Postcolonial Context Research Articles

“If we stayed at home, nothing would change”: gendered acts of citizenship from Mozambique and Pakistan

ABSTRACT This article investigates how women emerged as political subjects through protests in two post-colonial contexts: the Hazara women’s protests in Pakistan against ethno-sectarian killings and the Chiango women’s protests in Mozambique for road safety. Privileging the perspectives of two participants allows us to show that a critical outcome of these gendered protests was the process of political subjectivation itself. Triggered by grief, women disrupted their gendered and political habitus to make claims for the state to protect and provide, thus reimagining a more inclusive citizenship regime. Theatrical performances and the support of allies in the media, political organizations, and feminist groups helped to mitigate the risks of this disruption for the women. We find that their political action led to subtle empowerment in the private sphere, contributing to theorizing on the trajectories of women’s empowerment through collective action in the public sphere.

Practicing within and beyond planning: narratives of practitioners from South Africa

ABSTRACT There is limited scholarship on planning practice that foregrounds narratives of practitioners, especially those based in the post-colonial contexts. Juxtaposing biographical narratives of 12 practitioners from South Africa, this paper highlights the diversity and plurality that exist amongst planners and their practice in these contexts. Having trained in planning to enable socio-spatial change, these practitioners curate their practice within and beyond planning, following their passion, interests, personality, and personal circumstances. It is argued that central to this curation are the considerations of ‘where’ and ‘with whom’ to practice. The place of practice and the people they practice with become expressions of what practitioners value.

Spaces of African Thought: A Critique of an Enactivist Rendering

Abstract This article addresses Bruce Janz’s “enactivist” reading of African philosophy from two perspectives. The space in which African philosophy finds itself remains problematic, and, thus, this article attempts to unpack this issue. Janz argues that African philosophy allows for only a few or no possibilities for radical thought. However, his own reading of the Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole serves to debunk this claim. Oluwole’s thought highlights the challenges of building a modern African philosophy within the context of postcoloniality, in which problems of untranslatability are encountered when utilizing a metropolitan language, which, in her case, is English. But, beyond the problem of untranslatability, she is able to delineate a holistic cosmology that, in multiple ways, incorporates, complicates, and extends the borders of philosophy.

TRAVEL WRITING REVISITED: READING THE RIVER

Some theoretical considerations of travel writing as a genre presented in this article were inspired by Myrna Kostash’s Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River (2005). Besides a review of generic considerations, this text aims to highlight the postcolonial context and its relevance for travel writing, as well as the concepts of contact-zone and intertextuality, with a final touch on female travel writing, which all figure in Kostash’s travelogue.

The whole earth and apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation

This article revisits arguments in new media studies regarding how the Whole Earth Catalog and publications from the appropriate technology (AT) movement established models of networked media communication antecedent to peer-production. By emphasizing the agricultural pedagogy of back-to-the-land and rural developmental print-based communication networks, this article traces how a group of White, educated South African environmentalists, the Environmental and Development Agency (EDA), produced humanitarian AT manuals to circulate in the segregated areas of apartheid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Reading together archival materials with Stuart Hall’s theoretical response to the historiography of imperialism and land dispossession in South Africa, Pringle argues that EDA’s print-based media communication network enacted a cultural effort consistent with what would become peer-production, and that this case study is instructive for contemporary critiques of capital-intensive digital agriculture in postcolonial contexts.

An anatomy of the dilution of a local cuisine in a post-colonial destination – evidence from Macao

ABSTRACT Local food is one of the most important attractions and cultural ambassadors of a destination, including in post-colonial contexts. However, food is often subject to various influences, including the interplay between food and tourism, and is thus vulnerable. Using Macanese food as an example, this research conducted an in-depth investigation into its diluting factors via interviews with the insiders (owners, operators, and chefs of Macanese restaurants), supplemented by content analysis of published documentations of this important Macanese legacy. The results shed light on the status quo of the cuisine and the factors causing its dilution, including the origin and innate features of the cuisine, the waning influence of the Macanese community and its lifestyle changes, as well as the recent commercialization while the city develops tourism. Possible remedies were explored. The study contributes to the existing knowledge on the management and preservation of local cuisines, in contexts where food legacies are important for tourism destination marketing.

Early marriage/pregnancy among Syrian refugees in Jordan in light of reproductive governance and justice

Since the start of the Syrian refugee crisis, international development agencies and NGO's have attempted to curb the rise of early (underage) marriages among Syrian refugees who are displaced across the borders in Jordan. They aim to address the prevalence of early marriages as well as subsequent underage pregnancies and childbirth. Based on in-depth anthropological research, this article argues that apart of humanitarian concern, involvement with Syrians' underage fertility can be understood against the background of reproductive governance. Interviews with Jordanian health care workers reveal a dominant concern with Syrians' culture. By distinguishing different reproductive cultures, boundaries between both national groups are marked. Syrian women's experiences of perinatal healthcare in Jordan point at the importance of reproductive stigma and morality as tools of governance. These findings support the ‘populationism’ thesis, which argues that the international paradigm shift from population control to reproductive rights in postcolonial contexts has been incomplete.

The Shift of Self and Other in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing

The topic of identity has been the subject of intense and passionate discussions, with politicians, critics and revolutionaries equally tending to divide the world into opposing groups. In the post-colonial era, this has led to an emphasis on dichotomies such as oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized, master-slave, settler-native, and us-them. Each country seeks to establish its uniqueness by contrasting itself with others, and in doing so, identity is often viewed as something fixed, basic, and unchanging. However, this approach has led to the creation of binary divisions in society and losing of distinctiveness and individuality due to mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity, and the need to deconstruct and reconstruct subjectivity in what is known as the third space. The relationship between human experience and societal factors in a colonial or postcolonial context is a central theme in postcolonial literature, and it explores issues such as the fluidity of power and position. This paper examines the shift of self and other in postcolonialism through an analysis of Doris Lessing's 20th century South African novel, The Grass is Singing. The novel challenges established dichotomies and demonstrates how the colonized can subvert their subordination. It also reveals the fluidity, vulnerability, and fragile nature of colonial identity by highlighting the shifting positions of those in power and those who are not.

Cultural Assimilation Leading to Third Space Identity: A Postcolonial Analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The present paper analyzes the novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ (2007) from the postcolonial perspective in terms of Cultural Assimilation and Third Space Identity. Postcolonial theory features cultural hybridity and conflictive and conflated identities with a specific focus on theorists like Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (1961), Edward Said’s, ‘Orientalism’ (1978) and Homi K. Bhabha’s 8‘Location of Culture’(1994). In the postcolonial context, cultural assimilation refers to cultural domination where the dominant culture seeks to erase indigenous culture and identity, whereas the Third Space Identity is the in-between space where cultural identities are hybridized. In ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ Pakistani expatriate, Changes is filled to the brim with the issue of an identity crisis. After 9/11 he questions his American Dream when he experiences the prejudice of Americans against Muslims. The paper will explore the theme of identity consciousness and crisis that leads to hybridization in the selected text by applying postcolonial theory. The focus of the study will be on Cultural assimilation and Third Space identity and will examine ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ the in pre and post-9/11 literary and socio-political milieu.

HOME AND EXILE: A POST-COLONIAL ANALYSIS OF EURIPIDES’ PLAY MEDEA

In the wake of the forced mass displacement of people due to the outbreak of wars, the scintillating tale of the titular character in Euripides’ play, Medea has found new meanings in the post-modern world. This research paper is an endeavor to study Medea along the trajectories of postcolonial discourse to suggest that she is a displaced outsider and a symbol of post-colonial survival. This paper argues that Medea’s act of infanticide is not a monstrous act as she was forced to refashion her identity as an outsider and a foreigner. Therefore, by killing her own children, she strikes a blow against the system and in this process, she reclaims her own dignity. In fact, for Medea, it serves as a means of self-assertion. Bhabha’s (1994) theory of Hybridity will furnish the main theoretical lens to critically evaluate the text through close reading. Though critical literature has critiqued Medea’s act of defiance, her act of infanticide has not been analyzed in a post-colonial context. Her self-assertion allows her to transcend spatial and temporal bounds. The study of Medea’s character will help readers understand cultural heritage and the dominant colonial power which Jason represents

Images of the Body and Corporeality of Indigenous Australians at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Based on Bruce Chatwin’s Perspective and Selected Films)

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The research objective of this article is to examine what image of Indigenous Australians emerges from Bruce Chatwin’s well-known novel The Songlines (1987/2008) and selected films produced at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries also dealing with Australian Aboriginal culture.
 THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The analysis of the literary and cinematic work will be carried out here from an anthropological and postcolonial perspective, and is also part of a broadly defined somapoetics.
 THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: In the first part, the author focuses on the way female and male characters are portrayed. In the second part, he analyses more complex portraits, those of artists, hunters, ‘actors’ and strong personalities, before concluding with the theme of death.
 RESEARCH RESULTS: When analysed, Chatwin’s novel appears to be a text with many omissions, presenting a selective image, marked by the author’s ethnocentrism and his insufficiently insightful approach to cultural differences. Earlier films also fail to portray these in a credible way. Later films, however, not only deepen the understanding of historical and contemporary conditions, but also give the floor to representatives of this oldest culture in the world.
 CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The conclusions of the analysis of the material studied encourage a more critical reading of Chatwin’s novel. They also point to films depicting Indigenous Australians in a way that is free of postcolonial context, their different sensibilities and corporeality.

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Considering local-foreign news work as a process of straddling political, cultural, and epistemic boundaries allows us to interrogate the conceptual binaries operating in the relevant research, such as west/nonwest, local/foreign, fixer/journalist. By engaging the liminality of local journalistic labor, this article brings into relief dynamics often obscured in current studies, namely, the impact of race and gender identities, and the post-colonial contexts within which much local-foreign news work takes place. Attention to these dynamics challenges the conceptual divisions upon which studies of cross-border journalism often rely, while revealing the consequential – and boundary-defying – positionality of local news workers. Finally, examination of the “cosmopolitanism” of local-foreign news work, and the “situatedness” of the knowledge produced by local news workers, serves to thicken scholarship on the topic in ways that deactivate essentialisms, deepen empirical foundations, and address problematic configurations of power critical to the study of news production today. By diversifying the research queries we pose, and the theoretical perspectives we employ, future research can better account for the dynamism of local-foreign news work in the contemporary global news landscape.

Research in a Closed Political Context, COVID, and Across Languages: Methodological Lessons, Messages, and Ideas

This study offers a number of contemporary qualitative and mixed methods research lessons regarding cross-language research and research in closed social and political contexts such as post-Soviet countries, especially how such research may be adapted to disruptions like those posed by the COVID pandemic or other disasters. The lessons draw from a study of policy learning among government officials in Kazakhstan which illustrated several methodological strengths and weaknesses and generated a number of methodological recommendations. In particular, while the literature on best practices for research in closed contexts emphasizes deep interactions to develop trust, the COVID pandemic and other disruptions may force researchers to transition to online modalities and constrain options. We suggest strategies to overcome these limitations, including supplementing findings from interviews with content analysis or other multimethod approaches. Additionally, we argue that researchers in post-Soviet and post-colonial contexts must be particularly attuned to the challenges of cross-language research and the combination of local languages with the language of the colonial power. These lessons hold relevance for researchers working in a variety of contexts as they conduct research during times of disasters and geopolitical instability.

كلمة العدد (إنجليزي)

كلمة العدد (إنجليزي)

Reading Rest as Resistance

What can we learn from articulations of rest as resistance emerging from the Global South? By deliberately constructing and staging practices of rest, how do artists extract and distinguish it from the domain of the mundane and the everyday. This article considers the work of three artists/collectives in India who advocate radical conceptions of rest and leisure: dancer and pedagogue Navtej Singh Johar and his articulation of sukh (rest/contentment), dancer and choreographer Shabari Rao’s Still Standing series, a participatory work that explores stillness as an embodied experience, and visual artist’s Priyanka D'Souza's work under the artist duo, Resting Museum, with Shreyasi Pathak on rest, illness and disability. The article situates these conceptual and performative iterations of rest within overlapping social, cultural and economic contexts. Johar and Rao both have backgrounds in Indian classical dance, which emphasizes the cultivation of a virtuosic aesthetic through repetition. They also respond to the urban contexts they work in, where the body is increasingly co-opted into mechanized and techno-surveilled forms of homogeneity. D’Souza draws attention to the ableist connotations of productivity in her work, drawing on her own experience of disability. What affective resonance does productivity as stability, as mundane certainty, hold for postcolonial contexts? I place the work of these three artists against the frame of India as an emerging economy, whose narrative is that of a country in progress, work-ing towards an eventual future as an ‘advanced economy’. In this narrative, the ‘mundane’ takes on an aspirational quality. What does it take to fragment the relationship between rest and productivity in this context, where rest is not merely a reward for action and progress, but an independent way of being and doing in its own right?

JAHILIYYAH RHETORIC AS A DIVINE LEGITIMACY FOR VIOLENCE: A STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE OF SAYYID QUTB AND THE CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIST ORTHODOXY ON AL-QAEDA, THE TALIBAN, AND THE ISLAMIC STATE

The Islamic conception of Jahiliyyah brings together the three most debated Muslim militant organizations of our times, namely Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Taliban in terms of their justification for violence. It is discussed here that despite significant differences in their political agendas, social and cultural motives as well as religious denominational affiliations, the three organizations are hegemonic in their resort to the notion of Jahiliyyah while opposing the non-Shari’ah based political rule. They converge on the idea that there is an imperative to install a system based on Shari’ah and that any actors opposed to this can be treated as enemies, deviants, and infidels, hence, worthy of violent aggression. It is demonstrated here that this particular connotation of Jahiliyyah was essentially espoused in the works of Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential twentieth century proponents of Islamism and global Jihad. Although developed primarily to denounce Western imperialists in a postcolonial context, one may see Jahiliyyah as a contemporary Islamic rhetoric for providing the three organizations in question, valid pretexts to wage armed insurgencies against whoever they view as hostile political forces. This overall narrative, as this study indicates, relates to the broader contemporary Islamist discourse on the legitimacy of political violence in the name of religion.

C.L.R. James’ Beyond A Boundary

C.L.R. James’ <i>Beyond A Boundary</i>

Marxism in a Postcolonial Context—A Critical Study

Marxism in a Postcolonial Context—A Critical Study

Gender, Ethnicity and the Politics of Belonging in Postcolonial Africa/Cameroon: A Reading of Lola Perpetua Nkamanyang’s The Lock On My Lips

Gender and Ethnicity are two key types of group distinctions with which group-based power is associated and, in a multi-cultural Postcolonial context like Cameroon, gender and ethnicity intersect to shape our identities, opportunities and the challenges we face in life. Lola Pepertua Nkamanyang’s The Lock on My Lips falls within the corpus of literature on group-based power and discrimination, leading to a hardening of identities around claims to belong and an opposite process of excluding outsiders. Drawing from minority theories, gender and postcolonial theories, this study investigates the intersection of gender, ethnicity and power in the play. The paper argues that the ethnic tension replicates the Anglophone/francophone divide in a bi-cultural Cameroon. Seen thus, Lola follows in the footsteps minority writers like Victor Epie Ngome to weave her drama around a marital conflict between two people from different ethnic backgrounds whose union is characterized by marginalization, assimilation and dictatorship. However, Lola treats this sensitive subject in a rather kaleidoscopic, suggestive and pacifist way, recognizing like her radical predecessor that the reunified nation has been rendered fragile and diseased by the marginalization of women and the Anglophone minority, Lola rather opts for healing. A unionist, Lola believes that nation-building can be effective, if it is founded on mutual respect and equal opportunities for the sexes and for the two ethnic/linguistic groups of Cameroon. The significance of the marriage metaphor in her play lies in her espousal of gender equality, cultural syncretism and peaceful co-existence of husband and wife, and of Anglophones/Francophones.

Exploring the Ambivalence of Tribal and Gender Narratives in Mamang Dai’s the Black Hill

Ecology as a component of sustenance of life is complex, multi layered and interconnected, where the author ideating from the space of being ‘human’, tries to emerge as ecologically responsible in the articulation of identity construction. It is in this context that the present paper seeks to analyse how Mamang Dai in her novel, The Black Hill envisages on the task of blurring out the ecological self and the other through her characters in a post-colonial context. Such ecological vision in Mamang Dai’s work provides as a mouth-piece for her personal philosophy which is also entrenched in the mythical folklores of the Adi community. The novel has also highlighted the ideological enrapture of colonialism which resulted with the advent of Christianity and how this led to the change of the pagan culture. An attempt shall also be made to analyse the novel along the lines of deep ecology and the author’s attempt to develop an ‘ecosophy’ of preserving the native tradition while living harmoniously with the intrinsic values of nature.