Postcolonial Nation-state Research Articles

Our Libraries Are Colonial Archives: South Asian Collections in Western and Global North Libraries

South Asian collections in the West have complex histories. Usually started at the time of colonial rule and built on practices of acquisition, they often involved the removal of manuscripts and books from the subcontinent with little or no compensation to the owners. This in turn created gaps in knowledge locally. While following the founding of the independent, post-colonial nation-states, acquisition practices changed, a culture of coloniality continued through book exchanges and the classification system rooted in Western frameworks of knowledge and colonial mindsets. Moreover, for scholars outside the physical libraries, there are barriers to access the collections. Looking at current library practices, and with University of Wisconsin-Madison’s collections as a case study, this article outlines some historical problematics and points towards new directions in working toward decolonising the library.

Islamic visibility in Lebanon, the banking sector and Eurocentric modernity: erasure, development, and the post-colonial nation-state

ABSTRACT This paper is based on in-depth reflexive and qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2018 thinking alongside visibly Lebanese Muslim women. Based on participants' shared experiences, the paper argues that visibly Muslim women are excluded from employment in the Lebanese banking sector in line with this sector's pursuit and larger alignment with Eurocentric modernity. It identifies powerful narratives of development, progress, and the Lebanese nation-state with its post-colonial imaginary as key forces underlying this exclusion as well as key horizons it pursues. Accordingly, it posits that private capitalist financial institutions such as Lebanese banking function as apparati of Eurocentric Modernity's contemporary hegemonic establishment and reproduction through everyday lived experiences. Challenging the dominant representations of Lebanese banking as emancipatory and progressive, it examines contemporary national banking ‘from below’ as a contribution to emerging decolonial research in political economy, international political economy (IPE), everyday IPE, and cultural IPE.

The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits

Reviewed by: The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits Thomas Waller Peter J. Maurits, The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022). 214 pages. Print and ebook. xiv + 214 pages. There is a long and high-quality tradition of English-language scholarship on Mozambican literature. The landmark publications of Hilary Owen's Mother Africa, Father Marx and Phillip Rothwell's A Postmodern Nationalist in the early 2000s set the benchmark for subsequent work in the field by analysing the subversion and redefinition of narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and the deconstruction of discourses of gender and sexuality, in the work of authors such as Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto. More recently, monographs by Eleanor Jones, Ana Margarida Martins, and Maria Tavares have carried forward this line of research with new work engaging the theory of biopolitics, the publishing dynamics of the global literary marketplace, and the legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Mozambique. While there are points of divergence and disagreement within this scholarship, two of its characteristic features are a preoccupation with the category of national identity and a theoretical affinity with postcolonial studies, a field in which the experiences of Portuguese-speaking African societies have historically been either under-represented or ignored. Each in their own [End Page 96] way, these scholars read Mozambican literature through the framework of the postcolonial nation-state, which the texts are then seen alternately to challenge, re-examine, contest, or deconstruct. Peter J. Maurits's new book The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story approaches Mozambican literature from a different perspective. Published in Peter Lang's book series 'Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World', its orientation does not come from postcolonial theory, nor is it principally concerned with the themes of gender and sexuality, and while it has much to say about the trajectory of Mozambican nationhood, its scope transcends the bounding limits of the national framework to encompass a global horizon of political economy. The structure of the book is organized in five chapters of more or less equal length. The first chapter introduces key concepts and summarizes the monograph's thesis, that there exists a 'Mozambican modern ghost story'. The second chapter then presents the category of the modern ghost story through an analysis of the work of Walter Scott, with a particular focus on his 1827 short story 'The Highland Widow'. The third chapter identifies prototypes of the Mozambican modern ghost story in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Campos de Oliveira and in Orlando Mendes's important 1966 episodic novel Portagem. The fourth chapter theorizes the consolidation of the Mozambican modern ghost story proper in the period of the late 1980s, when Mozambique was transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to free-market capitalism. Finally, the fifth chapter argues, through a close reading of Mia Couto's novel O outro pé da sereia, that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to respond to the economic effects of neoliberal globalization. One of the virtues of Maurits's book is that it engages with two traditions that have received relatively short shrift in English-language work on Mozambican literature: Marxist social theory and world-literary studies. The first two sentences of The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story establish its argument at the outset at the intersection of these two fields: 'This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form—a genre—can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials' (p. ix). A materialist commitment to the theory and critique of global capitalism is thereby paired with a sensitivity to the unevenness of the production and circulation of world-literary texts in a system stratified by power and inequality. Whereas the former preoccupation leads Maurits to theories of the aesthetic mediation of capitalist social form, and to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Pierre Macherey, the latter leads him to world...

Rare Objects and the Rhapsodic World of Yoruba Elite Art Collectors: Preliminary Notes

This paper is a preliminary note on the data collected during my research on archives in Nigeria in the summer of 2013. While I examined both public and private archives, I found the private archives particularly those in the cities in southwestern Nigeria to be surprisingly rich in objects that are rare, new, and sometimes with unusual subject matter. The archives belong to notable elite collectors who are the de facto shapers of the art industry in Nigeria today. Their archives are worth art-historlcal study in terms of the richness of the col­lectlon, and because the sites are the contemporary repositories of not only an­clent art but also traditional, modern and contemporary works of art. From the range and volume of the collections, the archives seem to have taken over from the government-owned museums. The shift is very interesting to study as one traces the trajectory of art acquisition and accumulation from pre-modern to modern institutions. The preliminary submission here is that Nigerian elite art collectors are lnterveners and game changers. Their intervention could be seen in two ways: First, as rescuers of disappearing cultures and by the same plat­form they are pivotal to reclamation of cultural patrimony. Secondly, as game changers and transformative agencies the elite collectors become culture bro­kers who work assiduously to stem 'culture flight' and 'heritage drain'. The plat­forms they offer grant them boasting rights as art connoisseurs and promotes the affirmation of elite power within the matrix of a post-colonial nation state.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Beyond aesthetics: The long take as the nation-form in the cinema of Lav Diaz

This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space to include a study of bodies.

"Not at Home in Empire"

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

ABSTRACT Postcolonial literary studies have not paid much attention to literary portrayals of mobility practices partly because the field promotes a reductive understanding of ‘mobility’ as a mere synonym for migration. In order to address this blind spot and to recognise African fictional characters as mobile subjects, the present article focuses on representations of aeromobility in Francophone African literary texts narrating diasporic returnees’ journeys back to their former home countries. As my analysis of five Francophone African return narratives from the 1980s to the 2010s suggests, the aeromobilities of Afrodiasporic returnees are marked by a sense of unease that relates to the issues of (un)belonging and guilt, failures of modernity of the postcolonial nation-state, and the unrealistic expectations that those ‘back home’ have about migrant life. The article underlines the importance of aeromobility in the production of the mobile subjectivity of the returnee and their relationship with the place of return.

Tibet as a Factor in Sino-Indian Conflict

The article investigates modern day Sino-India relations, taking into account the Tibet factor. Using a postcolonial lens, it looks into how Tibet remains the key issue affecting India-China ties, which is not accounted for by both postcolonial nation states. However, the territorial disputes between both countries are directly linked to the status of Tibet as these disputed borders historically were the Indo-Tibetan border and not the Sino-Indian border. The entry of British imperialism in Asia changed the prevailing political systems, with British (western) ideas of statehood and sovereignty enforced as raison d etre. Under this, the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded and occupied Tibet, as the region was comprehended by the communists in terms of a ‘security dilemma’ for PRC. The military takeover of Tibet ended the traditional government headed by the Dalai Lamas, a line of reincarnated monks who had ruled Tibet since the 17th century. After the invasion of Tibet, the XIV Dalai Lama along with thousands of Tibetans escaped to India, which provided asylum and allowed the growth of a government of exile by the Tibetans. Thus, Tibet and Tibetans have emerged as the central factor in Sino-Indian conflict.

The Postcolonial State as Container: Lessons on Nation-Building and the Nation-State from Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT Sri Lanka provides a geopolitical lens to analyze theviolence (both overt and discursive) necessary for the formation of the postcolonial nation-state. Following Himadeep Muppidi’s concept of the zoological metaphor as one of the colonial signs in international relations, I first consider the nation-state as a container-box interms of a “treasure box” within international tourism and as represented on tourist maps, containing cultural artifacts and experiences that are both exotic and available. I then interrogate the nation-state as a container-box noting a ‘caged’ problem in both the civil war and the 2004 Tsunami. I argue that both the nationas a treasure-box and caged-problem arise simultaneously in the process and project of nation building, and therefore both the cultural and political representations of the state are necessary for assessing the limitations and possibilities of the state itself.

Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

Reviewer: Gregory J. Goalwin, Aurora University In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Nandita Sharma develops a theory of international migration that situates current political debates within a deep postcolonial history of biopolitics, population control, and citizenship policies. Tracing patterns of colonial relations, Sharma emphasizes the postcolonial nature of the modern world system. Nations, she argues, are the core of a Postcolonial New World Order that have turned us all into National-Natives of some place, creating an expectation that each person belongs to a sovereign separated nation state. Such a system necessarily draws borderlines between members of the nation and everyone else, a distinction that is of critical interest to Sharma. By limiting national membership and creating “people of a place,” Sharma argues that the nation state system creates a new class of people as well, those “out of place” who lack their own sense of national membership or who can be found outside of their “natural” territory. It is this new form of governmentality and biopolitics that forms the core of Sharma’s argument. In tracing how these processes function in the postcolonial world, Sharma identifies a discourse of autochthony that restricts national membership even further: the only “true” nationals are what Sharma calls “National-Natives”: those who can in some way show they are Native to the nation. But this National-Nativity is native in a very specific way, that is, native to the postcolonial nation state itself, not the territory it occupies. This thus creates two other categories of humanity “Indigenous-Natives,” those who predated the nation state and thus do not share fully in its community, and “Migrant-Natives” subsequent settlers from outside the nation state’s territory. This distinction, Sharma argues, is central to modern discourses of migration. By reconceptualizing national communities in this way, indigenous peoples are set aside in favor of new National-Natives who themselves often argue that Migrants represent a new form of colonialism, one that threatens their “rightful” claim to national sovereignty.

Postcolonial Civic Identity and Youth (dis)organizing Environment: A Growth into Citizenship Analysis

The fluid realities of youth in postcolonial nation-states can reflect changing and challenging landscapes. Their engagements with environment, for example, are not only elaborated in social, political, and economical contexts, but also generated through values, beliefs, and identities. This article adds to contemporary debates by positing that discussions on postcolonial civic identities have to be accompanied by youth narratives and their considerations on nature, time, and digital world(s) by taking Malaysian youths as examples. Specifically, it attempts to theorize youth civic identity within postcolonial context(s) by scrutinizing personal narratives that are symbiotically yoked with discourses on ecology and technology. Through administering personal narratives at a suburban district in West Peninsular Malaysia, this paper opens ‘windows’ into what it means for youths to participate in civic projects. Reading these narratives from the lens of growth into citizenship , their wide-ranging experiences in civic affairs can be understood in four ways, namely, recognition, responsibilities, reconciliation, and reciprocity. Two of these emerging themes, recognition and responsibilities, will be discussed in this article. Our attempt at depicting postcolonial civic identity, therefore, is part of a large-scale investigation on civic mindedness that will compel us to reflect on unofficial, continuous accounts of youth reflecting on a sense of belongingness and what the future might bring.

State approaches towards managing ethnic diversity in Myanmar and Malaysia: British legacies, postcolonial nationalism and contemporary issues

ABSTRACT A lasting legacy of colonial rule across the world is the political salience of ethnicity in many modern postcolonial nation-states. Upon independence, these nation-states had to grapple with the challenging task of nation-building amidst often tense inter-ethnic group relations. This article examines and compares the state approaches towards ethnic diversity of two former British colonies in Southeast Asia – Myanmar and Malaysia. It finds that in both countries, the key similarity is that the state has favoured the numerically dominant ethnic group in its policies. However, while the main ethnic divisions in Myanmar are within the indigenous ethnic groups, the Malaysia’s ethnic divisions lie along an indigenous/non-indigenous dichotomy. Given the long histories of these ethnic divisions, any long-term solution will be challenging, but is arguably not impossible. A closer analysis of nationalist concepts in Myanmar and Malaysia suggests that moving towards a more civic form of nationalism is possible.

A decolonial critique of the liberal peace: Insights from peace practices of ethnic people in Colombia

This article develops a decolonial theoretical framework of peace by conducting a decolonial analysis of the hegemonic liberal peace in order to explain the power relations at play in peacebuilding in post-colonial nation-states, and also among different alternative local/ethnic peace views. It argues that the hegemonic discourse of peace is fruit of the modern/colonial system, and therefore the liberal peace has been conceptualized as a universal phenomenon based on particular Western and modern ideologies. Thus, the promotion and importation of this model into the periphery, that is in post-colonial states, implies the reproduction of the coloniality of power/knowledge/being by keeping the bases and ideology of the modern/colonial system that establishes profound abyssal lines between those that fit into the hegemonic standard and those that not. A decolonial perspective, thus, serves to understand how alterities underlying the war-peace dynamics do also reproduce the colonial difference that establishes an ethnic-racial hierarchical classification of the population in the postcolonial periphery. As a result, liberal peace is studied as a discourse that does not overcome the coloniality of power and the exclusion of the others, but instead tries to control the alterities by coopting them, reinforces the legitimacy of the nation-state by securing the centrality of the nation-state (despite any multicultural openness), and extends its sovereignty to the peripheries.

Am I Anglophone? Identity politics and postcolonial trauma in Cameroon at war

I was born in the English-speaking South West Province of Cameroon and raised in the English-speaking North West Province where I was educated in a system of primary through high school studies modeled on the British education system of G.C.E. Ordinary and Advanced Levels. After my A’ Levels, I moved to the French-speaking Centre Province where I enrolled at the University of Yaounde. There I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Licence ès Lettres Bilingues—a B.A. in Bilingual Letters (English and French)—for which I had to complete a French language immersion requirement in Douala in the French-speaking Littoral Province. After my university studies, I worked in the French-speaking West Province and English-speaking South West Province before moving to French/English-speaking Montreal, Canada where I studied Comparative Literature at McGill University and later immigrated to the United States. This essay, written in the context of the current “Anglophone Crisis” and the war taking place in Cameroon, is a personal meditation as a citizen, scholar, and fiction writer on the elusive nature of identity that the postcolonial nation-state seeks to capture, contain, and/or impose on the multiple “fragmented” selves of its citizens; identities that are by necessity in flux and as such either refuse to be contained within state-sanctioned acts of linguistic terrorism and/or restrained by socio-cultural and political repression.

포스트식민 국가의 ‘국민’ 만들기 기획으로서 아동발달 ― 1960-70년대 아동발달 표준화를 중심으로

포스트식민 국가의 ‘국민’ 만들기 기획으로서 아동발달 ― 1960-70년대 아동발달 표준화를 중심으로

British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy

Reviewed by: British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects by Sheshalatha Reddy Mukti Lakhi Mangharam (bio) British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy; pp. xl + 271. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects examines the ways in which British colonial ideologies constructed colonial populations as repellent and revolting, thereby justifying rule over them. Reddy argues that colonized populations actively and collectively resisted—revolted—against imperial control over their labor and land. The word revolting thus describes not only the colonial view of the colonized but also the latter’s active rebellion against British authority. Reddy illustrates this revolt through three critical “flashpoints,” the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, and the 1867 Fenian Rebellion in Ireland (xiii). For Reddy, these rebellions were a response to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This disciplining was done through what Reddy, drawing on Michel Foucault, calls biopolitics, the disciplinary tools deployed by states and corporations to manage and regulate populations in an attempt to transform the varied subjugated peoples of India, Jamaica, and Ireland into a modern laboring force. Reddy argues that the revolts demonstrate that, at the height of industrial capitalism, the revolting body of early colonial rule was figured incompletely as a laboring subject. The oppressed colonized worker never could be transformed into someone whose identity was created and limited by labor. The last chapter of the book turns to the postcolonial nation state to show, through Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1997), how the figure of the woman, occluded from both colonialist and nationalist discourses on the rebellions, is repurposed within our contemporary neoliberal state as the consummate disposable but laboring subject. The book presents a valuable archive of primary and secondary texts surrounding key colonial revolts. Each chapter reads on average five or six main texts surrounding the rebellion in question drawn from a wide variety of genres. These include plays, poetry, novels, novellas, photographs, broadsheets, periodical essays, and political economic tracts, produced by both the colonizers and colonized. In this respect, it is a well-researched and thorough collection of readings of texts surrounding the rebellions, encompassing primary source material written since the 1850s. Reddy brings to our attention fascinating but lesser-known figures such as the Jamaican nationalist writer and artist Roger Mais (1905–55), who was the product of a middle-class creole family but evinced a commitment to black working-class politics and resistance, was imprisoned for his political activism, and wrote at least thirty plays and three novels. The book also excels in its [End Page 657] readings of better-known texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie (1936). Reddy argues that workers’ efforts to value themselves in this text depend on their reintegrating minds and bodies that have been dichotomized by industrial capitalism. Reddy shines at portraying the complexity of resistance to colonialism, which took psychological, physical, and spiritual forms. She is less successful when it comes to arguing that the rebellions were reactions to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This is largely due to an incomplete and only tenuous focus on the concept of labor. Different colonial theorizations of labor, whether John Locke’s concept of “property in the person” or his ideas of labor’s property constituting capacity, or even Karl Marx’s concept of alienated labor, are not adequately developed or explained in relation to the literary texts examined (Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett [Cambridge University Press, 2013] 31). Nor are colonized people’s own views of their labor explored. Other historical arguments made about the transformation of colonial populations into labor, such as Andrew Sartori’s well-known Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (2014), are only briefly mentioned. The texts themselves are not consistently mined for passages focusing on ideas and experiences of colonial labor. This is because Reddy’s argument is less about the coercive transition to waged labor in the...

Contesting Conversions in African Christian Theology: Engaging the Political Theology of Emmanuel Katongole

Abstract This article argues that Emmanuel Katongole’s theology focuses on contesting conversions in African Christianity. To him, conversions that have so far taken place in much of African Christianity, especially those informed by the theology of inculturation, have not adequately emphasized the formation of critical Christian social imagination that would challenge the violent politics of the postcolonial nation-state in Africa. The article engages Katongole’s theology by showing how his understanding of conversion aligns him with a form of African Christianity which he criticizes – the neo-Pentecostal and Charismatic variety of African Christianity. It critiques Katongole’s proposal by suggesting that the social and political transformation he seeks may be enhanced by forms of conversion rooted in the theology of inculturation which he minimizes.

Journeying through Modernism: Travels and Transits of East Pakistani Artists in Post-Imperial London

This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan—to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s. Sultan’s cosmopolitan journeying, from Calcutta through Karachi and Lahore, to the USA and through London, to eventually settle in the countryside of Eastern Bengal, left traces in his practice, philosophy, and the narratives that have come to surround his work. Abedin’s London stay was both as an artist from the former colonies and as an East Pakistani cultural bureaucrat representing the post-colonial nation-state of Pakistan. These two very different journeys are approached by the co-authors from two different disciplinary traditions (anthropology and history), to bring into focus the concept of “journeys of post-colonial modernisms.” We show how the case of East Pakistan, with its incomplete decolonisation, shaped the travels and trajectories of these two artists and the ways in which their work was received and exhibited. We also show that this cannot be understood without the context of the Cold War, which facilitated particular routes for travel to and through art institutions globally, and which was to become crucial in shaping practice as well as conferring canonicity.

Restitution and the Logic of the Postcolonial Nation-State

Restitution and the Logic of the Postcolonial Nation-State