Postcolonial Framework Research Articles

Testimonio y Teoría: Creating Bridges with Bilingual Communities in DeKalb County

DeKalb County has transformed significantly over the past 80 years. There have been flows of immigrants and transnationals into the area since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making present-day DeKalb a very diverse community. The children of transnationals in the U.S. find themselves at once students and teachers of their cultures and languages. Whether we speak our family’s languages or not, many of us born to parents from another country desire a connection to our linguistic heritage so that we can journey towards comfort and a sense of belonging. Drawing from the revolutionary Latin American literary genre, Testimonios (Saavedra, 2011), we share our stories with the hopes of planting a seed for new directions. From a decolonizing, postcolonial framework, we suggest ways to support bilingual and transnational students and groups by connecting to their cultural and linguistic assets through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Funds of Knowledge (Ladson Billings, 2009; González et al., 2005). The article begins with our theoretical framework, followed by an overview of DeKalb County’s history and demographics. We continue with our testimonios and conclude with suggestions for connecting with bilingual students and communities.

Emergent Police States

The Pacifying Police Units, rolled out in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, were part of a police intervention conceived to end the logic of war that characterized the city’s public security policies. As such, it adopted “so” strategies of policing aimed at reducing violence and asserting state sovereignty in “pacified” favelas. Drawing on a postcolonial framework of analysis, we argue that these favelas can be understood as sites for experiments in imperial statecraft, where a new set of socio-moral relations that we call police moralism were inscribed onto spaces and bodies. Pacification, in this context, means the reassertion of Brazil’s historical racial order. In our conclusion, we read the moral order implemented in the favelas as a prefiguration of President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing authoritarianism on a national scale.

“The pained and silent song of a branch”: Ecological precarity in the poetry of Taufiq Ismail and Khairani Barokka

ABSTRACT This article aims to illuminate how Indonesian poets Taufiq Ismail and Khairani Barokka narrativize late-20th- and early-21st-century ecological precarity, including urgent issues of deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and Indigenous dispossession. Ismail set the ecocritical agenda in Indonesian poetry early on with “I Want to Write Poetry” (1975), “Reading the Signs” (1982), and “The Pained and Silent Song of a Branch” (1982). Barokka’s long poem Indigenous Species (2016) similarly warns against neocolonial appropriation of land and advocates ecojustice for Indigenous communities of Kalimantan, centre of Indonesia’s palm oil industry. Their poetry links ecological change and catastrophe in Indonesia to the “imperial debris” of globalization. Focused on preserving the value of traditional Indonesian relationships to the more-than-human world, their work gives prominence to the affective dimensions of ecological precarity. The article adopts a postcolonial environmental humanities framework integrating Laura Stoler’s “imperial debris” and Akhil Gupta’s theorization of environmental precarity as “immiserization”.

‘un día más de trabajo’: Liberalisation Processes and the Precarity of Women in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

This article explores the nexus between liberalisation processes, violence, gender, and ethics in Roberto Bolano’s final novel 2666 (2004). It does so first, with reference to a postcolonial framework, through the examination of a passage that juxtaposes different instances of gendered violence and precarity over time, associated with economic liberalisation; second, with reference to Slavoj Žižek’s classifications of violence (also bound up with his critique of contemporary economic and political systems), it explores Bolano’s denunciation of the symbolic violence associated with the discursive construction of gender in Mexican society, which, in turn, reinforces systemic violence. Finally, I deploy Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the ‘face’ (in conjunction with Judith Butler’s reading of it in Precarious Life) to draw attention to the ethical imperative contained in the haunting of wealthy women by their murdered subaltern counterparts. I suggest that the presentation of the women in their tortured and murdered state strengthens the testimonial power of Bolano’s denunciation by disrupting the hegemonic landscape of representation which had previously succeeded in hiding them from view and silencing debates about the causes of their deaths. Tweetable abstract: Gender, liberalism, violence, and the ethics and politics of precarity in Roberto Bolano’s 2666

Testimonio y Teoría: Creating Bridges with Bilingual Communities in DeKalb County

DeKalb County has transformed significantly over the past 80 years. There have been flows of immigrants and transnationals into the area since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making present-day DeKalb a very diverse community. The children of transnationals in the U.S. find themselves at once students and teachers of their cultures and languages. Whether we speak our family’s languages or not, many of us born to parents from another country desire a connection to our linguistic heritage so that we can journey towards comfort and a sense of belonging. Drawing from the revolutionary Latin American literary genre, Testimonios (Saavedra, 2011), we share our stories with the hopes of planting a seed for new directions. From a decolonizing, postcolonial framework, we suggest ways to support bilingual and transnational students and groups by connecting to their cultural and linguistic assets through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Funds of Knowledge (Ladson Billings, 2009; González et al., 2005). The article begins with our theoretical framework, followed by an overview of DeKalb County’s history and demographics. We continue with our testimonios and conclude with suggestions for connecting with bilingual students and communities.

Teaching Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in a Feminist Classroom: An Intersectional, Transnational Perspective

Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, this article examines the theoretical and pedagogical challenges of teaching A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf in today’s feminist classroom. Rather than relegating this classic feminist text to the pedagogical margins owing to its sometimes-problematic treatment of race, class, and dated understanding of imperialism, the piece argues for an approach that acknowledges A Room of One’s Own’s deployment of uncertainty as a productive feminist category. Ultimately, it demonstrates how the pedagogical use of textual pairings or clusters within an intersectional and postcolonial framework can make the teaching of Woolf’s text relevant in contemporary feminist undergraduate courses.

Epistemic prejudice and geographies of innovation

This article seeks to understand how and why certain locations are excluded from or seen as foreclosed as places of innovation and knowledge production in health research and practice. Rooted in several years of collaborative ethnographic research in Mississippi, we develop this conceptual framework to understand the persistence of – and often ineffective response to – racialized and classed health disparities. We define our concept of epistemic prejudice as a structural inability or resistance to seeing certain places, bodies, and locations as capable of knowledge production and innovation. The history of the community health center movement, paired with the portrayal of Mississippi in contemporary media representations, helps us develop our concept. We use an interface ethnography method as Mississippi scholars to demonstrate the importance of this model of research in understanding persistent inequality in places of ‘lack’, noting that the challenges of addressing health problems in Mississippi stem in part from epistemic prejudice of scholars, health care practitioners, and policy-makers. Epistemic prejudice has broader implications for how global health initiatives are implemented, how postcolonial frameworks still shape knowledge production, and how knowledge is generated and taken as authoritative.

The Philippines Indigenous Peoples Rights Act and ILO Convention 169 on tribal and indigenous peoples: exploring synergies for rights realisation

ABSTRACTThis article compares the Philippines’ Constitutional and legislative recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights with the provisions of ILO Convention 169 (C169). It contextualises the Philippines’ contemporary recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights, including the requirement to obtain their Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), within the country’s colonial and post-colonial legal frameworks and considers the challenges faced in implementing the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA). It posits that ratification of C169 and engagement with the ILO Supervisory bodies could benefit the indigenous peoples of the Philippines, given the ILO’s extensive experience in overseeing the implementation of C169’s provisions on good faith consultations in the Latin American context. It argues the ILO’s tendency to occasionally resort to a binary veto-no-veto conception of FPIC disconnects the requirement for FPIC from the rights which it serves to safeguard. It suggests that ratification of C169 by the Philippines could assist the ILO Supervisory bodies to move beyond this conception of FPIC as a veto power. This broader rights-based conception of FPIC, as emerges from the IPRA, would be grounded on its historical underpinning, indigenous peoples’ customary laws, and its importance for the realisation of their self-determination and territorial rights as recognised under contemporary international law.

The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy

AbstractWhat place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces.

Editorial: Discovering Industrial-Era Francophone Ecoregions

This article, and its associated issue, involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) research in the sense that a post-colonial theoretical framework, which has been used in ATSI research, has been applied in a French context. This research does not involve direct research of ATSI peoples or their culture.

Examining Social Service Providers’ Representation of Trafficking Victims: A Feminist Postcolonial Lens

As anti-trafficking social service providers (SSPs) facilitate the process of victim recovery and empowerment, they also participate in the dissemination of trafficking-related knowledge to the general public. Drawing on a feminist postcolonial framework, this study sought to examine how anti-trafficking SSPs represent trafficking victims in written narratives published on their organizational websites. Thirty-three narratives were drawn from the websites of 10 New York–based anti-trafficking SSPs. Despite the widespread adoption of a strength-based term, “survivor,” the narratives were found to reinforce a gendered and racialized representation of trafficking victims as sex trafficked women from the “global South” and to (re)produce many “ideal” trafficking victim stereotypes that have been dominating the current discourses of trafficking. A “life transformation” discourse was pervasive, discursively foregrounding the positive impact of the SSPs on trafficking survivors. The findings suggested a need for anti-trafficking SSPs to engage with critical reflection on their positionality and intentionality in representing trafficking victims/survivors and to adopt a survivor-led storytelling paradigm. This study also provided a timely reminder for social work practitioners and researchers to continue to challenge the dominant narratives embedded in their fields of practice, to exercise critical self-reflexivity, and to provide a discursive space for those who have been deprived of voices.

Architectural tradition and modernity as crypto‐colonial ways of seeing: A comparison of Kathmandu's 1934 and 2015 post‐quake reconstructions

AbstractThis essay compares the architectural responses to Kathmandu's 1934 and 2015 earthquakes through a postcolonial framework. While rulers and elites used post‐1934 reconstruction to impose their notion of modernity upon the city, in post‐2015 reconstruction, conservationists see an opportunity to remake the traditional city. Instead of framing modernity and tradition as opposing forces, however, this essay reconsiders references to both as markers of class distinction that obscure Nepal's enduring crypto‐colonial position.

When Postcolonial Studies Interrupts Media Studies†

AbstractThis article utilizes a postcolonial theoretical framework to challenge and unsettle the ways in which media has been historicized in media studies where the time of the North Atlantic West is taken to be an unspoken normative assumption through which we chart media’s development. Further, this article attempts to move us to the Global South by calling attention to media objects and the mediated lives that function through those objects, that have not received any place in media history. Nor are they recognized as a media object. The basic questions that this article raises are: (a) what happens to our understanding of media’s development when we complicate the temporality (North Atlantic Western) through which we narrate the history of media, and (b) What happens to our understanding of what media is when 24/7 electrification is not taken as a norm in our recognition of a media or technology object. What other media objects and mediated lives might then become visible?

Decolonizing life skills education for girls in Brahmanical India: a Dalitbahujan perspective

ABSTRACTLife skills have become the foci of many girls’ education initiatives because they are assumed to empower girls to negotiate oppressive gender norms constraining their lives. Often these programmes give a singular attention to gender norms, despite other interlocking oppressive structures and norms. Although postcolonial feminist perspectives in education have often stressed on intersectional analyses, little attention has been given to caste in such scholarship in India. In this paper, we draw on data from a three-year qualitative study of a girls’ life skills programme in Rajasthan, India, employing a postcolonial feminist framework. We engage with Dalitbahujan feminist perspectives in education (Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. London: Routledge.) to decolonize our frameworks and illustrate how the life skills programme produced contradictory outcomes to address gender oppression, such as ensuring girls' bodily integrity, while re-inscribing caste norms. This intersectional analysis of caste, gender, and modernity expands on a postcolonial feminist critique of life skills

Indigenous Legal Principles: A Reparation Path for Canada’s Cultural Genocide

ABSTRACT This article argues that Canada’s justice system and the lawyers that operate within it are ill prepared to comprehend or reconcile the relationship between colonial legal systems and indigenous systems of law. They do not get training in indigenous law, so vital to crafting appropriate reparations for the wrongs justified by colonial practices and prejudices, and that could open doors to reconciliation and healing. The example used in this article to illustrate how the two systems of law could successfully interact is the historic Indian Residential School Settlement – the largest settlement in Canadian history, almost entirely based on Indigenous law and legal theory, and harmonized in part with principles of the common law of tort. The Indian Residential School Settlement proves that in post-colonial societies western frameworks lack the tools necessary to remediate injuries motivated by systemic discrimination, which, in this case, was cultural genocide. Different perspectives and legal theories are necessary to craft appropriate reparations and the processes used to achieve them. Unless indigenous laws, traditions, and practices are central to the design and implementation of reparations, state responses to the cultural genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples in Canada will not open pathways to either healing or reconciliation.

Corporate Scramble for Africa? Towards a postcolonial framework for transglocal development governance

Building on postcolonial critical organization and development studies, this paper explores the neo-colonial drive of a global development initiative. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NA) was launched in 2012 and provides a governance framework for partnerships between donors, governments, and companies that applies principles and practices of market-led growth as means to the end of inclusive development. Through an in-depth, multilevel analysis that juxtaposes the NA’s stipulated framework with the lived experiences of smallholder farmers in Malawi, one of ten African countries to participate in NA, the paper shows how local consequences are decoupled from global goals through governance gaps in both the horizontal and vertical dynamics of implementation. This decoupling of intention and consequence, we argue, happens at the national level of translating global principles into local practices. On the basis of this analysis, we suggest that vertical and horizontal governance must be integrated in one framework. Thus, we contribute to ongoing efforts to improve the theory and practice of the organization of development by introducing a framework of transglocal governance.

“What can I offer America?” A postcolonial analysis of faculty motivations and perceptions in North-South university partnerships

International university partnerships are a prevalent internationalization strategy for both North American and African higher education institutions, yet the predominance of discourses that reflect the inequities of the global knowledge economy among participants perpetuate the very challenges that they are designed to address. Using a postcolonial framework, this study provides a critical analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with faculty members from one West African and one U.S. university participating in an international higher education partnership. The paper examines the motivations and perceived benefits of the partnership among participants at both institutions. It argues that the history of inequitable relationships perpetuated by globalization continues to shape understandings and pose challenges to achieving mutuality in North-South university partnerships. Findings show, for both institutions, motivations for partnership participation are based on the expectations and anticipated benefits to their institution as well as an alignment with the individual’s personal goals and objectives. Furthermore, perceptions of power imbalances between participants at the two institutions are evident. Despite the partnership’s intent for mutuality and reciprocity, the narratives of both West African and U.S. participants reinforce inequitable hierarchies. However, they also highlight opportunities for working toward greater mutuality and intercultural learning through North-South partnerships. Recommendations for cultivating reciprocity in North-South university partnerships are provided.

Living in the Borderlands: A Postcolonial Reading of Nerdeen Abu-Nab’ah’s Oh, Allah, I Delivered a Female Child

Within a postcolonial theoretical framework, this article highlights the political struggles and cultural displacement of Palestinians using a recent novel published in 2013 and entitled (Oh, Allah, I Delivered a Female Child) by (Nerdeen Abu-Nab’ah). It investigates the meaning of living in the borderlands and the effects of double consciousness on the main characters/narrators: Abbas, his brother Abu-Raja, and his daughter, Miriam, who visits Gaza strip in Palestine for the first time in her life. The analysis shows that Abu-Nab’ah strongly believes in such idea as the borderlands being the place most Palestinians inhabit physically and symbolically inside and outside their homeland because of the oppression and discrimination they face. The article examines the complicated interrelationships among ideas of dislocation/exile, the (in)visible borderlands, and double consciousness by applying the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Homi Bhabha. Moreover, it interrogates the role of memory in reconstructing a national story about resistance and exile while simultaneously endorsing the role of women in documenting national loss and revolution. The result is a tale of cultural resistance against dislocation and exile and an articulation of the predicament of being a stranger within one’s country and abroad.

“Anonymous Collectivity” and “Sly Civility”: Postcolonial Defiance in a Satirical Short Story by Aziz Nesin

Until a few years ago, Turkey was usually seen as irrelevant to colonial studies owing to its non-colonial status. More recently, however, there has been a more flexible approach to considering the possibility of studying modern Turkey under the heading of postcolonial studies. By acknowledging the socio-political similarities between Turkey and colonized countries, the current study employs a postcolonial framework to analyze a short story by a Turkish author. In doing so, Aziz Nesin’s “Don’t you have any Donkeys in your Country?” is studied to show how Nesin contributes to the political and socio-economic status of Modern Turkey and the highlighted controversy over the applicability of postcolonial perspectives to the Turkish context. The present study draws upon Albert Memmi’s notion of “anonymous collectivity” and Homi K. Bhabha’s “sly civility” as postcolonial means of indirect defiance, to identify the ways in which the narrative contributes to its contemporary milieu. We argue that throughout the story Nesin satirizes the so-called expert colonizer for his fundamentally false assumption about the naivete of the colonized nation. The story reflects that although the Turkish peasant has unconsciously internalized the colonialist ideology of “anonymous collectivity,” the very same indirect means of defiance is consciously used by the peasant to overcome inequality and white supremacy in the sphere of selling Turkish carpets as one of the most prestigious products to the Western world. This study contributes to the literature on postcolonialism, first by raising the possibility of including modern Turkey in postcolonial studies, and then by examining Nesin’s response towards the postcolonial-like ideology whereby it is concluded that oppression creates contradictions in the ostensible colonized/colonizer, impairing and reversing both groups’ identity and humanity. We also conclude that the narrative reverses the dominant ideologies of clever and knowledgeable Americans by giving voice to a subaltern Turkish peasant whose goal is to resist the enduring effects of economic and cultural oppression.

A postcolonial framing of Indian commercial surrogacy: issues, representations, and orientalisms

Although only legalised in 2002, Indian commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS) is an industry worth an estimated 2.3 billion USD to India at its height. Not only has this contentious topic been researched extensively from a spectrum of academic angles, representations of Indian CGS abound in both the Indian and Western popular media (novels, documentaries, films, etc.), and increasingly online, particularly in CGS websites, advertisements, and (personal) blogs. Popular media representations as well as commercial ones can often be inclined towards the sentimental and even sanctimonious, but are immensely influential in shaping public perception. This article seeks to position the discourse and representation of transnational Indian CGS more explicitly within the postcolonial framework. Thus, it addresses a theoretical gap in explicitly connecting the problematic issues of power and ethics in CGS within the paradigms of postcolonial studies, drawing also on gender and feminist frameworks. The neo-colonisation of the body has been already considered to some extent – mostly in neo-liberalist contexts – but the industry’s systemically orientalistic set up and structure has been surprisingly little mentioned, particularly where transnational surrogacy is involved, with little framing of the imperialistic hangovers and undertones dogging these particular sets of international contracts. This article maps the orientalisms (and sometimes re-orientalisms) at play in this already fraught and contentious context, positioning transnational surrogacy as another instance of imperialism, as yet another form of cultural colonisation, othering, subalternising, and peripheralising working-class Indian surrogate women in the twenty-first century.