Postcolonial Cultural Studies Research Articles

Pitfalls and Possibilities of Social Justice Ally Development Models: Lessons From Borderland Theories for Building Solidarity Across Difference

Over the past 25 years, educators and activists have used ally development models to emphasize how someone with privilege can enact solidarity across identity differences. Conceptualizing how people develop into “allies,” is even more pressing in the aftermath of the largest racial justice protests in recorded US history with concerns about how and if the momentum toward justice will be maintained. These models place a spotlight on “allyship” as a form of solidarity that could interrupt oppression and further justice. However, these ally development models can also limit imagining solidarity across identity, power, and privilege differentials especially in the context of ongoing violence and brutal dehumanization. Some limitations include a reinforcement of binary thinking about identity and a false sense of a linear process of becoming and being an “ally.” In order to expand current and strengthen future “ally” models, this article is an attempt to begin a discourse between these development models and some of the conceptualizations of identity and solidarity that come from borderland theories in the field of postcolonial cultural studies. These theories conceptualize identity and encounters across difference in a nuanced and culturally complex way, which can lead to the development of a more informed, sustainable, ethical, and accountable solidarity.

Fluidity in Cultural Identity in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories

This article explores fluidity in cultural identity through the analysis andinterpretation of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Culture andidentity are important areas of postcolonial and cultural studies. Culturalidentity constantly changes due to diversity, as Rushdie shows the fluidity ofcultural identity to depict the social, cultural, political, linguistic, andecological differences between the sunlit land of Gup City and the perenniallydark land of Chup City. The differences between Guppees, who representliberal, pluralistic, and multicultural views, and Chupwalas, who representvarious types of conservative world views, reveal people's antagonisticposition. This difference also refers to a conflict between fundamentalism andWestern literary modernism. The novel presents postmodern concepts, fluidityof cultural identity and the formation and reformation of identity, which areapplicable to race, culture, and identity. The travels of Haroun Khalifa are anadventurous journey where he encounters different kinds of people in differentplaces. Haroun anticipates a shift in cultural identities between Guppees andChupwalas. Rushdie thinks that stories have the power to dominate silence,corruption, and oppression and to form new cultural identities. Rushdie'sstorytelling power represents various cultural identities as well as the changeand formation of cultural identity. This article highlights fluidity in culturalidentity in the context of postcolonial cultural studies.

SUBALTERNITY IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Subaltern Studies, particularly in the field of social and cultural anthropology, has provided critical contexts that restore suppressed histories while criticizing Eurocentrism, imperialist biases, Enlightenment rationality, and the idea of nationalism. After the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the terms subaltern and Subaltern Studies have become profoundly entangled with postmodern and postcolonial cultural studies, underlining the need for a conscious and deconstructivist approach for reading the history in order to get at the different ways in which European forms of knowledge represented the “subaltern”. Arundhati Roy’s famous novel The God of Small Things, while touching on many post-colonial issues ranging from linguistic imperialism to hybridity, is a striking display of the plight of subalterns. The subaltern in the novel can be grouped into three as “the inhabitants of Ayemenem”, “the untouchables” and “the women”. The novel scrutinises first colonial discourse and Western style of thinking about and studying the subaltern, and then how the colonizer and the colonized evolved within an unequal power relationship. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the ways in which hegemonic discourses constitute class, marginality and the objectification of the subaltern.

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN TWO SONNETS BY FLORBELA ESPANCA

Este escrito busca analisar, numa perspectiva interpretativa, os sonetos “A mulher I” e “A mulher II” da escritora portuguesa Florbela Espanca. Buscamos perceber como a representação da mulher vai sendo constituída nos versos florbelianos, analisando o aspecto feminino a partir de uma relação entre a biografia da poeta e as imagens femininas nos sonetos selecionados para esse trabalho. Os resultados desse artigo mostram-nos que o eu lirico florbeliano exalta uma mulher apaixonada e forte, apesar do domínio masculino da época.

“Memories from my mother’s kitchen”: Extinction and anxiety in Joudie Kalla’s Palestine on a Plate

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how culinary memory belies anxieties over cultural erasure in Joudie Kalla’s 2016 cookbook Palestine on a Plate. It contends that the exotic appeal of ancestral memory is invoked by Kalla to re-present Palestinian culture to mainstream western circuits. Following an established critical tradition of being attentive to “exotic” discourses in postcolonial cultural studies, the article pinpoints Palestine as particular locus of political and cultural exotification, beset as it is by competing narratives of violent activism and humanitarian suffering. Kalla draws upon problematic notions of self-exotification in order to market her book as preserving an “authentic” Palestinian cultural inheritance. Despite this, and through apparently competing notions of authenticity versus innovation, Kalla overcomes the mood of anxiety that haunts the text and defies processes of cultural erasure, ultimately presenting Palestine as a vibrant, living culture to be celebrated, not mourned.

The affirmative, the interstitial: Biodun Jeyifo and an inventory of postcolonial theory and criticism

ABSTRACTA broad conceptual categorization of the composite field of postcolonial cultural studies using some keywords from the work of Biodun Jeyifo. The article situates Jeyifo's work in that field and profiles in outline form some of his major unique contributions. Apart from perhaps Edward W. Said and Gayatri C. Spivak, there is no other scholar more attentive to the radically dispersed accents of thinking the postcolonial. If many have missed much of Jeyifo's efforts, it is no doubt because those efforts have come in the form of essays and articles rather than monographs.

Autoethnography as Decolonization, Decolonizing Autoethnography: Resisting to Build Our Homes

In this conclusion essay, I weave together the different voices in this special issue to voice the role of autoethnography as a method for radicalizing knowledge production as decolonial academic-activist solidarities. Theorizing the body of the academic as the site for intervention into the authoritarian-neoliberal regimes of knowledge production, I imagine the ways in which the account of the personal disrupts the colonizing tropes that are reproduced by postcolonial cultural studies, offering home as a site for voicing resistance.

As noções de Polidoxia e de diferenciais de poder no contexto da relação entre imaginários e diálogos inter-religiosos.

The research sought to systematize two notions around interreligious relations which aim to deconstruct imaginaries of an idealist tendency that often emerge from practices and forms of inter-religious ecumenism: (1) that of power differentials present in society and in interreligious relations and (2) the concept of polidoxy, which would avoid dichotomous and bipolar interpretations and actions. Methodologically, we adopted the process of synthesis of perspectives derived from postcolonial cultural studies – by different authors – and from the feminist theological critique of Kwok Pui-Lan. Among the results of the research are the theoretical bases for the analysis that highlight the power differentials also present in inter-religious relationships. These, as they are critically identified, admitted and evaluated, could attenuate the reproduction of veiled forms of domination, since such forms, contradictorily, are also present in the inter-religious dialogue spectrum. Another result is the clarification of the polidoxy concept, which, through the criticism of the single thought and its unmasking aims to overcome the binomial orthodoxy / heresy. This usually inhibits the realization of an authentic inter-religious and cultural dialogue. The deity, in this approach, is understood in terms of multiplicity, unrestrainability and relationality.

Stuart Hall’s relevance for the study of African blackness

In this article I draw on Stuart Hall’s extensive writing on blackness generally, touch on the few instances of him directly addressing Africa and continental African blackness and on what Gayatri Spivak rightly sees as the missed articulation of Africa(ns) and the postcolonial cultural studies project in Hall’s work in order to undertake, à la Hall’s essay on Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, a brief exercise on Hall’s relevance for the study of continental African blackness. The premise of my arguments is that Hall’s insistence on the importance of both difference and complexity should give us pause about the neat dualism of hybrid, evolving diasporic blackness and originary fixed continental blackness on the one hand and the assumptions of a spatio-temporally seamless homogeneous blackness from the continent to the far reaches of the diaspora on the other. Africa in general, and African blackness in particular, I argue, are in fact rather complex and this ought to be taken up more seriously and rigorously in conceptualizations of blackness and the field of cultural studies. Continued failure to do so, I conclude, has potentially serious consequences for the politics of representation and beyond.

Editorial: Critical Turning Points

In July 2010 at the IFTR World Congress held in Munich, I sat listening to Helen Gilbert's keynote address: ‘Making Modernity: Indigenous Theatre and Salvage Ethnography’. Aside from the insightful specificities of Gilbert's topic, I was taken immediately by her methodological approach, which involved sifting back through reflections gained from postcolonial cultural studies, sharing the impulse of this work to look at cultures through a transversal lens and to posit their folding together through space and time, this with a view, for example, to challenging received ideas of indigenous cultures as traditional, the West as modern, and so forth. Broadly speaking, both the paper and the Q & A that followed it offered a timely and salutary reminder of how knowledge generation is often a sedimentary process: over time certain ideas get deposited and are endlessly mined; others get washed away or eroded. Moreover, this also means that we can find ourselves digging the same old theoretical spaces without looking at the local sites of theatre, performance or culture in ways that might persuade us to excavate elsewhere with different tools and methods. In brief, critical strategies, such as Gilbert's, that variously encourage us to revisit, rethink, rearrange, reconceptualize or recover are important strategies to keep in mind as means to renew and progress our contributions to bodies of theatre and performance knowledge.

Introduction: Reading After Empire

Let us read slowly, word for word. Gayatri Spivak1 Reading seems remote from the urgency of our times. Reading is slow, staggeringly inefficient, disconcertingly beyond measure, lacking substance. Readers are distracted subjects, their bodies immobile, the book a barrier to the immediacy and interaction of the social world beyond. Reading, like readers, would not appear to do very much. Nevertheless, and apparently oblivious to Franco Moretti's provocative suggestion that we abandon it (precisely on the grounds it takes so long, achieves so little), reading acts persist as a central plank of postcolonial critique: Agamben reading Melville, Bhabha reading Rushdie, Spivak reading Devi, Said reading Conrad. The familiarity of such readings, and their reiteration in the form of re-readings by other critics, is a testament to the centrality, and industry, of reading in the field. Yet the possibilities of reading itself, for empire and its aftermath remain surprisingly under-examined. Reading and the construction of readerships were crucial to the manufacture of consent at both the colonial periphery and the imperial centre. Gauri Viswanathan2 long ago established the link between the introduction of literary study and territorial expansion in British India in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Joseph Bristow has demonstrated how rising literacy rates among British working-class boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century generated imperial anxieties around the 'uncontrollable'3 character of reading. What Bristow calls 'reading for the empire', through Boys Own and related literature, became a means of preventing the 'degradation of reading' while simultaneously interpellating working-class readers in terms of their special place at the centre of things. Bristow's empire boys remind us that reading after (in the sense of following or 'in pursuit of) empire is always more than a process of subjection, and is often accompanied by unease around misreading, reading otherwise, and the generation of alternative, aberrant, potentially contrary meanings. In 1660, British slave-owners were disconcerted by Charles II's decree that 'the Council for Foreign Plantations should instruct natives, servants and slaves of the British empire' how to read the bible: They feared the very idea of a 'literate black population' who might find dangerous revolutionary ideas in books. They did not believe those who argued that a literacy restricted to the Bible would strengthen the bonds of society; they realized that if slaves could read the bible, they could also read abolitionist tracts, and that even in Scriptures the slaves might find inflammatory notions of revolt and freedom.4 In South Carolina laws were introduced that prevented blacks being taught how to read, laws that were kept in place until the mid-nineteenth century. As Alberto Manguel goes on to note, this produced a culture of 'forbidden reading', among many slaves and former slaves, such as Frederick Douglas, who was captivated by what he called the 'mystery of reading'.5 If reading has historically been a site of anxiety that carried with it the capacity for subaltern resistance, disagreement, or contestation over meaning, then postcolonial studies' preoccupation with the text in isolation appears wanting. Today we have access to innumerable interpretations of canonical imperial fiction, but little sense of the actual audiences of that writing, even less of what actually constitutes 'reading' beyond narrow academic definitions of interpretation. The professional literary critic might read contrapuntally,6 or against the grain of postcolonial discourse with consummate ease, but asked to say something about reading itself, most would falter. As Arjun Appadurai suggests in this issue, 'in so far as postcolonial cultural studies were strongly affected by the new literary criticism, there has been a tendency to interpret everything through the text, including the reader (that is, of course, the implied reader)'. …

Review of Mair (2003): The Politics of English as World Language, New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies

Review of Mair (2003): The Politics of English as World Language, New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies

Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction Ann Elizabeth Willey Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt Bayreuth African Studies 73. Bayreuth: Pia Thielmann and Eckhard Breitinger, 2005. 285 pp. ISBN 3-927510-88-2 paper. Katrin Berndt presents us with an encyclopedic overview of Zimbabwean fiction in English, and this is indeed the main strength of her intervention, Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction. While the field of postcolonial cultural studies in general, and African literature in particular, continues to struggle with the definitions, implications, and ramifications of globalization, the categories of national literatures may seem to be an outdated rubric. As Berndt's study demonstrates, however, there is still some value to examining bodies of literature in national terms. Through comparative readings, Berndt's work brings to light the on-going conversation between books coming from the same national space. Her study examines Zimbabwean literature in English centrally concerned with female characters, whether written by men or women. For the sake of her argument, Berndt divides this corpus up into three main genres: the bildungsroman, the "metahistorical" novel, and the realistic/didactic novel. In each case, she examines what she identifies as the different "identity layers" of the female protagonists and argues that female identity in all of these genres resembles a palimpsest of often conflicting constructions of female identity that the female characters more or less successfully seek to negotiate. While Berndt's work is helpful in tracing some of the literary lineages that shape contemporary Zimbabwean fiction, it can be a bit of a rough going at times due to both a lack of careful proofreading and a tendency to overexplain basic concepts of literary scholarship with which it is safe to assume most of her audience is familiar. For example, there is a twenty-page discussion (199–220) of the definition and role of "flat" characters, didacticism, and realistic fiction. Her larger argument about the correspondence between flat characters in realistic fiction and symbolic types in orature gets lost in the overly reductive and simplistic explanations of basic narrative theory. For example, her definition of Structuralism (203) adds little to contemporary debates about the advantages or disadvantages of structuralism as a mode of reading, and its relevance to her larger argument is unclear. Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction has both strengths and weaknesses: it is truly comprehensive in its overview of the primary literature it takes as its object of study, but it also rehearses some of the more common theoretical stances of the field. It rightly pays a great deal of attention to the now-canonical [End Page 212] figures of Zimbabwean literature (Dangaremgba, Vera, and Hove) but limits the space given to an examination of the materials that readers are less likely to know about and in which they are much more likely to be interested. While Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction can be theoretically reductive at times, it is a valuable resource for those looking to expand their readings in Zimbabwean fiction in English. It is also an indication that the study of African literature may still have something to gain by interrogating the framework of national literatures. Ann Elizabeth Willey University of Louisville Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

Diasporic Postcolonialism and Its Antinomies

This essay calls into question a certain viewpoint that has become widespread in postcolonial cultural theory with respect to the representation of phenomena grouped loosely under the rubric of diaspora. The viewpoint in question can be called “diasporism,” referring to a pro-diaspora sensibility that has been and is being articulated in various disciplinary enclaves for at least the last two decades— principally in Jewish cultural studies but also in Black British, Asian American, and postcolonial cultural studies. Disillusioned by the Zionist dismissal of the legitimacy of diaspora as a “normal”— indeed, a desirable—form of existence, some Jewish cultural theorists have sought to articulate an affirmative view of diasporic culture, emphasizing its power to provide a fitting alternative to territorialized notions of Jewish identity (e.g., Boyarin and Boyarin; Omer, “Palestine,” 147). To these critics, it remains a matter of pride that Judaism, along with most of modern Jewish culture, was itself fashioned in the diaspora; hence any charges that Jewish life in the galut (exile) is uncreative or inferior to life in the state of Israel are unsustainable. A good example of this diasporist outlook can be found in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, whose main character, also named Philip Roth, preaches “diasporism” as a happier alternative to living in the war-torn State of Israel. George Steiner’s widely discussed essay, “Our Homeland, The Text” similarly proclaims a diasporist sensibility, seeking to locate the Jewish homeland not in the enclosed territory of a nation-state but in the deterritorialized idioms of rabbinic spiritual and discursive traditions. There are, of course, many more such sources.

Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory, particularly in its poststructuralist variant, presents important challenges to sociology's self-image, and open debate on these attempts to `unsettle' the modernist, Westernized disciplines is both conceptually and politically interesting. However, the postcolonial unsettling of sociology has to be actively extracted and reconstructed from the key texts of postcolonial theory - it is not transparently available as such - and this is the first main goal of the article. Particular attention is paid to the framings of these issues by Stuart Hall, Homi Bhahba and Robert Young. Second, the article offers the elements of a counter-critique, pointing out where the anti-sociological impulses of postcolonialism are exaggerated or unfounded, and also indicating serious internal problems for postcolonial theory when it is pitched as a direct and superior alternative to the modernist sociological `imaginary'. The continuing centrality (and difficulty) of questions on the nature of and purpose of explanatory social theory and postcolonial cultural studies are discussed.

Gender, liberated signs, deepened history

Muponde, Robert and Mandi Taruvinga (eds). 2002. Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare: Weaver Press; (2003) Oxford: James Currey. 236pp. Newell, Stephanie. 2002. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life.” Manchester: Manchester University Press. 242pp. Woodward, Wendy, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds). 2002. Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Cross / Cultures Series, 57. 356pp.

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism. Ed. by Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry for the English Association. Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. xi + 156 pp. 30 [pounds sterling]; $55. These seven essays, four on theory and method, three applying critical analysis to writers from the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, mark yet more additions to the ongoing soul-searching that has characterized postcolonial studies for the last decade at least. There is no such thing as a content postcolonialist these days it seems, other than possibly the figure who dissects the poverty of postcolonial critical approaches, to then collapse having justified why further analysis would be simply too much. Such concerns are legitimate of course. The heady rise of postcolonial studies in the last twenty years has undoubtedly been marked by analytical strategies guilty of neglecting key specifics of postcolonial praxis. Nevertheless, this emphasis on method has led to a considerable period in which much of the high-profile publishing on the subject has revolved around discussions of how best to approach the varying texts of the postcolonial. So when, in their introduction to this volume, Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry point out that postcolonial cultural studies have often adopted a culturalist approach that `bypasses a consideration of material conditions' (p. vii), they are reiterating an orthodoxy that has prevailed since the publication of a number of key interrogatory articles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chrisman and Parry must be congratulated for organizing a text that attempts to be more than only diagnostic. The essays on Kipling by Tim Watson, on Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson by Lawrence Phillips, and on Hanif Kureishi by Sukhdev Sandhu, are placed to work off the theoretical considerations of Vilashini Cooppan, Fernando Coronil, Gautam Premnath, and Ato Quayson that precede them. In truth, these later essays are the weakest part of the collection. Sandhu's somewhat swaggering account of Kureishi is idiosyncratic, but both Watson and Phillips struggle with the critical shape of their argument. Watson's account of Indian and Irish inflections in Kim contains the sort of historical and material detail Chrisman and Parry call for in their introduction, yet Watson's conclusion that Kipling's novel provides a `new fictive unity' for Empire, even as that unity accelerates `the pace at which the Empire helps to produce its own demise' (p. 111), is simply too critically neat. Phillips's examination of autobiography and illness in the nineteenth-century Pacific chooses a focus on what he terms the `seemingly chaotic sensual reality' (p. 119) of Stevenson's and London's travels. In fact, Phillips finds his texts perfectly free from chaos in marshalling his critical argument. Criticizing Rod Edmond's Representing the South Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for over-reading illness in the Pacific for its metaphoric content, Phillips contends such metaphors should be seen as `sites of discursive interchange' (p. …

Mediating 'Progress': The National Narrative of Economic Development and Liberalism in Singapore

Singapore is unique in the extent to which the People's Action Party (PAP) government has socio-culturally re-engineered society for economic development. The hegemonic historical narrative of commercial-industrial emergence - one in which 'national' identity is taken to be economic identity - reflects this purpose. This article examines the cultural logic underlying such a post-colonial narration of modernity. It argues, first, that while the PAP wanted independence, this did not stop an appreciation of the inherited colonial modernity; and, second, that what reinforced a pro-capitalist narration of modern arrival was the change in the global economy from the stable economic formation of the immediate post-war period to a world that resembles part of the laissez-faire world under Pax Britannica . Earlier post-colonial cultural studies looked at how Western imperialism produced 'the rest of the world'; this article argues that it is time to look at how the non-Western world 'produces' itself out of the same imperial experience.

AN ALTERNATIVE METACRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES FROM A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.

Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

ACADEMIC COMMENTARY ON THE NIGERIAN DRAMATIST and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka reveals a level of consensus with regard to the personal mythology he has developed for his artistic purposes. Returning to his native Yoruba cosmology and the rituals that derive from it, Soyinka elicits from ritual a drama of archetypes, developing in the process a vision of history, society, and tragic drama. A range of critical work has shown this vision to be based on a sociocultural passion, even as the playwright's oeuvre constitutes an attempt to work through the passion by means of art.' This understanding of Soyinka gives a sociological accent to his mythopoeic vision and aesthetic; that is, his refashioning of the traditional Yoruba worldview emerges as, on the one hand, a theory of historical being and the often brutal adventure of the social and, on the other, of art as witness to both. If there is one work that concisely bears out the validity of this critical consensus, it would be Death and the King's Horseman.2 But even as this play has emerged as a magnum opus of sorts, it has also been the site of an instructive controversy in African literary criticism. For if Soyinka elevates his mythopoeic vision to the status of a theory of being as well as the organizing principle of his craft, his choice has generated some ideological contestation. In the mid-seventies, he was taken to task by a generation of influential Marxist critics who attacked him for being romantic in his attitude to, and use of, Yoruba mythology. There are always lessons to be drawn from critical debates, and the one surrounding Horseman is no exception. From a metacritical perspective, there is a certain logic to the political heat the play draws (and drew). Indeed, this logic is so comprehensive that it transcends the specific context of African literary criticism and becomes intertextually relevant to theories of postcoloniality in current Anglo-American literary theory and cultural criticism. If one looks closely at the reasons Soyinka's work was a problem for Africanist-marxist criticism in the seventies, it is possible to draw analogies between the debates as they were conducted then and some of the issues at the heart of the Anglo-American discursive formation that has come to be known as postcolonial cultural studies. However, an in-depth exploration of such analogies is beyond the scope of this paper; principally, what I wish to do here is to examine Horseman in order to tease out the theoretical relevance it might be said to have for contemporary