Postcolonial Nation-state Research Articles

From a colonial reinvention to postcolonial heritage and a global commodity: performing and re-enacting Angkor Wat and the Royal Khmer Ballet

It is a commonplace that cultural heritage is not only a highly contested concept of modern times, full of nationalistic undertones, cultural stereotypes and essentialist topoi such as past grandeur and enduring cultural purity. Cultural heritage has also become the easiest and most profitable prey for today’s global tourism industry. These observations apply with particularly dramatic consequences to young emerging, postcolonial nation states with a rich repertoire of built (tangible) and performed (intangible) culture – especially if elements of this repertoire are branded ‘UNESCO World Heritage’ without considering their contested formation histories. Few other iconic heritage sites are more instructive in showcasing these observations than the temple site of Angkor, by charting the transcultural trajectories of Cambodia’s heritage construction through the processes of French colonial reinvention, postcolonial/nationalist essentialisation, and global commodification. This paper focuses on the ‘Royal Khmer Ballet’ as cultural performance and heritage re-enactment in combination with the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat as architectural stage. References to similar ‘heritagisation’ processes in the (post)colonial Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) will help to anchor this transcultural enquiry.

Women in Selected Dalit Narratives in India

The postcolonial project rejects colonial representation and constructs a nation with hopes of an egalitarian future. Along with it there is an awareness that all is not well in the new nation. Every power structure creates its own ``Others``, its own subalterns. And within the postcolonial nation state, inferior classes, castes, minority groups, women, and Dalits became ``others``. The question is how far do writings about Dalits show factors like caste, class and gender as permeable/non-permeable. This paper will look at writings by Dalits and writings by others about Dalits and analyse how such borders can be crossed. For the pupose of detailed study, the paper will deal with Om Prakash Valmiki`s Joothan, Sharan Kumar Limhale`s Akkarmashi, Mulk Raj Anand`s Untouchable, and Rohinton Mistry`s A Fine Balance. The paper will focus on the presentation of gender in the above-mentioned writings. A Dalit woman is a Dalit amongst the Dalits as she suffers ``double oppression`` - on account of her caste as well as her gender. This paper will discuss the issue of space and voice with regard to the female figures. How much space is given to them? How far do we really hear their voice, their travails and sufferings? Taking into accotmt Marx`s concept of ``commodity fetishism``, the paper will discuss whether the Dalit women are valued for themselves or for the work they perform. Are they fetishLzed with phallic objects and reduced to a stereotype where they fulfil certain masculine needs? If we look at the family as the basic unit of society, then how much ``space`` is given to Dalit women in the family or are they just treated as ``objects``? What kind of treatment is meted out to Dalit women by the society or the upper Women in Selected Dalit Narratives in India caste? How far do Dalit women undergo acculturation? The paper will also discuss the issue of representation of Dalits by non-Dalits, which has often been said to lack ``a visceral impact``. Using the concept of ``Manichean allegory``, the paper will discuss how the upper caste/class use certain differences to justify domination, and this is true in the case of gender as well. The paper will attempt to deconstruct master narratives, interrogating systems of representation, understanding the dynamics of power and examining the role of ideology in the construction of the self, especially the female self.

Public Art as the ‘Taonga’ of Socialist Democracy: Remembering Equality as a Value in Papua New Guinea

Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands ‘international’ airport. There they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans themselves in funeral use re-centre the dead in kin networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the loss of Papua New Guinea socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss' concept of taonga, that was once the postcolonial nation-state. The article draws on Benjamin to show that ‘brushing memory against the grain’ exposes how the transformations of equality as a value in the socialist democracy into the new social forms of equality as a value in the neo-liberal state occurred through many imperfect transactions. The ethnographic description of the changes in the display of the art to fit with the purposes of the new airport terminal shows, in even the most personal terms, just how fleeting were the promises of equality during independence.

Daddy’s Girls?: Father-Daughter Relations and the Failures of the Postcolonial Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père

Postcolonial theoretical discourses have adopted postnationalist overtones, declaring the obsolescence of the nation and treating dislocation as the paradigmatic condition. Sometimes, however, the claims of postnationalism may seem premature: the nation-state persists in the African literary agenda. When operating within the current paradigm, the notion of cosmopolitanism can serve as a useful tool for understanding contemporary African literatures and the ways in which they negotiate their relation to the local realities of the continent and the world beyond its boundaries. In this article, I read the narrative of the failed post-colonial nation-state through the lens of the father-daughter relations in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père (2010). The father-daughter relations are intertwined with the narrative of the postcolonial nation, giving voice to daughterly disillusionment. The texts inscribe the national crisis on a larger map, making it a global rather than simply a local concern. The novels undertake a new attitude toward nationhood while being interested in national issues: their future visions are not in line with the logic of the nation-state but nor are they so with the transnational dimension. Instead, they are equally informed by the unease caused by the failures of the postcolonial nation-state and the unfulfilled hopes of finding both a more favorable socioeconomic situation and a sense of belonging in diaspora.

Space and Territoriality

Territorial modernity signifies the transformation of the space of fluidity into territories or geometric grids of permanence. Border in International Relations with its constructed disciplinary gaze performs the role of a spatial unit and a decidable between a set of mutually reinforcing dualisms. In mainstream IR theory encrusted within the Western hegemonic discourse, transformations that exemplify the process of territorialization supplements the grammar of territorial epistemology. However, the ontology of the modern bounded ‘political’ marginalizes and makes invisible alternative mode of being. In post-colonial practices of South Asia, the dispositif of territorial modernity as a universal discourse and the ‘international’ is suggestive of resistance and contestations articulated via certain categories of bodies. This is prominent at the periphery of the post-colonial nation-states, as the actions of certain recalcitrant bodies often problematize the reified international. By taking the case study of the chars or river islands that often shift their location along India–Bangladesh riverine border, the paper also seeks to understand the political in these zones of indistinction and its (dis) association with the normative space that territoriality enacted in the first place.

The remembered railway town of Anglo-Indian memory

Unlike those who grew up in railway towns, the majority of Indians would have a hard time locating towns with quaint names on the Indian map that signified adventure, romance and the Raj. Kharagpur is one such colonial railway town whose history has been overwritten by one of the ‘temples’ of the postcolonial nation state, the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. But Kharagpur, about 110 km away from Kolkata, is remembered as home in Anglo-Indian memory and finds a mention in histories and fiction dealing with the Anglo-Indian community. Senior residents of Kharagpur corroborate these memories of a vibrant Anglo-Indian community thriving in Kharagpur until the early 1960s when the exodus began. Little remains of that remembered past in the Anglo-Indian neighbourhoods where about 200 Anglo-Indian individuals struggle to resettle in the new constitutional and social space comprising independent India. Yet, the nostalgia of the Kharagpur diasporas produces it as an idyllic colonial outpost with a quintessential Raj lifestyle. Through examining the narratives and oral histories of the Kharagpur diaspora, this article complicates the way that the remembered railway town is produced as home by the community displaced by the new dynamics of power in independent India.

Homophobia as the State of Reason

The stigmatization of Caribbean postcolonial nation-states in the Western imagination as exemplifying some of the most homophobic nationalisms masks a more-nuanced reading of the complexities of Caribbean modernity. As such, the hardening of homophobic nationalisms in settings such as Trinidad and Tobago forces us to question how and why compulsory homophobia is deployed as a form of moral discipline that is made to seem compatible with postcolonial modernity. This article explores the “problem space” of state-sanctioned homophobia as a regulative and generative (not simply repressive) force in postcolonial nationstates. It first briefly theorizes how compulsory homophobia has become a mandate of state-popular affinity in the postindependent era that conditions the possibility of pluralistic consensus in the postcolonial nation-state. Within this context, the author further explores a historic court case involving the “wrongful arrest” and alleged strip search of an out gay subject by state police officials. Some analytic insights into the strip search and subsequent court case testimonies are offered with a view to understanding the regulatory and generative potentials of institutionalized homophobia. The implications of this case for an incipient LGBT activist platform are also discussed as an expansion of the complex debates about sexual citizenship and political community within the postcolonial condition.

The heterogeneous world of the citizen

In response to the broad range of approaches given by this Special Issue, this article offers a critical post-colonial view on the question of citizenship after orientalism. Drawing on the historical trajectory of the emergence of the citizen in India through the era of anti-colonial struggle and beyond into that of the post-colonial nation state, the article exemplifies what can be called a discontinuous way of studying the figure of the citizen – the figure that ended colonialism, that brought about revolution, and that snatched the establishment apparatus called the constitution to turn it against itself. As this article shows, one of the discontinuous ways of studying citizenship is to mark out those moments and dynamics when or whereby power and resources are redistributed and a new definition of the political community emerges.

“Fictions Where a Man Could Live”: Worldlessness, Utopia, and the Void in Rushdie’s Grimus

Research Article| June 01 2012 “Fictions Where a Man Could Live”: Worldlessness, Utopia, and the Void in Rushdie’s Grimus Eric D. Smith Eric D. Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (2): 267–295. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-3008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Eric D. Smith; “Fictions Where a Man Could Live”: Worldlessness, Utopia, and the Void in Rushdie’s Grimus. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2012; 58 (2): 267–295. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-3008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

“Suspended City”: Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani's <em>Graceland</em>

In Graceland (2004), Chris Abani extends a long tradition of Lagos literature by re-imagining the city from the perspective of its poorest population. By invoking and subverting the Bildungsroman genre through his narration of the young slumdweller Elvis's troubled coming of age, he suggestively critiques the instability and inconsistency of the postcolonial nation-state. Specifically, through his formal and thematic elaboration of a suspen - sion leitmotif, Abani demonstrates the paralyzing imbrication of the local, national, and global discourses of development that collide at the urban margins. While national models of progress are proven untenable by the discrepant trajectories of development that intersect the city, the promise of cultural transnationalism is equally circumscribed by Elvis's immersion in a global economic system that perpetuates his marginalization. In his fic - tional representation of Lagos's uneven development, Abani thus responds to calls for more holistic accounts of development than those which emerge from dominant economic analyses.

Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English, Pranav Jani, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010

Abstract Decentering Rushdie argues that postcolonial studies has consistently underestimated the investment of the English-language Indian novel in the nation by focusing on a handful of texts that conform to Western assumptions about the bankruptcy of the postcolonial nation-state. Taking Salman Rushdie’s work as the sign of a presumed homology between postcolonialism and a postmodern distrust of totality, Jani demonstrates that his novels are hardly representative of the range of Indian writing in English. Instead, in a series of expert readings of less well-known texts, he demonstrates the commitment to the decolonising project that exists even within the inevitably cosmopolitan worldview of Indians writing in a colonial language. Situating his work within foundational debates in postcolonial studies, this review demonstrates the fresh light he sheds on the vexed relations among historical location, political ideology and literary form.

Bollywood and neonationalism: The emergence of nativism as the norm in Indian conventional cinema

This article utilizes a transnational feminist perspective to examine the genre of Bollywood cinema and the representation of Indian citizens in the national narrative that it promotes. The author analyzes the resurgence of nationalisms among South Asians on diasporic shores and the role played by Indian and Pakistani cinema in stoking patriotic flames in its discourse of citizenship among the citizens of the postcolonial nation state. In particular it focuses on the questions, what kinds of imagined communities does Bollywood cinema as a whole promote? And to what extent does Hindutva play a central role in the construction of the imagined community?

Malaysian composers, geopolitical spaces and cultural difference

The case of Malaysian ‘new music’ composers resonates the political aspects in the production of cultural difference within a modernizing post-colonial nation-state in Southeast Asia. Caught in the discord of a state-induced cultural agenda that highly favored ‘syncretic’ and locally stylized popular idioms, Malaysian new music composers continuously struggle for aesthetic integrity within the backdrop of their country’s consistent growth en route to becoming a world economic power. Believing with Bunnell (2006), however, that a utopic kind of modernity in Malaysia is alluded to in its spatial dimensions, and in the ‘govern(nance) of the landscape’ (2006: 15–31), I therefore argue that the creative responses of those composers, to apparently marginalizing conditions of the present, may just as well involve spatial realms—be they ‘physical’ or otherwise.

‘It ain't where you're from, it's where you're born’: re-theorizing diaspora and homeland in postcolonial Malaysia

The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the ‘original’ homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the ‘routed’ dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is ‘where you're born’, rather than ‘where you're from’. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland.

Central and Local Patrimonialism

How useful is the concept of patrimonialism to analyze state formation and political dynamics in postcolonial nation-states? Using Tunisia, Morocco, and Iraq during critical periods of state-building following the end of colonial rule, the author considers this question. The purpose of the article is to build on Max Weber by exploring how patrimonialism operates in kin-based social contexts where power on the basis of kinship ties is exerted not only by a central authority but also by leaders of local communities organized along lines of real or fictive kinship—as was the case in the three countries in the period under examination. Suggesting that Weber undertheorized the way in which central authority relates to local collectivities in his analysis of patrimonialism, the author identifies three patterns in the strategies used by central power toward local patrimonial networks: marginalization, integration, and shifts between marginalization and integration. The article argues that central patrimonialism can be accommodated with all three strategies directed toward local patrimonialism.

The Question of Multiculturalism in the Arts in the Postcolonial Nation-State of Trinidad and Tobago

The Question of Multiculturalism in the Arts in the Postcolonial Nation-State of Trinidad and Tobago

Cross-border activities in everyday life: the Bengal borderland

This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal ‘illegal’ cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past.

“At the Receiving End of Severe Misunderstanding”: Dambudzo Marechera's Representations of Authorship

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987) is the object of a cult phenomenon: his figure represents a relevant site of sense-making and his earlier unfavorable African criticism is challenged. Marechera’s fiction has a strong autobiographical dimension that results in a metadiscourse on the meanings of authorship, where the notion of misunderstanding represents a central trope. This essay aims not only at drawing an overview of Marechera’s representations of authorship, but also at suggesting that Marechera was actively involved in the construction of his authorial image, and that the notion of misunderstanding captures the changes that have taken place in the contexts of his critical reception. Further, the essay addresses Marechera’s positioning in relation to the notion of commitment and argues that the relevance of the Marecheran dissident writer-figure stems from the fact that it represents a position from which repressive truths of the postcolonial nation-state can be contested.

Lost Boys: The Infernal Youth of the Cinematic Teenage Vampire

Popular cinema in India has been identified as providing rich cultural texts for understanding the legitimization of ideological and political hegemony, especially through narrative-cinematic forms popular in the post-colonial Indian public sphere. An impressive amount of literature has explored the various trajectories of discourses regarding the post colonial nation-state, family, and the iconic presence of the mother informing the narrative organization of popular Hindi cinema. However, representation of boyhood within the specific narrative and visual rhetoric of popular Hindi cinema received little scholarly attention. This essay traces the representation of boyhood and adolescence - first, as predominantly integrated within the narrative of male protagonists' early life, a popular cinematic motifs in 1970s and 1980s which, interestingly enough, has somewhat disappeared from post-liberalization Hindi cinema; and second, as a discursively formed narrative agent with specific ideological and psychological connotations. Drawing analogies from a range of Indian literary works on and for children, I explore how concomitant cinematic tropes serve to reiterate and negotiate ideological and social codes interlacing gender, sexuality, class, and caste, not however without leaving fissures for subaltern agency. Keywords: BOLLYWOOD, HINDI FILM, CHILDHOOD, POSTCOLONIAL, IDEOLOGY, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, BARNA PARICHAY New normative discourses on the in nineteenth and early twentieth century India produced a number of texts that directly dealt with children's character formation. Such discourses recurrently conceived the notion of family as an isolated private domain, separate not only from the kinship system but also as a shelter from an aggressive and cruel outside world. discursive construction of the Indian depended heavily on the ways of powers and pleasures were distributed and in the process generated a radical separation between childhood and adulthood. child was central to this construction, as a new idea of childhood helped precipitate the new discourse of the family. The child came to be regarded as a person with distinctive attributes- impressionability, vulnerability, innocence-that required a 'correct/ protected, and prolonged period of nurture. It was only through a certain practice and strategy that the child's character-building exercise was to be pursued (Bose, 1995, p. 118). Hence, to be the ideal child, it was necessary for (the him is used deliberately, because, as we will discuss later, discourses almost exclusively referenced the male child) to avoid rash confrontation with various corrupting influences and to be subjected to a system of love, affection, discipline, and punishment. Interestingly, this discourse on childhood in India underscored the fact that the was envisaged as a realm that played the most valuable task of shaping the individual's life. As Satischandra Chakrabarti, in an influential, widely read book written in Bengali, Santaner Charitra Gathan (Building the Character of Child, 1912), writes: word Hie has given a new turn to the system. In earlier times, the principal question before the was how juniors would behave toward elders and superiors and how elders would behave toward juniors. Now the main subject of discussion is how every life in the family, especially the life of children, can be developed. is now a center for the development of life. (P- 2) customary belief prevailing in Indian household was that seniority was to be respected. father was a disciplinarian, a figure of supreme authority, and the children in return offered bhakti (devotional love) to their parents, a kind of love that gods are supposed to receive. It is noteworthy that this bhakti towards parents, especially the mother, became a recurrent narrative trope in popular Hindi cinema in immediately post-independence India, an aspect that signals the normative, disciplinary ideologies that the child was to internalize from birth. …

“At the Receiving End of Severe Misunderstanding”: Dambudzo Marechera's Representations of Authorship

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987) is the object of a cult phenomenon: his figure represents a relevant site of sense-making and his earlier unfavorable African criticism is challenged. Marechera’s fiction has a strong autobiographical dimension that results in a metadiscourse on the meanings of authorship, where the notion of misunderstanding represents a central trope. This essay aims not only at drawing an overview of Marechera’s representations of authorship, but also at suggesting that Marechera was actively involved in the construction of his authorial image, and that the notion of misunderstanding captures the changes that have taken place in the contexts of his critical reception. Further, the essay addresses Marechera’s positioning in relation to the notion of commitment and argues that the relevance of the Marecheran dissident writer-figure stems from the fact that it represents a position from which repressive truths of the postcolonial nation-state can be contested.