Postcolonial Moment Research Articles

The rise and coming fall of international accounting research

► International accounting research (IAR) as a historically constituted discursive formation. ► The post-colonial moment (comprising decolonization, the Cold War, and the development doctrine) as its condition of possibility. ► IAR as a policy science in the service of Development. ► Conjectures the likely end of IAR. This paper examines international accounting research (IAR) as a historically constituted discursive formation and argues for the post-colonial moment as its condition of possibility. The post-colonial moment is specified as comprising three aspects: decolonization, the Cold War and the Development doctrine. The latter entailed a political program to fashion a commodity-intensive world, subtended by the economic subject. The post-colonial moment also triggers a reorganization of the social sciences into policy sciences to which IAR belongs. By examining key topics in IAR such as economic development, culture, corporate capitalism, and harmonization in the context of its conditions of production, the paper conjectures the likely end of IAR.

Premesh Lalu's Post-colonial Push: Is it Time to Dismantle the Discipline?

In The Deaths of Hintsa, Premesh Lalu argues that South African history remains trapped by colonial modes of thinking. As a necessary consequence, he claims that the field needs a post-colonial moment, suggesting that historians engage with a deconstructionist strand of subaltern studies so as to sever the field from colonial epistemologies. In this essay, I review the book and then locate Lalu within a broad overview of South African historiography in order to offer a critical response to his proposals. I highlight radical and social historians because I think that they have more to offer the field today than Lalu is willing to admit. In a final section, I briefly explore Jonathon Hyslop's idea of an epistemological middle ground and Clifton Crais's engagement with subaltern studies. Both scholars provide useful alternatives to Lalu's work. I conclude that South African history does not need Lalu's post-colonial moment because it would privilege creativity at the expense of coherence and promote dismantling at a time when we may want to seek some stability.

Locating Home in the Postcolonial Moment

Locating Home in the Postcolonial Moment

A Wind of Change? White Redoubt and the Postcolonial Moment, 1960-1963*

In July 1963, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk held a private meeting with Dr. Willem Naude, the ambassador from South Africa. “A rough time [is] ahead,” Rusk explained as the representative sat down in his office. “We are under enormous pressure but do not intend to give in.” Several members of the so-called African bloc at the United Nations had successfully protested the practice of apartheid—South Africa's system of institutionalized racial discrimination—in the Security Council that year, and pressure was rapidly mounting in the General Assembly for mandatory economic sanctions against South Africa. The ambassador looked across Rusk's desk and noted that it was “ironical” that ten years earlier they had been allies in the Cold War, and now his country was being isolated in its struggle against a “common enemy.” He went on to assert, “The United States [is] to a large degree responsible for releasing these revolutionary forces in the world. The goal of a great power should be to play down tensions and try to get people to talk together, but the United States without even opening its mouth [has] released dangerous forces in the world.” Rusk paused for a moment before responding, “[I wonder] if these forces [are] not deeply rooted in the nature of man. [I wonder] if this discourse has not been going on for 2,000 years. Did not man, like most animals, not like to be pushed around too much?”1

Revolting bodies, hysterical state: women protesting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958)

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) (AFSPA) has been debilitating for people in Manipur, already struggling with socio-economic and political marginalisation since independence. The consistent erasure of Manipur by an apathetic and forgetful ‘mainland’ India provides the political impetus for anti-state groups demanding autonomy. The people of the state are, however, ambivalent about taking sides, having experienced the violence engendered by both factions. It is within this complexity that I situate my study of the AFSPA. My paper will elaborate on a theory of haunting, a metaphor I evoke to address this complexity of postcolonial modernity and its silences, by focusing on the protesting icons of the Meira Paibi and Irom Sharmila. Examining the idea of haunting provides us with a vocabulary to push at the limits of rationality that both political movements and social sciences rely upon; haunting, then, is both a methodology and a theme that might help us account for lived realities that are far from rational, clear-cut and thus easy to access. The figure of Sharmila emerges then as one not only haunted by the violence of the postcolonial moment but also simultaneously haunting us – isolated, confined and outlawed, she occupies a liminal position between the living and the dead, enacting a disruption that simply cannot be contained by the modern Indian state or even a rational social science seeking to represent her.

Afrikaans poetry: New voices

I focus on the new voices in Afrikaans poetry since 2000: poets who have published their first collections of poetry during this period. The texts are discussed according to gender‐specific categories as an attempt to undermine a predominantly heteronormative academic discourse. Binary categories are used to substantiate this approach, and following Spivak, I employ these categories for the sake of the academic argument. I also argue that the sociopolitical and economic realities of the postcolonial moment in South Africa (1994) are now relegated to the margin and there is a strong tendency to write poems that deal with issues such as identity and positioning of the self within the global world order. The ongoing intertextual rivalry with the more established poets within the Afrikaans literary discourse is also examined.

Crossroads in the black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and dramas of the African diaspora

Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a compendious, timely, and fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It consists of detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem, from different locations across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so prominently among the tragedies adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, can articulate the postcolonial moment. Capitalizing on classical reception studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, Crossroads in the Black Aegean co-ordinates theory and theatre. It crucially investigates how the plays engage with the 'Western canon', and shows how they use their self-consciously literary status to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and that of the Greek originals, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission.

Singapore's moment: critical regionalism, its colonial roots and profound aftermath

Kenneth Frampton's version of the theory of critical regionalism turns on a dialectics between ‘universal civilisation’ and ‘national culture’ while relegating the political circumstances of his chosen architecture merely to a form of negation. Yet Frampton's source for this opposition, Paul Ricoeur, was writing directly about the cultural problems faced by anti-colonial liberation movements. This article returns critical regionalism to the immediately post-colonial moment of Singapore in the early 1960s. It explores the Singapore Conference Hall and Trade Union House (Malayan Architects Co-Partnership, 1962–1965) as an exemplary building of that period. Between colonialism and the rapid modernisation that would be unleashed on Singapore in the later 1960s, the building balanced particular forms of the regional with the universal forms of rationalism that modernism had come to represent. Bound up with this balance was another delicate negotiation. The building was the product and embodiment of the brief alliance between organised labour and the government of Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party. The article suggests that a better understanding of the building within these circumstances not only helps to give political, and specifically post-colonial, resonance to theories of critical regionalism, it also provides a counter-balance to Rem Koolhaas's dismissal of this period in Singapore's urban development.

Traveling in Paradox: Edward Said and Critical International Relations

In this article, we argue that those who aspire to `critical' international relations would be well served by importing inspiration from Edward Said's work, particularly in drawing examples from his negotiation of intellectual paradoxes and tensions. While several scholars are sharply critical of Said for adopting apparently contradictory theoretical positions, we suggest, by contrast, that his negotiation of those apparent contradictions is one of the lasting contributions of his work, not least as a model that might productively `travel' to critical international relations. Specifically, we develop two features of his treatment of paradox. First is his `hermeneutic of “worldliness”', a spirit of `secular' criticism that is socially, politically, morally situated, self-ironic, free from service to any `God', any universal singularity, but expressive of a moral-political community. Second is an uncommon articulation of the postcolonial and the global, a suturing together of a global moment of humanism and a postcolonial moment of listening to and hearing—contrapuntally reading—the voices of/from alternative loci of enunciation. These should be constitutive principles for critical international relations, which currently often fails to acknowledge their importance.

The First Vietnam War: colonial conflict and Cold War crisis

Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. Introduction Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall Part I. The First Vietnam War in History 2. Making Sense of the French War: The Postcolonial Moment and the First Vietnam War, 1945-1954 Mark Philip Bradley 3. Vietnamese Historians and the First Indochina War Lien-Hang T. Nguyen Part II. From One War to Another 4. Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship, and Indochina: A Reassessment Stein Tonnesson 5. Creating Defense Capacity in Vietnam, 1945-1947 David G. Marr 6. Forging the Great Combination: Britain and the Indochina Problem, 1945-1950 Mark Atwood Lawrence 7. French Imperial Reconstruction and the Development of the Indochina War, 1945-1950 Martin Thomas Part III. Colonialism and Cold War 8. Ho Chi Minh and the Strategy of People's War William J. Duiker 9. The Declining Value of Indochina: France and the Economics of Empire, 1950-1955 Laurent Cesari 10. France, the United States, and Indochina Marilyn B. Young Part IV. The End of the French War and the Coming of the Americans 11. Assessing Dien Bien Phu John Prados 12. China and the Indochina Settlement at the Geneva Conference of 1954 Chen Jian 13. After Geneva: The French Presence in Vietnam, 1954-1963 Kathryn C. Statler 14. Chronicle of a War Foretold: The United States and Vietnam, 1945-1954 Andrew J. Rotter Notes Contributors Index

As the Postcolonial Moment Deepens: A Response to Green, Sonn, and Matsebula

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) article is useful in helping to establish and develop whiteness studies in South African academia, and thus to shift the academic gaze from the margins to the centre. The article is published in the wake of three waves of international whiteness studies, which successively described whiteness as a space of taken-for-granted privilege; a series of historically different but related spaces; and, finally, as part of the global, postcolonial world order. Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) contribution could be extended by more fully capturing the dissimilarity in the texture of the experience of whiteness in Australia and South Africa. In South Africa whiteness has never had the quality of invisibility that is implied in the ‘standard’ whiteness literature, and in post-apartheid South Africa white South Africans cannot assume the same privileges, with such ease, when state power is overtly committed to breaking down racial privilege.

Okigbo Agonistes: Postcolonial Subjectivity in "Limits" and "Distances"

Among Africa's leading twentieth-century poets, Christopher Okigbo occupies a most interesting space. Born to Igbo Roman Catholic parents in Eastern Nigeria, Okigbo studied the Classics and began to write poetry as a means of re-identification with his primal world. Yet both his life and his poetry staked a claim to a universalist impulse, and, as a colonial subject interpreting the postcolonial moment, Okigbo rejected a narrow, essentialist categorization of either himself or his poetry. He rejected the Africa Prize in 1966, claiming that "there is no such thing as African poetry, there is only good poetry or bad poetry." Okigbo appropriated signs and tropes from a vast range of sources, emphasizing the cosmopolitan, hybrid, transborder nature of signs and language in the postcolonial text. Yet Okigbo's poetry exhibits the recursive fantasy, displacement, and disorientation of a problematic imaginative cosmos. I argue in this essay that Okigbo, especially in the poems "Limits" and "Distances," was expressing his attempt to engage in an agonistic search, a quest for some stable identity. In interpreting the chaotic space of postcolonial experience, the poet Okigbo reflects what Homi Bhabha describes as a "mixed and split text of hybridity" – the double-toned voice of postcolonial anxiety.

The postcolonial moment in security studies

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.

The Treachery Of Wetness

A number of prominent critics have observed that Irish Studies is a practice configured by a sense of crisis. In Irish Classics Declan Kiberd notes that ‘Irish Studies, for all its hopes of academi...

Bio-Politics and the ContamiNation of the Body in Alejandro Morales' "The Rag Doll Plagues"

With the rise of the modern nation-state during the eighteenth century, power, discourse, and knowledge have constituted central elements controlling the populace. Especially the West, the nation-state has governed the lives of its people, creating the mirage of and external security, economic growth, and cultural identity exchange for power, money, and certain rights. In addition, the positioning or, rather, projection of an Other as a potential threat to the nation has played a crucial role the discursive construction of national communities. Part of this construction has been the projected fear that alien elements infect and ultimately destroy the ostensible unity of the national body through racial and cultural difference. As a method of self-constitution, discourses of the nation have generally excluded marginal voices of race, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual preference and have thus desired to keep the collective body pure from radical alterity. While national narratives have been designed to level out certain differences within the ethnos, there always remains a certain degree of otherness which cannot be assimilated but is fact necessary to delimit the ideal social body from certain nationalities and groups that reside within the confines of the nation. Similar to nation-building processes the centers, the ignition of national consciousness the peripheries was also based on an imagined cultural substratum. Within many anti-colonial and civil rights struggles, those control of discursive practices have often silenced voices of alterity order to unify a people the struggle against colonial, hegemonic orders. (1) In recent years, scholars and New Americanists have focused on these topics of national inclusions and exclusions their analyses of cultural and literary texts. For example, New Americanists have introduced the term to convey a sense of opposition to the discursive constructedness of the nation cultural representations. A postnational perspective hence exposes the exclusionary practices of national discourses by debunking and criticizing the embedded patriarchal, essentialist, and heterosexual hegemonies. (2) Such a research perspective also seeks to explore critically the points of intersection between American studies and theory order to explore notions of empire relation to the US. This marks an important intervention because, the past, many literary and cultural critics have discarded the notion of the United States as postcolonial. It has often been claimed that the US had its postcolonial moment after 1776, but soon developed its own distinct colonial and imperial endeavors, domestically and abroad. (3) However, recent debates have suggested an inclusion of certain experiences the United States for instance, slavery, migration, internal colonialism, and minoritarian struggles for civil rights under the auspices of studies (cf. King). The relations between Anglo America and Mexican Americans call for an incorporation of the Chicana/o experience into the field of studies because they were historically marked by many features of proper: political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural dominance. Since the 1960s, a number of Chicana/o critics have adopted the theoretical concept of internal colonialism to account for their group's subordinate socio-economic and cultural position within US society) Supporting this claim, Fredric Jameson has suggested that in the United States itself, we have come to think and to speak of the emergence of an Third World and of Third World voices, as Black women's or Chicano literature (151). Hence, a growing number of Chicana/o studies scholars are debating and testing the applicability of certain paradigms--colonial discourses, national liberation projects, border crossings, or hybridity--to literary and cultural representations of the Mexican American condition (see, for instance, Arteaga; Aldama and Quinonez; Perez-Torres; Karrer). …

The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics

Examination of the political trajectory of African states since the terminal colonial period suggests that, by the 1990s, the 'post-colonial' label still widely employed was losing its pertinence. The term acquired widespread currency not long after independence in acknowledgment of the importation into new states of the practices, routines and mentalities of the colonial state. These served as a platform for a more ambitious form of political monopoly, whose legitimating discourse was developmentalism. The colonial state legacy decanted into a patrimonial autocracy which decayed into crisis by the 1980s, bringing external and internal pressures for economic and political state reconfiguration. But the serious erosion of the stateness of many African polities by the 1990s limited the scope for effective reform and opened the door for a complex web of novel civil conflicts; there was also a renewed saliency of informal politics, as local societies adapted to diminished state presence and service provision. Perhaps the post-colonial moment has passed. AT THE MOMENT OF THE GRAND ENTRY OF AFRICAN STATES into the world consort of nations in 1960 (17 out of 53 achieved sovereignty that year), the primary discursive referent for the new polities was 'post-independent'. From an African nationalist perspective, widely shared in the academic community, the achievement of independence was a defining historical moment, the culmination of an epic struggle. Incorporating visions of liberation, transformation and uplift, the independent African state was a newborn polity. As 'new states', African polities appeared to shed the colonial chrysalis. By subtle metamorphosis, over time the routine descriptor for African states became 'post-colonial'. This semantic shift was not innocent of meaning. Formal sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle gradually became less salient as defining attributes than the colonial origins of the African state; more crucially the wholesale importation of the routines, practices, Crawford Young is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of WisconsinMadison. An early version of this paper served as a keynote address for a conference on 'Beyond the Post-Colonial State in Central Africa?' organized by the Centre of African Studies of the University of Copenhagen in December 2001.

Irish Studies After the Renaissance

Graham, Colin. 2001. Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. $67.00 he. $26.00 sc. xiii + 189 pp.Valente, Joseph. 2002. Dmcula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and Question of Blood. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. $29.95 he. xi + 173 pp.In recent years, Studies has developed significantly a field in which literary theory has offered helpful new readings of canonical texts well foregrounded works of writers who might not previously have been widely studied. Feminist theory and postcolonial theory in particular have been applied usefully to study of culture and literature, and some of these texts have become definitive sources in field: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry (1996), Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland: The Literature of Modem Nation (1995) and David Lloyd's Anomalous States: Writing and Post-Colonial Moment (1993), to name a few, have shaped contemporary readings of literature and influenced scholarship of several generations of Studies academics. The revitali/ation of field that can be attributed to these and other contemporary texts seemed to lose momentum at end of decade and, although field has remained vibrant, Studies scholars continue to unpack work of these critics. Rather than indicting current scholarship, however, this trend demonstrates vast applicability of work of that generation of scholars, particularly those who argued that postcolonial theory is a useful and relevant means of approaching study of culture and literature. As feminist and postcolonial readings offered new lenses through which to read texts, study of canonical works, especially those of Joyce and Yeats, became more challenging new ways to reread seemed to have been nearly exhausted. Consequently, Joseph Valente has a very difficult task in presenting a new reading of Dracula in his Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and Question of Blood. To reread a text that has been deconstructed and read feminist, anti-feminist, colonial, postcolonial, nationalist, antinationalist and Marxist, Valente must grind a new lens. Using a foundational concept fact that, a result of 1800 Act of Union, Ireland ceased to be a distinct if colonized geopolitical entity and assumed unique and contradictory position of a or 'metropolitan' colony(2002, 3),Valente reads Dracula a text shaped by its means of production, arguing that, rather than being read Irish, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or subaltern, the Irishness of Dracula should be read and understood in light of what I call its metrocolonial conditions of production, which function at both collective level, shaping cultural and political identity of people, and at individual level, giving a peculiar slant to psychic terrain of Stoker himself This notion of metrocolonial is defined not only in relation to Ireland's unique status a domestic and metropolitan colony but also to role of Ireland participant-victim in imperial enterprise (3). Working with concept of Ireland's unique colonial status, Valente examines intricacies of Stoker's interethnic Anglo-Celtic identity and how it affects text. Though readings of Stoker's hybrid cultural identity have abounded in studies of novel, Valente coins a term that offers a semantically fresh concept.The of is one familiar approach to Dracula, andValente's slant is that question of blood represents not merely Victorian fear of racial mixing but a critique of racialist paranoia(2002, 5). To clarify this subtle distinction, he argues that traditional Irish reading of text has focused on pollution of race, whereas a more nuanced explication of text identifies villain of novel as racialized anxiety itself (5). …

A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies

I juxtapose a story of Aboriginal landowners demonstrating their firing strategies with a story of environmental scientists elaborating their regimes of burning. The firings are profoundly different, and maintaining those differences is crucial for both Aborigines and scientists. Yet it is also important for both these groups to develop links between the forms of firing. I argue for understanding both firing regimes as expressions of collective memory which embed evaluative witness. This sameness enables modest yet sufficient connection. Acknowledging this translating form of ‘sameness’ would have scientists and Aborigines engaging an alternative form of generalizing, promoting a transformative moment in both knowledge traditions. This alternative form of generalizing embeds a politics different from the politics embedded in orthodox scientific and Yolngu forms of generalizing. I claim the tension made in articulating these alternative forms of generalizing as a ‘postcolonial moment’.

A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners

A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners

Introduction: Debating Empire

Debating Empire1 Tony Ballantyne This special issue, dedicated to assessing David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, is part of the ongoing debate over British imperialism that engages scholars, activists, and various communities in many parts of the world. The sources, nature and legacies of British imperialism have been the subject of renewed interest over the last decade and the question of empire has come to occupy an increasingly central place in cultural and political life in this post-colonial moment. In their very different ways, settler colonies such as Canada, Zimbabwe and New Zealand have been grappling with questions of indigenous sovereignty and land rights, while the question of ‘native title’ sprung to the foreground of Australian politics after the landmark Mabo decision in 1992 (which transformed Australian legal and political culture by recognising the existence and persistence of Aboriginal land ownership). The legacies of colonialism have also been at the forefront of political life in South Africa following the dismantling of the apartheid regime, framing many of the histories of racial exclusion and violence produced by the 20,000 witnesses that testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In South Asia the role of British colonialism in engendering the region’s ‘underdevelopment,’ environmental degradation, and religious and ethnic conflict is the subject of constant debate in bazaars, newspaper editorials, and classrooms. The pressures of post-colonialism has also been felt in the United States of America where activists and scholars alike have increasingly drawn attention to that nation’s status as a settler colony and the centrality of imperialism, both formal and informal, in the making of American cultures and identity. In Britain itself, many saw the transfer of power in Hong Kong in 1997 as marking the final act in the great drama of the rise and fall of the empire; but such a nostalgic view ignores the persistent legacies of British imperialism which are at the heart of ongoing debates over Northern Ireland, immigration, and the very nature of Britishness itself. During the 1990s the imperial past was increasingly scrutinised by scholars from a range of disciplines and studies of colonial discourse (enabled by Edward Said’s path-breaking Orientalism), imperial science and medicine, gender and sexuality, and popular culture jostled with the analytical staples of imperial history — high politics and economics. Partly as a result of this new interdisciplinary interest in empire, imperial history, a once moribund field that seemed near obsolescence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has re-emerged as an important and rejuvenated academic field and even a topic of public concern. The publication of the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire in 1999 and 2000 marked the culmination of this rebirth. Wm. Roger Louis, the editor-in-chief of the series, argued that shifting ideological currents meant that a reassessment of the British empire and its historiography was much needed: The time [the mid 1990s] was ripe for a reappraisal. The ideological wars of the 1960s, the emotions raised by issues of nationalism and decolonization — all of these had diminished, and we were able to recruit historians of India and of Asia and of Africa as well as Britain to participate in the project. 2 Such an account of the significance of empire, which suggests that imperialism is of declining political importance and equates anti-colonialism with emotion, is disputed by several of the essays in this forum, but there is no doubt that the new Oxford History found wide academic and public support. Jointly funded by the Rhodes Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oxford History was enabled by a huge (and continually expanding) body of research produced in dissertations, journal articles, edited collections and monographs. It also followed on the heels of other significant works of synthesis, most notably A.G. Hopkins and Peter Cain’s magisterial two volume study of the economics of empire, Dennis Judd’s Empire, P.J. Marshall’s The Cambridge illustrated history of the British Empire, the dictionaries of empire edited by Alan Palmer and James Olson and the historical atlases edited by Chris Bayly and Andrew Porter. 3 The Oxford History...