were often replicating school and community heteronormative practices and beliefs. They seemed compelled to conform to hetereomasculine norms even when it conflicted with their personal beliefs. The research concludes that a cultural shift in homohysteria and homophobia is necessary to allow for more inclusive masculinities among young men in inner-city communities.

Christianity in East and Southeast Asia

Throughout past decades, there has been much discourse on how the axis of Christianity has moved from the global North to the global South with the demographic shift in Christianity worldwide. Befittingly, this shift has also increased attention on Christianity’s local manifestations, especially in the global South. Christianity in East and Southeast Asia, the fourth volume of the “Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity” collection and part 2 of its series on Asia, answers this call for attention by analyzing the fastest-growing religion of the past several decades and its multiplicities in “two of the most religiously diverse regions in the world” (3).Replete with impressive charts and detailed maps, the companion aims to edify its readers with a better understanding of transnational Christianity and its encounters with other religions, communities, and governments in the context of East and Southeast Asia. This book centrally provides “an account of how we are continuing to make Christianity Asian” (19) through its comprehensive demographic and statistical analysis and by shedding light on the lesser-known areas of East and Southeast Asia. The book is also noteworthy for its attempt to break free from the confinement of being purely encyclopedic or simply an eclectic collection of essays by addressing Christianity’s past and the continuously looming issues through uniformity in its three subsections: “Countries,” “Major Christian Traditions,” and “Key Themes.”The first section begins by zooming in on the history of Christianity in the nineteen nations covered in this volume. Each contribution takes a historical approach by retracing Christianity’s growth, which is often entangled with the complexities of social and political challenges, colonialism, and interfaith relations. The in-depth examination of each nation provides a platform for countries like Timor Leste, often overlooked due to its brief history, to be brought into the limelight and to excite readers for further research. The real gem in this collection is in the fact that “critical insiders” (xi) in their respective fields have contributed to entries for their own countries or from their own disciplines and perspectives, thereby providing a more critical and incisive insight.While observing the various Christianities in the countries of East and Southeast Asia, the second set of essays takes a closer look at six major Christian traditions, which excludes an essay on independent churches due to the political sensitivities of church-state relations in the region. Following the worldwide trend, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity has also been growing rapidly, with its emphasis on a “practical gospel for daily survival and witnessing” (347). Independent churches have also increased significantly, largely due to the increasing number of house churches in China, as covered in David Ro’s essay.The final ten essays share a common thread with the collection’s other volumes, which address important themes such as gender and theology. Two special essays focus on issues of migration and the colonial and postcolonial context, which are highly relevant in the context of East and Southeast Asia. Just as migration has served as a significant analytical lens in understanding African Christianity, Maruja M. B. Asis argues that migration can also serve as a critical tool in scrutinizing the spread of Christianity in this region. Wai Ching Angela Wong draws out the complexities of colonialism and imperialism in East and Southeast Asia, challenging readers to also question “what is meant by the postcolonial context of East Asia” (474) in the contemporary.With such a dense volume, it is impossible to cover every angle or topic, and it is easy for one to become overwhelmed by the vast area that the volume aims to cover. It is also easy to fall into the trap of becoming an essentialist overly dependent on statistical data. Nevertheless, what this exhaustive coverage does accomplish well is that it conveniently provides accessible snapshots of the individual nations and the region as a whole, provoking the readers to further fill in the gaps. Readers should also utilize Gina Zurlo’s informative profile on the demographic analysis of Christianity in East and Southeast Asia and the rich statistical data found in the appendix.From the perspective of my own scholarly interests, books such as this heterogenous volume provide opportunities for students and scholars of World Christianity to stay informed and explore the Christianities in the periphery and the indigenous agency that merits much attention. This volume, along with the rest of the volume series, greatly contributes to readers’ ability to see the bigger picture of the history and expansion of Christianity.

Postcolonial Identities in Dinaw Mengestu’s Literary Chronotope

The critical discussion in this article is on postcolonial identities and it centres on Dinaw Mengestu's novels Children of the Revolution and All Our Names. It is contended that the term postcolonial identities is taken to mean the awareness of the subaltern as they try to negotiate who they are within the chronotopic hybridized African space in the postcolonial context. In the epigraph above, Gayatri Spivak describes the culturally oppressed, the subaltern, as having neither antiquity nor ability for speech due to the milieu of colonial production in which they operate. Important for the study, history and speech happen in time-space. Therefore, the identities of the subaltern, which Spivak associates to history and speech, come into being in the novel through fusion of time-space indicators. Cued by Spivak’s unique assertion, how Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution and All Our Names address themselves to postcolonial identities through fusion of time-space indicators is the central concern of this paper.

Cosmopolitan Geopolitics

ABSTRACT Whether addressing violent ethno-nationalism, xenophobic bigotry, or religious intolerance, scholars and educators invoke cosmopolitan notions of a shared planet and common humanity as a means of rising above difference. Cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political orientation places an imperative on seeking out, welcoming, and learning from cultural others. As such, cosmopolitanism involves a process of reducing the social and physical proximity between ‘them’ and ‘us’ carried out in the belief in shared commonalities held by a universal ‘we.’ However, a priori assumptions about who and what constitutes that ‘we’ at the heart of cosmopolitanism are necessarily partial, situated, and subjective. In this special section, authors consider the tensions, paradoxes, and potentials of cosmopolitanism in diverse settings and from diverse perspectives. Specifically, these papers examine the formation of youthful, cosmopolitan subjectivities and youth involvement in the creation of cosmopolitan spaces, from South-South global volunteering and international missionary trips to the anti-nationalist hip-hop scene in Sarajevo and efforts to enact a civic cosmopolitanism in Beirut. Situated in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts and centering the political subjectivities of young people and their hopeful efforts to bring about a better world, these papers examine the spatial-temporal politics of cosmopolitanism and the tension inherent in creating necessarily bounded spaces grounded in cosmopolitan openness. This introduction frames this examination of grounded and contested cosmopolitanisms as an immanent process of world-building guided by a transcendent worldviews. This framing emphasizes cosmopolitanism as a universal moral outlook and the need to create caring pluriversal worlds capable of accommodating multiple worldviews.

A Narrative Inquiry of Identity Construction in a Post-Colonial Context: Hybrid Identity of a Young Generation Hongkonger

Identity construction is a complex issue, especially for Hongkongers. Due to historical reason, Hongkongers are regarded to have multiple languages and dual identities, which is hybridity of Chinese (eastern) culture and English (western) culture. Based on the method of narrative inquiry, this study explores how a young generation Hongkonger constructs her identity in a post-colonial context and provides evidence of Hongkonger’s hybrid identity. On the one hand, Hongkongers desire permission to be accepted in the certain cultural communities. On the other hand, they are excluded by both the Chinese community and the English community from a cultural point of view, which leads to localism in Hongkong. As a result, they are like cultural orphans wandering in the cultural “in-between” space.

Impeding corporate social responsibility: Revisiting the role of government in shaping business — Marginalized local community relations

AbstractThis paper is based on a case study of the European space industry as it is organized in the postcolonial setting of French Guiana. It brings the state back into political corporate social responsibility (CSR) by showing how government shapes interactions between business and local communities, more specifically around CSR issues. The paper opens new research avenues in political CSR by making two significant contributions. First, it identifies postcolonial contexts as instances in which government, rather than stepping back, gets actively involved to impede the emergence of CSR. This demonstration is made by building on a conceptualization of the marginalized local community as comprising citizens—rather than mere stakeholders—who expect their government to defend their rights vis‐à‐vis business. Second, by using a longitudinal approach that provides access to dynamics of interactions over time, the paper develops a typology of mechanisms that support a government’s changing role in CSR. Over a 50‐year period, such government is shown to have played the roles of impeding the emergence of CSR, partnering for CSR, symbolically mandating CSR, and finally, disengaging from CSR.

Dub, Utopia and the Ruins of the Caribbean

The weathered stone, collapsed lintels and hollow roofs of the ruin have long evoked a sense of pathos, standing as monuments to the disastrous contours of history and the possibility of alternative futures. In this article, I ask: What is the meaning of the ruin in the postcolonial context of the Caribbean? There are few physical ruins in the Caribbean, resulting in a feeling of lack: the architectural landscape fails to speak to the catastrophes of slavery and colonialism. Dub, a subgenre of Jamaican reggae, responds to this sense of deprivation. The dub producers of the 1970s decomposed reggae songs, creating ruinous constructions where crucial elements of the original version are missing. Fragmented dub compositions act as icons of the traumatic history of the Caribbean and a utopian pique to the imagination, forcing the listener to fill in the gaps and imagine the world remade.

‘It has to be in a natural way’: a critical exploration of co-teaching relationships in trilingual preschool classrooms in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and education, this article explores relational practices among bilingual co-teachers at a private, international early years programme in Hong Kong that emphasizes democratic philosophies of learning in their efforts to promote trilingualism. Findings point to co-teachers’ interest in developing collaborative relationships, and prompting interest in additional language use through promotion of children’s interests, along with tensions they experience as they grapple with instruction in multiple languages. Findings point to a need for more nuanced understandings of co-teaching dynamics in post-colonial multilingual learning contexts.

Zajełdyz. O postkolonialnych aspektach Jakucji Jegora Radowa

The author analyzes the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism on the basis of Egor Radov’s novel Yakutia. The two currents are interrelated and affect both the aesthetics and the structure of the works. Their Russian variants, due to their particular interpretation of the colonial issue, are very different from the Western models. Yakutia is an example of a postmodern novel in which the post-colonial context is a background for philosophical and socio-political reflections. The novel combines various motifs characteristic of the genre of dystopia, popular in Russian postmodernism.

Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and Inbetween Spaces in Research Practice

Abstract This article offers a critical perspective on emerging and alternative spaces for emancipation within transitional justice studies. Taking into account recent critical literature and postcolonial interventions in transitional justice studies, we argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Methodological impediments exist because transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. As a result, research practice in the field reflects the perspectives and preferences of elites in transition societies through a legal-technical mechanistic imagining of transitional justice that we refer to as the transitional justice machine. We argue that the needs and voices of marginalized social actors, particularly within states that are largely defined as liberal democratic or postcolonial, have long been ignored due to these practices. Against the backdrop of evolving agency patterns, including widespread global protest and demands to deal with the past across countries, we zoom in on a variety of actors who, until now, have not been at the focus of transitional justice studies. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this article contributes to the critical understanding of transitional justice studies as a Bourdieusian field. First, by expanding the conceptual lens to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships.

The Work of Repetition in 1960s Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets

ABSTRACT Nigerian epistolary pamphlets in the 1960s contained large quantities of reprinted material from globally circulating publications dating back to the early nineteenth century. Anachronistic English templates were offered to readers as models for copying in their own correspondence. This article argues that even when local authors copied English sources verbatim, they manifested anything but a passive duplication of metropolitan texts. Their relationship to anglophone materials was more complicated than allowed for by the category of plagiarism. A neglected trajectory of world literature can be opened up by the study of repetition and copying. In postcolonial contexts where emerging social classes sought empowerment through the production of writing in English, the layering and juxtaposition of diverse source materials in epistolary pamphlets presents a challenge to the linear, evolutionary timelines through which national literary-development and literary success or failure are often judged by scholars.

Resistance and Identity in The God of Small Things Written by Arundhati Roy

This paper presents an analysis of the novel "The God of the Small Things" written by Arundhati Roy. The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate the idea of resistance and identity that have been described in the novel by the novelist. It will be demonstrated in this novel that how the resistance against the traditions and norms of post-colonial era is related to the self-realisation. There are different kinds of resistance that have been depicted in the novel at various circumstances. In Postcolonial context identity is a complex concept to be located in just a simple definition or to be investigated throughout a single theoretical approach. Resistance as a concept linked to the identity question. The Novel handles this notion and throughout its plot, besides the burden that is left from the colonial legacy, gender identity comes to the surface. Though women resistance appears as a reaction with identity suppression; yet it is a reflection of self-identification of gender inequality under patriarchal traditions inherited from long dominant masculine power. This paper elaborates on each type of resistance and activism that arises against the feudal and patriarchal forces structured by the economic and politically influential people in the new community as a sample in India after postcolonialism. Consequently, one of the points that the research ends with is that the act of resistance validates the pursuit for self-identity, which is an attempt to renown, reclaim and rename the world.

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies: Insights from Sámi animal melodies (yoik)

This article offers a critique of the notion of “universals” in cross-cultural studies on music and emotions based on empirical observations and philosophical arguments. The empirical material comes from experiments with songs evoking animals and belonging to the Indigenous Sámi “yoik” tradition. Participants from the Belgian Ardenne untrained to the yoik ( N = 114, age 4–79) listened to recordings and tried to guess which animal was evoked. While their scores were significantly above chance level, additional data about their own environment and relationships to animals illustrate that interpretations in terms of “universals” would obscure the interrelational processes and (productive or unproductive) “misrecognitions” at work during the experiments. By analogy, this illustrates the need for a down-to-earth approach in cross-cultural studies on music that acknowledges the creative role of experimental designs and laboratory conditions in the production of universals. This approach may imply a move away from the nature/culture divide and a renewed attention to experimental subjects in a postcolonial context, with the aim of informing us on the entanglement of human musicality in “relational places” and the productive biases these offer to relate across different environments.

Pedro Costa’s realism of the poor

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa has over the years pictured the lives of immigrants from Cabo Verde in Lisbon, in In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto de Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006), Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014), and more recently Vitalina Varela (2019). His portrayal of impoverished Black communities in Fontainhas, a slum in the outskirts of the capital, uses the style of art cinema to portray how his protagonists are excluded from Portuguese society. His work features non‐professional actors, mixing documentary techniques with a highly aestheticized approach. This has led several critics (Pantenburg, 2010; Guarneri & Costa, 2015; Fajgenbaum, 2019) to describe Costa’s films as realist, emphasizing links between formal and material aspects of his work and how they relate to a manner of political engagement. In this article, I trace the discourse on realism in Costa up to the present day, leading to an assessment of how his most recent film, Vitalina Varela, relates to his past practice. The concept of “cosmopolitanism of the poor,” coined by Silviano Santiago ([2008] 2017), is introduced in order to read Costa’s films as engaging in a form of realism that appropriates high art to tell stories of migration and poverty in a postcolonial context.

Confinati nell’Eden. L’esperienza dei genitori tahitiani durante la pandemia

The functioning of many education systems around the world was disrupted during the Covid-19 crisis. Even the idyllic atolls of French Polynesia – although far from the main centers of contagion – have not been spared, so the school and families were induced to adapt and to find new strategies of collaboration. This paper is based on the study of 19 families living in Tahiti, and it analyse the discourses of Polynesian parents charged with new responsibilities associated with school support during the crisis. The results obtained reveal that attitudes linked with such new tasks are closely correlated with the socio-economic status, and that the educational style of parents, during confinement, favoured directive and empowering traits. Finally, the study shows that Polynesian parents maintained a conflicting relationship with pedagogical continuity, confirming an overall trend, observed in other postcolonial contexts.

Debating Sex and Sovereignty: Uganda\u2019s New National Sexuality Education Policy

IntroductionThis article examines recent moral panics over sex education in Uganda from historical perspectives. Public outcry over comprehensive sexuality education erupted in 2016 over claims that children were being taught “homosexuality” by international NGOs. Subsequent debates over sex education revolved around defending what public figures claimed were national, religious, and cultural values from foreign infiltration.MethodsThis paper is grounded in a survey of Uganda’s two English-print national newspapers (2016–2018), archival research of newspapers held at Uganda’s Vision Group media company (1985–2005), analyses of public rhetoric as reported in internationally and nationally circulating media, textual analysis of Uganda’s National Sexuality Education Framework (2018), formal interviews with Ugandan NGO officers (3), and semi-structured interviews with Ugandan educators (3).ResultsUganda’s current panic over sex education reignited longstanding anxieties over foreign interventions into the sexual health and rights of Ugandans. We argue that in the wake of a 35-year battle with HIV/AIDS and more recent controversies over LGBT rights, both of which brought international donor resources and governance, the issue of where and how to teach young people about sex became a new battleground over the state’s authority to govern the health and economic prosperity of its citizens.ConclusionsEthno- and religio-nationalist rhetoric used to oppose the state’s new sexuality education policy was also used to justify sex education as a tool for economic development.Policy ImplicationsAnalyzing rhetoric mobilized by both supporters and detractors of sex education reveals the contested political terrain policy advocates must navigate in Uganda and other postcolonial contexts.