Postcolonial Nation-state Research Articles

“Against Forgetting”

This paper investigates the witnessing and memory-making functions of the poetry of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Against the backdrop of prevailing institutionalized constraints on journalism and mass media reportage by a postcolonial nation-state in a conflict-ridden territory, this paper shows how Shahid’s poetry fills the lacuna and serves not only as an archive of collective memories of his people, or witness to their sufferings, but also engages the critical as well as emotional faculties of a wider audience to elicit empathies and garner committed solidarities. It throws light on the complexity of witnessing with respect to the poet’s positionality as he bore witness to the occurrences of his homeland while being physically distant from it and yet offering a substitution to news, especially in the present times when journalism, in Kashmir, has failed in its obligation to represent the experiences of the ordinary people. The study primarily focuses on Shahid’s 1997 collection, The Country Without a Post Office, for its investigation of the witnessing functions of his poetry.

God’s wealth, legal frames, and the question of material and immaterial heritage: the case of Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala, India

ABSTRACT Analyzing the battle over Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple’s enormous treasure, the paper documents the litigious journey of the concept of sacred possession and heritage. It shows how the evolving and complex logic of secular governance in India provides the legal categories that animate this contestation over the deity’s wealth. While the enormous treasure trove housed in the six chambers of the temple’s basement ‘belongs’ to the idol (murthi) Lord Sree Padmanabhaswamy, the royal family of Travancore has held the right for over the last two hundred and seventy years to control the wealth as the Lord’s servants (dasa). Though the dispute over what is arguably the world’s largest temple gold and valuables collection began in 2007, it gained widespread media attention in 2009 when a public interest litigation (PIL) was filed. Since then, the royal family, temple management, and other stakeholders have been embroiled in the struggle for possession and control of the temple’s wealth. The paper explores how legal frames of Anglo-Hindu law in their postcolonial avatars, material patrimony (gold and land), and notions of immaterial heritage (shebaitship) animated and framed this contestation. To this end, the paper maps the legal trajectory of the dispute and the public debates over the ownership and control of the astounding wealth of Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. Further, it decodes the legal reasoning behind the courts’ arguments and delves into ontological questions surrounding religious freedom and secularity. The discussion illustrates how notions of immaterial heritage anchored in ideas of kingship as well as kinship emerged as clinching evidence in the management and access to this sacred wealth. Finally, the analyses offer insights into the governance of sacred materiality through religio-legal categories in a postcolonial nation-state.

“Whose Union?” Federalism, Funding, and the Ideal Citizen-Student in Indian University Education (1950–1960)

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of Allahabad University’s functioning, this article argues that independent India’s ideas of federalism reimagined university education. New visions of the educated person – linked to ideas about the ideal citizen – changed the kinds of disciplines and universities being funded. With support from industrial elites to buttress the new nation-state’s development plans, the state prioritised technical education over arts and humanities to serve a unified economic policy. This change manifested through increased scrutiny over university functioning and crackdowns on student protests. The Indian postcolonial state’s “centralised” federalism to manage the national economy and promote national integration impacted university funding. Ultimately, decisions about university funding were tied to the state’s vision of the ideal apolitical citizen student, who would contribute to national development. This article highlights the complicated relationship between capital, the postcolonial nation-state, and university autonomy.

Understanding the Kashmir Conflict: A Complex Multiplicity Perspective

Understanding the Kashmir Conflict: A Complex Multiplicity Perspective

Violence-as-Norm in the Postcolony

Abstract In this paper, we explore forms of statist violence in both colonial and postcolonial contexts to underscore it as a constant in a postcolonial location like Nigeria. In addition to exploring how statist violence works, we also position civic dissent as a strategy employed in the colony and postcolony to confront statist violence. Our theorization of “violence-as-norm” is motivated by earlier ideas like the works of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, Tejumola Olaniyan’s “postcolonial incredible,” Toyin Falola’s views on violence within Nigerian history, and Achille Mbembe’s notions of banality and vulgarity in the postcolony. Our paper engages with Peter Omoko’s Majestic Revolt to demonstrate how “violence-as-norm” mediates colonial violence and civic dissent. Furthermore, by close-reading Chiedozie Omeje’s “When Cowards Win,” we explore postcolonial forms of violence through the EndSARS movement against police brutality in Nigeria to demonstrate how civic dissent is performed and ruptured in the contemporary moment. Ultimately, our research positions the Fanonist category of violence as a way to imagine the inherent coloniality of postcolonial nation-states, thereby extending the critique of the nation-form in postcolonial studies.

Reawakening Ali Sardar Jafri’s Asia Jaag Utha

The epic poem "Asia Jaag Utha,"" written in 1950 by Ali Sardar Jafri of the Indian Progressive Writers Association, was a battle hymn of its time, a celebration of Asia’s history and geography, with a vision for Asian liberation and communist revolution at the dawn of the Cold War in the aspirational Third World. Are its messages still applicable today, or is it strictly a period piece? This essay analyzes what Jafri was trying to do in his own context and explores whether it has anything to say to ours. In order to do this, the author enters into dialogue with Jafri’s poetry, and proposes some updates to its political agenda that might be needed to carry its energy into the present. While the mid-twentieth century vehicles of progress and liberation (such as industrial development and the postcolonial nation-state) require critique, Jafri’s emancipatory impulses and ideals of solidarity ring true.

Decolonization and the Third World

This essay asks why the Third World has become a symbol of poverty and failed infrastructure while the political imperative towards decolonization has gained popularity. By examining histories of decolonization in mid-twentieth century and the subsequent establishment of postcolonial nation-states that often ignored, suppressed, or actively participated in settler colonial occupations both globally and internally, I argue that there needs to be a widespread reckoning with what constitutes anti-colonial liberation.

Narrative reproduction: plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust

This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis around an attempt to reach for the narratively reproductive potential of disavowed, arid lands at the borders of the postcolonial nation-state. As the readings in this article demonstrate, Owuor's novel both chimes with the interventions of those theorists who depict social reproduction in Africa as a general theory of feminisation – of people and land alike – and offers an answer to how social reproduction might be rendered in literary formal terms. This article is therefore an investigation into the ‘where’ of social reproduction in the contemporary African novel.

Distant homelands: Mobility, exile and (trans)nationalism in contemporary African fiction

In this article, I argue that Bulawayo’s representation of precarity in her novel helps us decolonize representations of mobility in African literature. In Bulawayo’s novel, mobility undergirds the global presence of Africa and frames African identities in a cosmopolitan purview. Yet, the cultural trajectory of African migrants unveils practical realities within the nation state that shape expressions of cultural belonging in Afrodiasporic contexts. The novel’s presentation of poverty, abjection and dislocation limits the possibilities of an Afropolitan engagement with Darling’s experience in the diaspora. Her joyful, yet, precarious childhood in Zimbabwe and the illusion of an abundant life in the United States show that the postcolonial nation state and the US racial state remain unprecedented forces that constraint the fluidity of people of African descent’s identities. The metaphoric representation of her condition as a prisoner not only questions her mobility but also her difficult experience as a migrant in the United States underscores her struggles to belong in a racialized American society. Thus, the protagonist’s precarious position in her homeland and her host-land reveals the restrictive power of the state and challenges a romantic description of life in both the Global North and the Global South.

Transition and Trans*lation beyond Binary History in Mid-century Upper Egypt; or, Portraits of Transfemininity in Asyut

Abstract: In 1958, the popular Egyptian magazine Ākhir Sā`ah ran a story about four people designated “men donning dresses and living as women” in the Upper Egyptian town of Asyut. Ākhir Sā`ah presented brief profiles explaining these people’s gender expression alongside staged photographs and opinions from an Egyptian psychiatrist, the local minister of education, a lawyer, and a social scientist. This article departs from that one. By annotating my trans*lation of the Arabic text, I interrupt its binary logics. Trans*lation is an idiomatic meaning-making process that is in intimate dialogue with the process of transition itself. In the source text, Egyptians living in tension with the gender binary were made legible through the relay of pseudoscientific evidence and details about their early childhood experiences, or in one instance, through a story about a deal between the subject and a spirit, a jinn. My analysis denaturalizes the publication’s ethnographic documentation and teleological narration of these people’s lives. Working through the Arabic text and departing from the Orientalist fixation with philology, I consider the possibilities of rendering gender alterity across languages and employ trans*lation as a method to engage narratological and historiographical processes. In my treatment of these biographies, I clarify how “nonbinary” challenges the emplotment of gender transition and the work of translation as linear processes, and I motion towards its potential to evacuate the overlapping transitions to modernity and the emergence of the postcolonial nation-state, which the aforementioned transfeminine individuals also lived, from similarly teleological narrations and binary logics. Ultimately, I situate these four subjects beyond the interlocking binaries of man/woman, human/spirit, cis/trans, modern/traditional, and East/West. In so doing, I collapse these structures and offer alternative portraits of transfemininity in Asyut.

Worlds from the Periphery: A Multilingual Reading of Saurav Kumar Chaliha and Anjum Hasan

The paper examines the Assamese short story “Xomoi-Xeema” (2005) by Saurav Kumar Chaliha and the English poetry collection, Street on the Hill (2006), by Anjum Hasan to propose an expanded notion of Anglophone writing through multilingual readings of regional Indian literature and offer alternative modes of political inclusivity. It examines the role of English in Northeast Indian literary texts in articulating cosmopolitanism from a marginalized space and probing the linguistic frontiers of the postcolonial nation-state. Through this comparative reading, the essay envisions the relationships between region, nation, and world through a series of overlapping linguistic exchanges and provides an alternative understanding of world literature to current models focused on the English-language novel.

Decolonial Politics: State, Statelessness, and Coexistence in Peace

ABSTRACT Due to the colonial continuities encoded in postcolonial nation-states, formal decolonisation reproduced new dominations rather than peaceful intergroup coexistence. Reflecting on the ‘how’ of decolonial politics, I argue that self-determination beyond the nation-state and spatiotemporally embedded decolonial imaginations are the undecomposable components of decolonial politics. I exemplify the failures of the nation-state through Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan and illustrate Western (Rojava-Syrian) Kurdistan as a possible example of stateless decolonial coexistence, despite major geopolitical and socio-historical stalemates. The argument contributes to peace studies in International Relations by rethinking inter-group coexistence at the intersection of violent geopolitics and decolonial imaginations.

Colonial Modernity and the Image of the Gorkhaland Movement in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

This article examines some dynamics surrounding the Indian nation-state's treatment of its minority populations, and how Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss seems to abet the postcolonial nation-state's attempt to policing its own people. The article is interested in exploring the impact of colonial modernity in postcolonial human relations. As such, the novel successfully locates postcolonial literary violence in the character of the judge, whose replication of racist treatments on his victims highlights the destructive cycle of violence. At the same time, the novel reinforces ethnic stereotypes against certain ethnicities--at least it leaves much to be desired in countering racist thoughts of some of the characters. Drawing concepts from psychoanalysis and contemporary political philosophy, the article sheds light on a relationship between literature and the nation-state.

Women’s role in postcolonial nation state building: Krishnabai Nimbkar and the question of rural development in and beyond India

Women’s role in postcolonial nation state building: Krishnabai Nimbkar and the question of rural development in and beyond India

Prehistory and Ideology in Cold War Southeast Asia: The Politics of Wartime Archaeology in Thailand and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1954–1975

The two decades comprised within the partition of Vietnam and the end of the Indochina Wars surprisingly saw major advances in prehistoric archaeology in the region. This article examines the political context and implications of archaeological investigations conducted in Thailand and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under the guidance of, respectively, American and Soviet specialists, as an aspect of the cultural Cold War. Archaeological discoveries in both countries debunked colonial archaeology’s account of prehistoric Southeast Asia as a passive recipient of Chinese cultural influence by documenting autonomous technological development. The article argues that the new image of mainland Southeast Asia’ prehistory that formed by the early 1970s reflected the superpowers’ objective of empowering the region’s postcolonial nation-states notwithstanding their political contrasts, yet it was not equally congruent with the nationalist narratives of Thailand and North Vietnam.

Cold War Decolonization

Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have so often been treated in isolation from each other. Postcolonialism and Cold War studies have, as Monica Popescu tells us, followed “separate, largely non-intersecting paths” (6). Yet even a superficial summary of the key geopolitical developments of the postwar period suggests that the Cold War and decolonization are not just interconnected, but mutually determining. When you take into account the decolonizing world, in some places afflicted by devastating proxy wars in this period, it must be said (it has often been said) that the Cold War was cruelly misnamed. This dual history has shaped our political language. A term like the West, as it is used in academic debates as well as in political, journalistic, and policymaking fields, developed its particular set of associations by contrast with the communist Eastern bloc on the one hand and with the (post)colonial global south on the other. Yet these two versions of the non-Western don’t always line up: although anticolonial movements often sought to align themselves with the international communist movement, many proudly independent postcolonial nation-states were explicitly anti-communist (like the neoliberal regimes in Singapore and South Korea). Other postcolonies grappled with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China as a colonial power.

Keta Lagoon: Uncovering Suppressed Heritage Practices for Sustainable Wetland Management

Current efforts to integrate heritage practices in the sustainable management of wetlands in postcolonial nation-states assume that these practices have always existed in the forms they are now. The colonial order, whether deliberately or otherwise, suppressed many local traditional practices. The postcolonial authority’s adoption of Western science invariably continued the suppression, albeit in a more liberal form. In the Ramsar Convention, natural scientists were assigned the role of conserving wetlands ‘‘for the benefit of humankind in a way compatible with the maintenance of natural properties of the ecosystem.’’ This became known as the wise use principle. This article highlights the history of the Keta wetlands and proposes an integration of key knowledge holders into management plans for a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states. The colonial and postcolonial regimes made the knowledge holders invisible. Modern imaginaries – Western legal institutions, Western science and Christianity – were privileged over local heritage practices. It therefore requires historical and heritage expertise to uncover local sustainable knowledge for integration into the Ramsar management plan, hence a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states.

Struggles for Self-Determination: The Denial of Reactionary Statehood in Africa by Josiah Brownell

Struggles for Self-Determination examines the sovereign claims of African counterrevolutionary nationalisms in Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana. The book’s most important contribution is conceptual; Brownell takes the nationalist claims of these countries seriously, even though they were denied that legitimacy by international forums in their own time.Dominant nationalist historical narratives of African decolonization are entwined with the legacies of the anticolonial nationalist movements that became ruling postcolonial state governments.1 Therefore, understandings of African decolonization have relied on refuting the legitimacy of counterrevolutionary nationalisms that posited political alternatives to postcolonial nation-states. In addition, accounts of these counterrevolutionary nationalisms were often implicitly connected to notions of imperial nostalgia.2It is to Brownell’s credit that he charts a careful path between sympathy and denial of these nationalist claims. For these reasons, he is upfront about what his book is not—he is not making normative claims of legitimacy for these regions, he is not arguing that they were all the same, and he is not researching daily life of ordinary people in these regions (3–4). Instead, Brownell is concerned with the externalities of sovereignty—its performance and the pursuit of international recognition, especially when that pursuit requires circumnavigating official international forums (such as the United Nations). He discusses how these claimants tapped into “certain aesthetico-idological lineages designed to generate the maximum sympathy and support from particular overseas constituencies” (6).This focus on the performance of national sovereignty begs the question, who is writing these nationalist scripts?3 While Brownell highlights a fascinating cast of characters, the agency and the structural limits of these scriptwriters as African “nationalist” figures—people such as Moise Tshombe, Lucas Mangope, Kaiser Mantanzima or the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi (an intellectually fascinating figure whose activities fall outside of the book’s scope)—are not central to his narrative. He instead focuses his book on what he sees as four common elements across the nationalist claims of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana—that they were responding to both decolonization and Pan-Africanism; that they utilized right-wing transnational networks; that they ideologically contested the role of ethnicity, race, and power in postcolonial Africa; and that they were viewed as threats by postcolonial African states.Tracing these common elements, a number of individuals appear repeatedly, people such as Selous Scout Ron Reid Daly, Rhodesian and Bophuthatswanan politician Rowan Cronje, and U.S.-Rhodesian lobbyist Kenneth Towsey. Drawing upon Pessemiers’ work on the adhoc forms of collaboration between white supremist Southern African regimes, Brownell is uncomfortable drawing direct strategic connections.4 In order to make the connections, he identifies that the three white post-imperials (Daly, Cronje, and Towsey) and others like them served as pivots between multiple counterrevolutionary nationalisms—a point that could be opened up to further exploration.Brownell’s loose chronology begins in 1960 with Katanga’s attempted secession from newly independent Congo-Léopoldville and the subsequent United Nations intervention, and ends in 1985 when international investors and cultural entrepreneurs decided to boycott the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana. Chapters focus on the ideological framing of these nationalist claims, performances of sovereignty at home and abroad, and the utilization of culture and tourism as “soft power” in nationalist claims-making.The subject of chapter 7, the Bophuthatswanan Sun City resort serving as a hub for the cultural performance of reactionary statehood, is particularly intriguing. If this resort was a portal for international claims-making, what exactly was Bophuthatswana claiming to be? According to Brownell, Sun City “resided in an ambiguous zone. It was both a supposedly politics-free ‘pleasure dome’ and a stalking course for the normalization of” Bophuthatswana’s claim of independence (262). In a magazine advertising the resort, British Airways extolled the lack of racial segregation at Sun City where all guests “have an equal right to lose their money on the slot machines and at the roulette tables. The races mix on the dance floor, in the restaurants and at the shows” (273). However, by 1985 the global advocacy of the anti-apartheid movement successfully cast Bophuthatswana as a satellite to apartheid rather than independent, making it lose popularity as an international destination.It is noteworthy that Brownell takes a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing the archival methods of a historian and the thematic organization of a social scientist. His interventions on “sub-nationalisms” are imbedded in qualitative political science literature, particularly that of Jackson.5 A worthwhile study would be found in placing Brownell’s work in dialogue with scholarship in global international relations, particularly on South African contributions to the international legal-order that in the end denied recognition to the counterrevolutionary nationalisms chronicled in Brownell’s book.6By considering the nationalist aspirations of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana seriously and navigating between the poles of imperial nostalgia and anticolonial negation, Brownell has opened up avenues of future research. This reader came away from Struggles for Self-Determination looking forward to finding scholarship on the political thinking, writing, and positioning of counterrevolutionary nationalist leaders.7

Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century By Pallavi Rastogi

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century by Pallavi Rastogi Charles Kipng'eno Rono Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century BY PALLAVI RASTOGI Northwestern UP, 2020. ix + 289 pp. ISBN 9780810141742 e-book. Pallavi Rastogi's Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century is a compelling analysis of disaster literature within postcolonial studies. It boasts four chapters systematically divided between three parts, including an introduction and a coda that serves as a conclusion. For readers interested in domesticated concepts of disaster studies into literature, the book provides significant insights. Through its astute creation of narratology for Anglophone postcolonial disaster fictions, the text traces a "dialectic tension" between the Story, i.e., literary elements of the narrative, and the Event, the real-life disaster that the story registers. While rightly observing that this tension is determined by the temporal distance from the inaugurating event, it demonstrates how, on one hand, the narrative tends toward a more imaginative reinvention of the catastrophe when the disaster is more distant from the time of writing and how, on the other hand, disaster predominates over literary when the Event is more recent. As she gathers solid fictions on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the AIDS crisis in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan to consolidate this claim, Rastogi revivifies old concerns of postcolonial theory that were prematurely dismissed. The result is a ground-breaking book that offers refreshing accounts of disaster that exceed ineffective ethnographic explanations that postcolonial nation-states relied on as interventions in mitigating effects of disaster. [End Page 152] Partitioned as "Explosion," "Slow Burn," and "Simmer," it ends not with a conventional conclusion that signifies closure but with a brief coda on the Syrian contemporary refugee crisis that canvasses her arguments as she invites the reader to conceive of the book as an emblem for future studies. To achieve her goal, Rastogi develops "Disaster Unconscious," a judicious dialectic interventionism that she reformulates from the works of Fredric Jameson and Neil Lazarus as a check and balance that returns the Event not "to define entirety of the text" (13; emphasis added), but to teach us all "to live with all-pervasiveness of catastrophe while simultaneously resisting it" (11). Her theorization expands the purview of the Unconscious by emphasizing that no matter how far the Story moves from the original Event through genre, style, or time, the Disaster Unconscious refuses "subordinations even in fiction that takes flamboyantly literary claims" (83). While the first chapter foregrounds the issue of temporality in discussing a burst of short lyrical poetry and genre fiction as a diverse assemblage that focuses on rebuilding and reconstructing the havoc wrecked by Sri Lanka's explosive tsunami disaster, those that explore a historically distant Event like the geopolitical conflict between India and Pakistan in Jaspreet Singh's Chef (2008), Mohsin Moni's The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008), and Manil Suri's The City of Devi (2013) are discussed in the last chapter. The second part, which comprises two chapters, is of striking interest because the Story and the Event in the texts discussed appear to be collapsing under each other, sometimes appearing to be undermining and troubling each other's disaster unconscious. Rastogi's keen sense of austerity helps her out to maintain this push-and-pull balance. In a remarkable example, Rastogi reads economic crisis in Zimbabwean fictions and analyzes how these novels are "Buying Out," i.e., they "consciously turn away from crisis-ridden Zimbabwe" by prioritizing the Story, but the economic disaster can still permeate the texts, rendering attempts to separate the Story from the Event quite impossible. Despite minor conceptual weaknesses, like her presumption that the book is the first to create narratology, it compliments other disaster-related studies. In a close-down ending that disposes scholars to be passively acquiescent in future disaster-related studies, Rastogi deserves kudos for her scholarly erudition, the readability of her original text, and her ability to reorient the reader to the usefulness of a more reparative understanding of disaster literature. Though I would have liked to see more examples...

Lately, I have been talking with our ancestors

This ‘letter to my children’ is part of the author’s book in progress Algerian Letters: The Jewelers of the Ummah. Through her engagement with different addressees (her ancestors and children, scholars, political theorists and law-makers active in Algeria, France, and Palestine) and reflecting on the history of her paternal family life in Algeria, she questions the seemingly irreversible nature of the process through which, in less than a century, an offspring of an indigenous Algerian Jew could no longer find it possible to say ‘I’m Algerian.’ Her assumption is that the French colonization of Algeria in 1830, and forcing the Jews who lived there to become French citizens in 1870, marked the destruction of their world. Is this process reversible? What would such a reversal require? More than just a personal reckoning, family history, or an implied return, this inquiry interrogates the structures of colonial dispossession, charting processes of world-loss and asking what kind of repair – that is increasingly called ‘decolonization’ – is possible. Beyond the physical and emotional world loss of the Arab–Berber–Jews of North Africa, this series of letters prompted her inquiry into the role of both the colonizing powers in North Africa and the colonial (Israel) and post-colonial (France) nation-states and into how citizenship operates in preparing groups of people to detach themselves from objects to which they are attached and in which they are invested, and to be ready for migration and assimilation in a foreign, supposedly superior, culture and emancipation project.