Postcolonial Nation-state Research Articles

The Limits of Democracy and the Postcolonial Nation State: Mali's Democratic Experiment Falters, while Jihad and Terrorism Grow in the Sahara (Summary and Final Chapter)

The legitimacy of not just “democracy” but of the African State itself, is challenged by the crisis in Mali, The crisis provoked by the coup d’etat of March 2012, led to the collapse of the democratic Malian state, a jihadist Al Qaida take-over of North Mali, and the return of the French Foreign Legion to the Sahara after 54 years of Malian Independence. Why did the Malian State collapse in 2012? Were the various Tuareg revolts in North Mali a symptom of State failure, rather than its cause? What were the causes and sources of the jihadi take-over of North Mali in 2012, led by Algerian drug smugglers and Pakistani preachers? Why did the French intervene militarily in January 2013 and will they now stay? What chance has Mali of determining its own future, confronted by the power of international corporations: extractive corporations, criminal mafia corporations, and religious corporations? With 12,000 UN peacekeepers (MINUSMA) and the election of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2013, what now are the prospects for peace and democracy on Mali? What mechanisms exist within Malian society, that might build a sustainable peace economy? How can women mobilize family networks to promote peace and to create employment? Will their efforts avert another round of civil war in 2030?

Arab Internationalism and Gender: Perspectives from the Third Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 1949

Historians of the Middle East have used gender to explore a range of topics, from how crises around gendered practices have contributed to the construction of national identities to women's roles in nationalist movements. Whereas early gender histories focused on single nation-states, recent scholarship has turned to regional and transnational connections. Yet the international sphere, the domain of nation-states and nongovernmental organizations in relation to each other, has yet to be examined through the lens of gender. In this essay, I argue that doing so yields new insights into the relationship between the national and the international in the Middle East, and into the process of rights claiming in postcolonial nation-states. I make this argument through a discussion of the third session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW).

The Sudan National Democratic Alliance (NDA): The Quest for Peace, Unity and Democracy

Sudan is a typical case of many postcolonial nation-states in Africa characterized by multiethnic, multicultural and multi-religious societies. It is an example of a pluralistic society formed by people who have differences in their sense of belonging and national identity. As in other African countries, the Sudanese situation is caused to a large extent by inequalities in power sharing and access to wealth and unequal development opportunities. In Sudan, the outcome has been a constant crisis of governance, civil war, ethnic genocide, famine and other man-made disasters which have crippled the country since independence. Differing visions for the future of the country have been contested. At one extreme is the vision of separation (formation of two states), at the other, the preservation of the status quo by any means, including violent ones (the military solution), which in a way means the continuation of inequalities within a united country. Proposals such as decentralization of the power of the state through a federal system, autonomy for the South and other disenfranchised regions of the country, or the right of self-determination, have at times been propagated by one political group or another.

‘Les lendemains de révolution avortée’: Nathalie Etoke's bipolar narratives of doomed national romance

Nathalie Etoke’s novels Un amour sans papiers (1999) and Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux (2008) deal with the hardships of the African postcolonial condition in the global era through the trope of doomed romance. In these novels, the plight of the postcolonial nation-state drives people to emigrate in a search for more viable prospects. While the mobility theme addressed in her novels is typical of third-generation African literatures in general, Etoke’s vision simultaneously struggles against the postnationalist currents informing this literary paradigm. Indeed, Etoke’s novels are quite loud and didactic in their articulations of political commitment towards the nation and the continent. Etoke holds on to the anticolonial romance narrative, but at the same time cannot ignore its inevitable failures in the present. This leads to a tension that marks her work by giving it a bipolar character, one that manifests itself in the constant oscillation between utopianism and disillusionment. The bipolar quality of the texts betrays a discomfort that the narratives’ promotion of an anticolonial struggle for nationhood and decolonisation generate in a postcolonial era that keeps witnessing the failures of these romantic discourses to realise themselves. A close reading of the novels reveals that this discomfort finds its articulation in the narrative fabric of the texts.Keywords: anticolonial romance narrative, bipolar narratives, Nathalie Etoke, postcolonial condition

Proto-Nationalisms as Sub-Text for the Crisis of Governance in Nigeria

There are several accounts of the genealogy and manifestations of the myriad governance crises, which Nigeria continues to face five decades after independence. Although no single account is sufficient to explain the governance misadventures, one key point resonating is that progress and development have proved elusive over the years. In this article, we seek to move away from the dominant characterization of this governance crisis as deriving directly from the consequences of a monolithic oil economy, a deeply fractured and volatile political terrain, or even corrupt and patrimonial rule. Instead, the article locates the root of Nigeria’s governance crisis in the queer pattern of the emergence, reinvention, and manipulation of proto-nationalisms characterized not by any nationalistic quest for independence and spatial liberation but one pursued to gain foothold in governance and to partake in its perquisites. Invariably, the post-colonial nation-states that emerged at independence in many African countries, for the most part, neither followed through with any logical expression of genuine nationalism nor mobilized toward a shared vision of nationhood. The article shows how individuals and groups within the polity soon became locked in contested and irreconcilable positions that further made the construction of a truly nationalistic identity difficult, if not forlorn. This article submits that successive post-colonial administrations unimaginatively followed the divide-and-rule traditions of the colonial state and thus failed to mobilize the popular support required for the construction of a broad-based national identity that is key to managing the protracted governance crises the country has experienced since independence.

In Search Of New Forms

This essay examines language reform in the first two decades of Singapore's independence in 1965, specifically the bilingual education policy and the ‘Speak More Mandarin, Less Dialects’ campaign. The policy and campaign simultaneously divide and restructure the heterogeneous Sinophone community into a cohesive homologous unit with the promotion of Mandarin as the common language among the various Sinitic dialect groups. The policy and campaign also directly impacted the relationship between the Chinese, Indian and Malay communities and their mother tongues. Mandarin was assigned as the mother tongue to all Sinophone Singaporeans, serving as a maternal figure to preserve cultural traditions against western influence in a rapidly modernizing, postcolonial nation-state. This essay analyses three contemporary Sinophone poems, showing how each of them directly or indirectly responds to the impact of the bilingual policy and the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign on Singapore society and its literary traditions.

Migrancy and Memory in Siddhartha Deb’s Novel The Point of Return

Siddhartha Deb’s novel The Point of Return (2002) is a nuanced study of the fractured relationship between an indigenous tribal people and Bengali migrants in the undivided state of Assam, and the exilic condition of these migrants in the Northeast of India (especially in Assam and Meghalaya). It also shows the painful process of cartographic reconfigurations of state boundaries along ethnic lines, and the resultant violence, uprootedness, alienation, and continued memory of loss. The paper seeks to investigate how the writer traces the lives of the first generation migrants who came to the new land in search of a better life but were condemned to live precarious lives in their adopted homeland. The novel is also about the post-partition generation who inherited the memory of their parents and grandparents and had to negotiate their own sense of belonging and identity in the face of ethnic assertion by indigenous people in the eastern borderland region. The legacy of this conflict lives on in the Northeast as the post-partition generation continues to grapple with issues like displacement, cultural confrontation, and homelessness. At the same time, we have examined how Deb utilizes the mode of memory to tell his story of migrancy and the trauma of loss and dislocation. The act of remembering, the urge to recall and revisit the historical loss, fracture, and trauma, are insistent in the text even as it grapples with issues like home, identity, citizenship, and belonging in the postcolonial nation-state.

Nathalie Etoke's bipolar narratives of doomed national romance

Nathalie Etoke's novels Un amour sans papiers (1999) and Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux (2008) deal with the hardships of the African postcolonial condition in the global era through the trope of doomed romance. In these novels, the plight of the postcolonial nation-state drives people to emigrate in a search for more viable prospects. While the mobility theme addressed in her novels is typical of third-generation African literatures in general, Etoke's vision simultaneously struggles against the postnationalist currents informing this literary paradigm. Indeed, Etoke's novels are quite loud and didactic in their articulations of political commitment towards the nation and the continent. Etoke holds on to the anticolonial romance narrative, but at the same time cannot ignore its inevitable failures in the present. This leads to a tension that marks her work by giving it a bipolar character, one that manifests itself in the constant oscillation between utopianism and disillusionment. The bipolar quality of the texts betrays a discomfort that the narratives' promotion of an anticolonial struggle for nationhood and decolonisation generate in a postcolonial era that keeps witnessing the failures of these romantic discourses to realise themselves. A close reading of the novels reveals that this discomfort finds its articulation in the narrative fabric of the texts.

Our Home(s) and/on Native Land: Spectacular Re-Visions and Refusals at Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games

In this essay I examine how Indigenous artists and performers leveraged Indigenous inclusion in Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games to refuse conditions that spectacularize Indigeneity for the consumptive appetite of settler-spectators. Their refusals, I suggest, called upon settler-spectators to reorient their placement on Indigenous land: to move from understanding themselves as citizens of a postcolonial nation-state celebrated through Olympic (inter)nationalism, to settlers (still) occupying unceded Indigenous territory. I critique how settler subjectivity and settler colonial relations have historically been produced through non-Indigenous people engaging with Indigenous people and political expression as spectators, enjoying the privilege and presumption of consuming and looking at Indigenous people and art. To be called into a different relation by Indigenous art and performance that refuses our spectatorship, we are called upon to relinquish our position as spectators, to identify ourselves as settlers, and to reorient ourselves temporally, spatially, and politically to Indigenous peoples and land. The positioning of Indigenous art and performance as refusals within and against the Olympics, the ultimate spectacle of statehood and inclusion, intensified their potency. Refusing and revising the spectacle, they playfully and powerfully unsettled settler-spectators and settler colonial conditions.

From the Last Dancer

From the Last Dancer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio) Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. And then Ernesto Laclau. A generation of intellectuals and activists, intellectual/activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think “Black Britain” before Stuart Hall. And, in Britain, the impact of cultural studies went beyond the confines of the academy. That quiet, gentle, witty, tenacious, learned, original political thinker inspired generations of students into intellectual and cultural production that spilled over into hands-on activism. Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Isaac Julien, Michelle Barrett, John Akomfrah, the list goes on. It was my good fortune to meet Stuart Hall with an opportunity of spending quality time with him in discussion at the Marxist Cultural Interpretation Institute in Champaign-Urbana in 1983, under the shadow of Shabra and Shatila. Stuart Hall recounted the days of the saving of the New Left Review when the Russell Foundation no longer supported it, in, if memory serves, 1963. (I was in Britain that year, a young Bengali woman tyrannized by a prefeminist white alpha-male financially dependent resentful companion, a transient research student at Girton, two years out of India, not part of the radical mainstream.) Hall was among the founders in the fifties of the New Left Review. I cannot museumize Stuart in the widely claimed Euro-U.S. protest scene of the sixties, as widely claimed as the Naxalbari movement at home. He surely belonged to it as a passionate participant, even a charismatic leader, but mourning takes me elsewhere. Today, I remember that it was also the moment of the death of Lumumba, Fanon, Du Bois. In other words, Hall came in and participated without epistemic recognition in the inauguration of a new [End Page 129] way of thinking about the world in the long-haul, not just immediate protest or resistance. I cannot confine him to British cultural studies alone, even as it preserves its political difference from U.S. cultural studies’ identitarianism, betraying the austere hospitality of democracy; I read him rather in the world that worked for social justice in the diversified field of the struggle for citizenship in the metropolis after the waning of territorial imperialisms, and after the passing of the initial dreams of negritude and Pan-Africanism. It was Awoonor who made me imagine the early 1960s in this worldly way. Awoonor came back to Accra with a good Brit Lit degree from Leeds even as the New Left was consolidating itself at Oxford. Smart boy from Africa, not in the radical British mainstream. Awoonor became Du Bois’s minder. He remembers the move against Du Bois’s sympathies with a peculiar communism, which meant passport denial in the United States, but might mean going with the Eastern bloc in newly fledged Ghana. (Remember Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? [1956], and that Marcus Garvey was still taken seriously as an alternative?) More important, he remembered the 1959 Pan-African Congress, with both Lumumba and Fanon (“the tall one and the short one”) in attendance. I want to place Hall, young man lately arrived from Jamaica, in this broad world, for the philosophers of the future, rather than keep him local. I wish he were here for me to be having this discussion about global connectivities. You listened, Stuart Hall, contradicted, but also, sometimes, agreed. I can sense the shadow of this constellation in “When Was the Postcolonial?” Although the essay apparently relates to a debate by now forgotten (between “postcolonial critics” Robert Young, and Homi Bhabha, and Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, Lata Mani, Ruth Frankenburg, Mary Louise Pratt), “Larger issues are ‘at stake’ in these debates than the criticisms which have been widely signalled sometimes suggest” (Hall 1996, 256). Paragraph after paragraph describes—without mentioning Africa—the predicament of postcolonial nation-states in Africa, a predicament that clearly signals Africa’s nationalism, division into regionalism, un-examined culturalism. As we are today reeling under the dismissal of a good governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, or looking at an aging FLN member running again for president in Algeria, along with witnessing...

The turn of the south? Social and economic impacts of mega-events in India, Brazil and South Africa

In the neoliberal era, competing to host global sporting events has become a prominent urban promotion strategy, and with a few exceptions, the scholarly focus has been on the western experience. In contrast, this paper focuses on the south experience with specific reference to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. A common argument is that such sporting events provide global marketing opportunities that can attract foreign investment, which may serve as catalysts for development. A key goal is to promote the status and power of the post-colonial nation-state (although ironically ceding sovereignty to entities like FIFA for the duration of events). While there are some benefits, especially in terms of infrastructure development, the Indian, Brazilian and South African experience suggests that the privileged tend to benefit at the expense of the poor, and socio-economic inequalities were exacerbated. These points are illustrated in this paper with reference to evictions, loss of livelihoods and violations of human rights. Disturbingly, the cost of constructing new sports’ facilities and associated infrastructure escalated phenomenally from the original bid-document estimates, without any public oversight, and some are destined to be white elephants. The mega-events were largely organised and funded by the governments in consultation with the private sector, with little or no accountability to citizens, although such decisions had major implications in terms of the diversion of public spending priorities from more urgent social needs such as housing, healthcare and education.

The queer Third World

This article attempts to align ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ – grouping them in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagement and their shared allegiance to non-alignment and a politics aimed at disrupting domination and the status quo. In assembling both terms one is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of international development, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer: under Western eyes it has often been constructed as perverse, abnormal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as deviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic development is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never living up to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but never quite arriving). For their part, postcolonial Third World nation-states have tended to disown and purge such queering – by denying their queerness; indeed often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yet at the same time imitating the West and pursuing neoliberal capitalist growth. I want not only to make the claim that the Western and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on Lacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’ would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structural negativity and destabilising politics.

Speaking Conflict: Ideological Barriers to Bilingual Policy Implementation in Civil War Sri Lanka

This article presents a holistic view of ideological barriers to bilingual policy implementation in Sri Lanka, a conflict-ridden postcolonial nation-state. I examine Sinhalese youth and adults' Tamil as a second language (TSL) learning and speaking practices across three contexts: a multilingual school, a program for government servants, and an NGO. Though limited interactional spaces emerge where Sinhalese students speak Tamil, bilingual policies continue to reinforce inequalities between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Tamil-speaking minority groups.

Media control, colonialism and the making of an authoritarian postcolonial African state: The case of Botswana

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the interconnections among colonialism and the authoritarian nature of Botswana's postcolonial state. Observing the emergence of public service broadcasting on the eve of colonialism in Botswana (early 60s to early 2000s), the central thesis of the article is that the roots of control of the media in contemporary Botswana can be traced to British anxieties about the possibility of a nationalist revolution in the protectorate, following political trends of the anti-apartheid black nationalist movements in neighbouring South Africa. To understand the continuing deep-seated fear of letting go of state ownership of particularly Radio Botswana, the Botswana Daily News and Botswana Television (BTV) is to understand the fragility of Africa's postcolonial nation states, and thus its bureaucracies. Common belief has it that because Botswana is ethnically homogenous, it therefore experiences very little threat to its nation-building project, the truth is that stifling debate has been an important function of government control of the media. Even with the advent of social media platforms and their unprecedented influence in African politics (as in the Arab Spring), in Africa broadcasting will remain a vehicle for mobilising power and states seem intent on maintaining that control for the foreseeable future.

How India became territorial: foreign policy, diaspora, geopolitics

Why do countries go to war over disputed lands? Why do they fight even when the territories in question are economically and strategically worthless? Drawing on critical approaches to international relations, political geography, international law, and social history, and based on a close examination of the Indian experience during the twentieth century, Itty Abraham addresses these important questions and offers a new conceptualization of foreign policy as a state territorializing practice. Identifying the contested process of decolonization as the root of contemporary Asian inter-state territorial conflicts, he explores the political implications of establishing a fixed territorial homeland as a necessary starting point for both international recognition and national identity-concluding that disputed lands are important because of their intimate identification with the legitimacy of the postcolonial nation-state, rather than because of their potential for economic gains or their place in historic grievances. By treating Indian diaspora policy and geopolitical practice as exemplars of foreign policy behavior, Abraham demonstrates how their intersection offers an entirely new way of understanding India's vexed relations with Pakistan and China. This approach offers a new and productive way of thinking about foreign policy and inter-state conflicts over territory in Asia-one that is non-U.S. and non-European focused-that has a number of implications for regional security and for foreign policy practices in the contemporary postcolonial world.

Speech of the Nation and Conversations at the Margins of the Nation-State

This essay focuses on the issues of voice and representation, especially of people at the margins of the postcolonial nation-state. I ask what happens to political conversation and dialogue in situations of foundational inequality between two speaking positions, where the inequality has been engendered by the way in which the epistemic and political category of the nation-state has emerged. I place this discussion in the context of India's Northeast, which has seen a history of failed political conversations. These issues of representation and voice resonate with larger debates within postcolonial and transnational studies.

Dreaming Baba, resituating memory: Popular Sufi shrines and the historiography of contemporary East Punjab

Why and how does popular memory reconfigure itself in the form of dreams? Taking a clue from the veneration of saints at popular Sufi shrines, this article underlines the role played by memory and dreams in the restitution of the practice of saint veneration in contemporary (East) Punjab. It further probes the grand theories of post-colonial nation-states ideologies and problematizes the accepted processes of Islamization. Through an analysis of dream experiences and social memory, the intention is to chart a social history of Islamic acculturation in South Asia.

Immigration restriction: rethinking period and place from settler colonies to postcolonial nations

AbstractImmigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.

Mapping the Transnation: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Central to Ghosh's oeuvre is the idea that the nation is a fiction whose boundaries are continuously being reimagined and redrawn. Nationalism creates binary divisions, and projects a kind of false history which would buttress its own interest. The ideology of modernity and its various avatars, like Western geographical and ideological expansionism, modernist knowledge production strategies, and racism, create a Manichaean dialectic between the self and its other. Ghosh's engagement with the frequency of boundary-crossings within and outside India, challenges the essentialist definitions of nations and societies. Ghosh's endorsement of the syncretism and humanism that downplay cultural differences explains his antipathy towards nationalism and its divisive epistemology. Despite his celebration of cultural pluralism, an acute sense of the sameness of man across looking glass borders and temporal divides underlies his work. Questioning the authoritarian and coercive actions of the postcolonial nation state, Ghosh pines for the Nehruvian utopia of a secularist, democratic national unity which assimilates Indian diversity in a syncretic whole. Based on an ethically conceived solidarity, this feeling of communitarianism would provide an ideal alternative to religious and ethnic chauvinism and Majoritarianism, as well as political dispersal and the religious/ethnic violence rampant in contemporary Hindu nationalism. Ghosh distrusts the nationalist political and official discourse of a faceless and dehumanizing statist machinery detached from the actual lives of people. In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh thematizes the migrations of people(s), the importance of connections between the past and the present, the changing status of nation-states, the fluid nature of boundaries, intercultural communication beyond nationalism, the spread of Western modes of production, and encounters between different cultures - all of which are the fallout of globalization.

The World System of Englishes

Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the sociolinguistic scale. In order to better represent and understand the complex relationships obtaining between varieties of standard and non-standard English in the contemporary “English language complex” (McArthur 2003: 56; Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 1–3), the present paper proposes a new theoretical model, based on language systems theory (de Swaan 2002, 2010). While the model is not designed to supersede existing alternatives, such as the Kachruvian (1982) Circles, it will nevertheless complement them in important ways, chiefly because it is better equipped to handle uses of English in domains beyond the post-colonial nation state. The “World System of Englishes” model was developed in the course of the author’s work on the use of pidgins and creoles in web forums serving the post-colonial West African and Caribbean diasporas. The way Nigerian Pidgin figures in the creation of a globalised digital ethnolinguistic repertoire will hence serve as an illustration of its usefulness.