Postcolonial Landscape Research Articles

帝国日本の開発と文化遺産としてのダム -戦後台湾における文化遺産の変遷と地域社会による実践を中心に-

The purpose of this study is to examine how dams, which were built for the development of imperial Japan, are now accepted as cultural heritage in postwar Taiwan. This study explores the Wushantou Reservoir in southern Taiwan as an example and basis of cultural heritage studies in Taiwan.<BR> In the process of De-Japanization in the postwar Taiwan, colonial buildings used to be considered as negative legacies of Japanese imperialism in the past, which brought about shame and embarrassment for the Taiwanese. However, since the 1990s in the midst of Taiwanization progress, the Taiwanese society began to re-think about colonial buildings as important historical heritages, which need to be preserved.<BR> The transformation of the Wushantou reservoir provides as an important aspect of postcolonial landscape in Taiwan. The Wushantou reservoir did not survived with iconoclastic fervor in the process of De-Japanization. However, it has become a symbol of promoting Chinese culture by displaying the statues of Chiang Kai-shek and the Temple of Heaven. In particular, the Chia-nan irrigation association

Story of Three Cities: Three Aspects of Post-colonial Landscapes

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the effects of (post)-colonialism on the lives and landscapes of three different cities &#8211; Paris, Dubline, and Port of Spain, each of which is described in The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, Dubliners by James Joyce, and Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul. Benjamin wants to show the map of an early capitalist city to criticize mass influences of Phantasmagoria of the capitalist market and encourage the mass to confirm their class consciousness. To achieve this purpose, it is definitely important for Benjamin to show the ‘facts’ as they are, not opinions or ideologies. This is one of the reasons why he uses ‘montage’ as his writing technique. Contrary to the general belief, Joyce always has much concern about his homeland. The main theme of his Dubliners , paralysis, is designed to depict the sufferings and miseries of Irish people under the British colonial suppression and exploitation. Meanwhile, Naipaul portrays the lives of Indian immigrants in the Caribbean society who have been confined in poverty, helplessness, and weariness. The fact that their immigration as indentured laborers was implemented for the colonial nations shows the negative effects of (post)-colonialism. These three works reaffirm that colonialism isn’t beneficial to either colonizing or colonized nations in that it brings illusion on merchandise, moral hazard, and cognitive distortion.

Diasporic slippages: accent and dialect in translation

ABSTRACTThis paper takes up the question of linguistic multiplicity in Arabic to include accents and dialects as mechanisms that disrupt a cohesive logic of language in the postcolonial landscape. Through the lens of difference in dialect and accent, Hanan al-Shaykh’s Innaha Landan ya Azizi (2001) shows that the diasporic experience of Arab immigrants in the British metropole is both fragmented and dystopic. I argue that rather than glorifying Arabic as a language of unification, al-Shaykh exposes the hierarchical underpinnings of Arabics’ accents and dialects which operate as markers of class, national, and political affiliation. This paper comparatively reads and examines al-Shaykh’s novel Innaha Landan ya Azizi (2001) alongside its translation by Catherine Cobham Only in London (2001) in order to explore the ways accent and dialect function as tools for policing and managing alterity in the context of postcolonial migration in the novel.

History as Resource: Moral Reckonings with Place and with the Wartime Past in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACTLocated in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today the place remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning, a site of ambivalent moral reckonings both with the colonial past and with the postcolonial present. These moral reckonings, in turn, intersect with peoples’ experiences of, and hope for, ‘development’. In Oro Province, history is becoming a resource – not unlike gold, or the oil palm plantations that extend across the landscape – which might attract outsiders, and with them forms of wealth and possibilities for realising the good life. Accordingly, Higaturu landowners work to attract outsiders to the site of the eruption and the hangings. At the same time, however, they worry that the outsiders they attract – including anthropologists – will exploit and profit from their history in the ways that so many outsiders have profited from the Province's other resources. Commercial considerations inform these hopes and worries, but the mobilisation of history-as-resource also speaks to other concerns, including about the relationships of insiders and outsiders across time, and the proper attributions of guilt, responsibility, and entitlement within colonial and postcolonial landscapes of remembrance.

Decentrare la lingua. Alcune considerazioni sul caso italiano

Which is the position of the Migrant Italian Literature in the postcolonial landscape? How Italian Language is subverted in migrant writers’ texts in order to re-write the balance of power? This work aims to discuss some of these aspects, focusing on Ali Farah novels.

Scenes of Amani, Tanzania: Biography of a postcolonial landscape

In this paper an architect, two social anthropologists, and an architecture historian assess the postcolonial landscape of Amani Hill research station, a once highly productive and century-old site of scientific research. Rather than an ‘objective’ description of the overall site, this is done through six ‘scenes’ composed of photographs, drawings, and short essays that each highlight particular aspects of the ‘biography’ of this landscape. The mapping is accompanied by two reflections. Starting from cultural geographer John Wylie’s observation that ‘landscape is tension’, we discuss some frictions embedded in the inquiry of such a mundane postcolonial landscape. Subsequently, we engage with the work of mapping as ethnographic experiment, examining the unanticipated effects that our architectural survey produced within the local community. Together, the three parts of the article underscore the inevitability of tactical engagement with the material elements that make up the postcolonial landscape, even in seemingly detached survey work.

Stories of the Ainu: The Oldest Indigenous People in Japanese Children’s Literature

The Ainu are Japan’s oldest indigenous people, and they have survived and maintained their culture from the Late Paleolithic Period through today. However, the Japanese government did not formally recognize the Ainu until 2008. The visibility of the Ainu in literature is limited, especially in realism-based genres such as historical fiction and contemporary realistic fiction, but they do appear in fantasy stories and traditional folk literature. The Ainu play the role of familiar strangers in Japanese children’s literature. Arjun Appadurai argues that imagination has grown a collective social product while fantasies are private and even individual (7). The idea of the Ainu as neighbors in Japanese nationhood has appeared in the literary world as collective forms of imagination in which they are depicted as ancient, mysterious people who are deep parts of nature. Using Appadurai’s distinction between imagination and fantasy and a framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, we studied representations of the Ainu in Japanese picture books. Laura Wright examines the ways that authors of fiction represent postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues and how “the realm of the imaginary” is positioned within postcolonialism and environmentalism (1). Ecocritical themes in Ainu folk literature include respecting nature and appreciating what is given by the Earth. Ainu culture is viewed through its epics, myths, and folklore, and a range of ecocritical themes that mirror contemporary Ainu life are brought up. This paper concludes that Ainu fantasy texts for Japanese children convey ecocritical values and support cultural ecoliteracy. The development of cultural ecoliteracy leads to a critique of the anti-ecological effects of ruling-class culture, which requires that humanity be defined by its superiority over lesser humans, animals, nature, and all that is “other” (Gaard 326). The significant lack of Ainu presences in historical and contemporary stories reinforce the Ainu people’s long standing status as one of the most marginalized and stereotyped groups in the literature.

Take a Good Lamp

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (www.cohenvanbalen.com) have investigated the multiple materialities, modes of production, and long networks of contemporary technological culture in many of their installation and film works. This has ranged from work with bioengineering (Sterile) to work with the rare earth minerals and metals that form the backbone of contemporary media. In works such as H/AlCuTaAu and the later D/AlCuNdAu, they remediated the existing chemical elements of electronics and data centers into an odd sort of hybrid art-installation object; in 75 Watt, they investigated the long production networks of another sort of real, and yet imaginary, object as part of its production chain, producing a weird choreography of imaginary technology becoming a consumer product. Recently they embarked on a field trip to Congo, one that served both as artistic research and as a performance of returning some of the minerals back to the soil. The following text is a short excerpt from their travel diary: a meditation on a geography of the travels of minerals—the materials of media culture—as part of the postcolonial landscapes. From the microscopic dust returning to the soil, to the experience of gaining access to the mines, their images tell a backstory to the quiet colonial histories of media culture, now enhanced by the presence of global corporations from the ex-colonies and by newcomers from China. The images shown here are from their field trip and from art projects such as H/AlCuTaAu and D/AlCuNdAu. —Jussi Parikka

Life Is a Biological Risk: Contagion, Contamination, and Utopia in African Science Fiction

Given the centrality of utopia to the African literary and postcolonial imaginary, science fiction by African writers offers a unique opportunity to explore and critique the sociopolitical salience of imagined African futures. Through a close reading of three short stories in theAfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers Vol I(2012) anthology, I illustrate how generic science fiction utopias prove to be much too sterile when applied to an African context and thus do not amount to a viable and sustainable future. Making use of tropes of contagion, there is a clear desire to demonstrate that the human impulse is, in many ways, contrary to the objectives of neat utopias and these stories subsequently seek to “contaminate” the notion of utopia itself. Overall, I suggest that this is indicative of a shifting postcolonial landscape that needs to more carefully weigh the price of its utopias.

Re-negotiating an ethics of care in Kenyan childhoods1

Abstract Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.

Race, space and post-colonial landscape in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants

Race, space and post-colonial landscape in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants

The Postcolonial Jew in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997) are novels that feature Jewish protagonists; both represent the history of the Holocaust and diverge from the postcolonial landscapes the authors are associated with. Though the Indian Desai and the Anglo-Caribbean Phillips are distinct as postcolonial subjects, their Jewish protagonists help to create what Rebecca Walkowitz terms “comparison literature,” the “work of books that analyse… the transnational contexts of their own production, circulation, and study.” In other words, Desai and Phillips are interested in the structures and dynamics of ethnic identification in a global context. Through what I term the postcolonial Jew, these novels move beyond the notion of ethnic authenticity to a cosmopolitan view of identity as hybrid and positional. The authenticity of and in these novels does not rely on the authors’ ethnic backgrounds, but is found in their ways of telling history. Their intention is to break from the traditional association of Jews with the Judeo-Christian tradition, to represent them instead as separate from the Occidental tradition. As a result, Desai and Phillips utilise a decentred Jew, one who is constantly in flux, disparate, conflicted, and the embodiment of diaspora. The existential condition of this Jew —the placeless place he is called upon to inhabit, which the reader is invited to visit— and the paradoxical states of belonging and displacement become the conditions of all displaced others and represent the constant deferral of meaning in the narrative act.

Nativity Shifts, Broken Dreams, and the New Latino South's Post-First Generation

For game three of the 2013 NBA finals, 11-year-old Sebastian de la Cruz, a musical prodigy born and raised in the great state of Texas, opened the June game with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner—a la mariachi. As the applause faded for the El Charro de Oro's [The Golden Mariachi's] performance, an outburst of racialized twittering hit the cloud. Although we watched the series of events that surrounded Sebastian de la Cruz's performances from thousands of miles away and despite the geographic distance between San Antonio and our communities, we recognized the hit-and-run commentary as all too familiar. In Georgia and the Carolinas, increasingly corrosive rhetoric surrounds Latino immigration—creating great obstacles to academic achievement including the navigation of a postcolonial nativist American landscape of K-12 education that continues to fail minoritized youth. Or, as Flores and Loss (2010) surmised, “Immigration policies and practices have been, and continue to be, riddled with contradictions. Close to the center of this sometimes bloody and always controversial issue is a fundamental, indeed enduring, question: Who is an American and what sorts of education should all Americans enjoy?” (p. 403). With these questions in mind, we argue that given an ongoing Latino nativity shift marked by 2010 Census analyses, the continued framing of post-first generation Latinos as perpetual foreigners whose academic achievement depends simply on the remediation of their English language proficiency is symptomatic a “national myopia” (P. R. Portes & Salas, 2014). We conclude with the overarching proposition that educational policy paradigms for Latino achievement in and beyond the shifting demographics of the U.S. South need to be grounded in additive models of cultural identity development that advance inter-culturally distributed cognitions, attitudes, and affective-behavioral patterns that result in achieving broader, richer identities across a variety of social contexts.

Contesting Epistemological Dependency and Contextualising Space: A Postcolonial Critique of Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

Survival, on its first publication in the year 1972, was hailed as “a ground-breaking study of archetypal patterns” in Canadian Literature. One of the salient features of the book is its emphasis on contextualising Canadian literature in a space of its own, through an intrinsic study of its patterns, images and motifs. Space was celebrated as a source of pride by Canadians. To Atwood, Space hence, becomes a metaphor of the postcolonial literary landscape, wherein lies the inherent source of strength and pride of the Canadian writer, and therefore should be reclaimed or conquered from the imperialist onslaught. Therefore by advocating the need for an authentic Canadian literature that effectively expresses the Canadian identity and its cultural survival against the imperial cultural onslaught, Atwood argues for a postcolonial space or a space of intervention that not only challenges epistemological dependency, but also helps create positive new identities by writing back to the centre, and thereby negating the indebtedness of colonised peoples to colonisers‟ discursive constructions and modes of thinking

Southeast Asia. Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-colonial landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 300. Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-colonial landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Edited by VATTHANA PHOLSENA and OLIVER TAPPE Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 300. Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000691 'When a memory is recalled like a car part from storage, there is no scientific certainty as to how it is put back, probably not as it was.' Norman M. Klein, The history of forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory (Verso, 1997). Echoing Klein's work Ian Baird explains, 'We need to see memories as experiences that are not simply recalled, but rather produced and reproduced over time, and entwined with agency, so that in the end people are not simply recalling past acts, but are considering past productions and reproductions of the past' (p. 243). Within academia, there is a substantial amount of work on collective memory, but very little on how conflict areas shape it. This collection of essays addresses the lacuna by looking at the fluid process of collective memory for those who live in the post-conflict landscapes of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Each essay provides details into the way that war-torn places become sites of memory, what Pierre Nora calls lieux de memoire. In this way, the collection provocatively showcases the symbiosis between people's identities and their war debris. Krisna Uk writes about artists and craftsmen who attribute new meanings and functions to war relics and their memories. The 70-year-old Cambodian funerary painter Keulagn Beuragn transforms horrifying memories of the bombing plane into aesthetic remembrances of those who died by it (pp. 223-8). Not only memories of the war, but war-riddled landscapes change in the post-conflict era. Vatthana Pholsena's account of Route 9 in southern Laos provides powerful descriptions of the lives of Sepon villagers who lived through the US war in Vietnam and its aftermath. Vietnamese soldiers and Royal Lao Army prisoners repaired the road in the postwar period, converting sites like a 'reeducation camp' where prisoners were tortured into an exhibition centre. Pholsena argues that beyond these governmental endeavours is a local social component. Villagers in Sepon see the reconstruction of the road as a marking of progress, civilisation, and development. In this way, they situate their own narrative within the road restoration 'in a historical timetable that followed their own recovery from the war' (p. 172). In her chapter on war debris in Vietnam, Christina Schwenkel writes about the international tourism that has developed for demilitarised zones (p. 149), but also notes the cultures that develop between 'professional' deminers and 'hobby' deminers who collect war debris at their own peril (p. 147). Here, people are not only redefining meaning with the war debris; in this example, war debris is part of the process in which people are redefining themselves. Perhaps one of the more physical and horrific examples of this comes from Susan Hammond's accounts of Agent Orange in Vietnam. The negligent manufacturing of the herbicide by US companies like Monsanto and Dow led to the devastation of thousands of people in addition to their ecology. …

Searching for South Asian intelligence: psychometry in British India, 1919-1940.

This paper describes the introduction and development of intelligence testing in British India. Between 1919 and 1940 experimenters such as C. Herbert Rice, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, and Venkatrao Vithal Kamat imported a number of intelligence tests, adapting them to suit a variety of South Asian languages and contexts. Charting South Asian psychometry's gradual move from American missionary efforts toward the state, this paper argues that political reforms in the 1920s and 1930s affected how psychometry was "indigenized" in South Asia. Describing how approaches to race and caste shifted across instruments and over time, this paper charts the gradual recession, within South Asian psychometry, of a "race" theory of caste. Describing some of the ways in which this "late colonial" period affected the postcolonial landscape, the paper concludes by suggesting potential lines for further inquiry into the later career of intelligence testing in India and Pakistan.

Not dead yet: Three takes on auteurism in contemporary French and Francophone cinema

Sixty years have passed since the term une politique des auteurs was first coined by François Truffaut in the pages of Les Cahiers du cinéma. Initially an approach to filmmaking reacting against its own socio-political context, la politique evolved into something of an ideological celebration of the personal worldview of the artist, and became a dominant element in determining a new canon of cinéma d’art. Since the fall of the French colonial empire, the end of the Cold War and the rise of a vastly transformed global order, the French cinema industry, including many historians and critics, seems to have largely maintained the auteur-based model in terms of its funding and self-projection on both a national and an international level. But is that not an anomaly? What is the real place and meaning of the auteur paradigm within the context of a diverse and fractured Francophone world? This article provides three different perspectives regarding the critical purchase of la politique des auteurs within the contemporary postcolonial Francophone cinematic landscape. Through these perspectives, we argue that while the auteur paradigm can claim relevance within the confines of the Franco-French film industry, its wider applicability as a model for Francophone filmmaking raises pertinent questions about the continuing influence of the metropolitan centre on how minority identities are constructed and received.

Towards a Politics and Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and Its Reception by American Film Critics

This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode.

Dictates of Dominican Democracy: Conceptualizing Caribbean Political Modernity

This essay addresses the limits of conventional Western political categories for apprehending post-colonial Caribbean political landscapes. Specifically, it suggests that in the case of the Dominican Republic standard political differentiations of periods of “dictatorship” and “democracy” obscure continuities and elide the crucial impact of US imperialism. The practice of the US military occupation (1916–24) in clothing itself in a discourse of democratization and modernization was perpetuated by the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) to long-lasting effect. Through close readings of key political discourses from the Trujillo era, the author highlights the dictatorship’s appropriation of key modern democratic vocabulary, terms including modern politics, democracy, progress, equality , and social justice . Ingrained for more than three decades, these meanings did not simply vanish with the arrival of “true” democracy in the country and remain partly alive today. The work of Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau on hegemony may help account for these continuities and be usefully brought to bear on other Caribbean postcolonial contexts.

Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema by James S. Williams

readers with a general interest in French culture and film studies, either in a program of studies or who harbor an individual interest. Each film“can be used to introduce a facet of French culture, such as education, history, representation of French society in film, representation of stereotypes, national and personal identity and immigration” (20). The chapters cover films by the following directors in this order: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Claude Miller, Nicolas Philibert, Francis Veber, Christophe Gans, and Ismaël Ferroukhi. The déroulement is more or less historical moving from 1959 (Les 400 coups) to 2004 (Le grand voyage). Vanderschelden titles the chapters, however, to capture a broader context, for example, “François Truffaut:AnAuteur’s Representation of Childhood.”After identifying Truffaut as “a ring-leader of the New Wave,” auteur, and prolific critic, she notes how his personal history led to cinema consuming his life (23). Truffaut’s role in film history is followed by synopses of two films, Les 400 coups and L’argent de poche, and then their production contexts. The childhood theme gets thorough discussion, as do filmic concerns (style,use of space,camerawork,sound and music,narrative and time,editing). The conclusion charts Truffaut’s evolution as it moves from an auteurist perspective to a more independent and accessible cinema. The remaining nine chapters follow similar trajectories,each crafted for the specific director and social issue.Studying French Film takes us on an easy-to-follow trip from the New Wave to today’s transnational and postmodern visions. It is indexed and offers chapter notes and extensive bibliographies. The general bibliography appears orphaned: better to have an all-inclusive bibliography, separated into general works as well as the chapter-specific ones. The glossary of film terms seems superfluous: they should simply have been footnoted. The entire volume would have benefited from better copyediting. I found the font choices off-putting. What distinguishes this work from many others, however and more importantly, is the breadth of genres (New Wave, documentary, historical drama, comedy, etc.), the types of production (artistic, mass market, multicultural), and the mix of French close textual analysis and cultural and gender studies favored by Anglo-Saxon approaches . With only ten chapters showcasing ten cinéastes and fifteen films, the depth of the analyses makes it useful, and Vanderschelden’s analyses and discussions are provocative. Virginia Commonwealth University Kathryn Murphy-Judy Williams, James S. Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7190-8432-4. Pp. 257. $95. In dialogue with contemporary studies on place, space, region, cityscape, and postcolonial landscapes, this book makes both theory and application accessible to all. Williams seamlessly weaves description, theory, and analysis in a way that is exciting 210 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 211 to those specialized and those unfamiliar with the films of focus. His clearly-defined distinction between“place”and“space”incorporates outlines of influential theories by Foucault, Lefebvre, Certeau, Deleuze, and Augé, which aid the reader in capturing both the evolution and complexities of the field. The first forty pages, concentrating on notions of cinematic space “from the practice and theory of screenspace to the place of space in modern French thought”(xv), allow for the six following chapters to concentrate on rigorous analysis of films by Dumont, Guédiguian, Cantet, Kechiche, and Denis. This range of contemporary filmmakers from different perspectives and traditions is the volume’s strength. It complements publications such as Archer’s The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (2012) and Block’s World Film Locations: Paris (2012), which includes Guha’s “Remaking the Cinematic City: Claire Denis’s Paris.” Understanding film as a site of relations, Williams delves into encounters of spectator and film, character and sites of identity construction, time and space. Stepping away from the “legendary” Paris, the volume explores the North, Marseille, sites of the Republic, school settings, work space/classroom, the non-space of work, and post-colonial landscapes. Chapters draw from the uniqueness of each filmmaker’s approach,including the dynamic of Dumont and the audience,Cantet’s“always already codified,apportioned,distributed, even segregated [space]”(147...