Postcolonial Nation Research Articles

Between Queer Joy and Injury

This article expands the notion of queer domesticity from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing on autoethnography, ephemeral archives, and secondary sources, the authors examine Nanur Basha, the residence of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community mentor, which in 2016 was the site of two murders committed by a local chapter of Al-Qaeda. By empirically interrogating the events leading up to the unmaking of Nanur Basha, the authors argue that global South queer domesticities — constituted by quotidian practices of queer worlding and expanding from apartments to rooftops to streets to political discourses — aspire to greater political freedom by deploying imaginative and counterhegemonic practices. As queer domesticities open up interstitial sanctuaries in nationalist discourses and within the urban fabric, they are also unmade by competing postcolonial nationalisms. Contesting Nanur Basha's reduction to a site of victimhood under Islamic terrorism and homophobia, this article illustrates how Nanur Basha indexes a subterranean modality of southern queer domesticity that negotiates secrecy, safety, celebration, and survival under heterosexist nationalist surveillance and violence. Such queer domesticities underpin an affective sanctuary at the borderlands between queer joy and injury. The article contributes to emerging conversations in transnational queer studies by situating queer worldmaking practices within landscapes of authoritarianism and queerphobia.

Queering Masculinities in the Middle East (SWANA) and South Asia

One of the most important shifts in gender scholarship is the attention now being paid to discourses and practices of masculinity in the Global South. This issue of Men and Masculinities contributes to this growing field in three important ways. First, we foreground scholarship on masculinities in two interconnected, but understudied regions of the world, specifically the Middle East, which is also known as South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and its neighbor to the east, South Asia. In particular, we demonstrate the ways in which queer identities and communities are being formed across these two regions, connected as they are by historic trade routes, migration pathways, and transregional cultural flows. Second, we point to the vibrant masculinities scholarship that is emerging from these regions. But we focus specifically on non-normative masculinities—or the queer, trans, and other genderqueer masculinities—which have been historically present in these two regions, but which have been much less represented in masculinities literature. Third, we look to identity formation, or the ways in which young cis-gender, trans, and queer men come out in their communities and seek authentic lives of desire, pleasure, and participation. At the same time, we highlight the ever-present precarity within queer communities in the Middle East/SWANA and South Asia, especially given postcolonial nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas, which promote normative heteropatriarchal masculinities and concomitant homophobia and transphobia.

Brazil’s position in the Russia-Ukraine war: Balancing principled pragmatism while countering weaponized interdependence

ABSTRACT As a post-colonial nation that embraces international law and multilateralism, Brazil was expected to side with those who defend the sanctity of Ukraine’s territorial integrity when the country was invaded by Russia. However, as a Global Southern country with tangible geopolitical and economic interests at stake in the war, Brazil turned a blind eye to Russia’s defiant move and downplayed the gravity of its breach of the law. This article aims to explore the contradictions in Brazil’s foreign policy stance towards the Russo-Ukrainian war. It analyes the difficult balance between ideals and concrete goals that Brazilian diplomats strive to achieve in the ongoing war. In doing so, it also sheds light on the current administration’s strategies to cope with today’s emerging multipolar order and to avoid falling prey to the “weaponization of interdependence”. The article concludes reflecting on Brazil’s quest for an actively non-aligned position to address the sovereignty paradox it faces in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Vanishing Nubia

As the Nasserist state built a large hydroelectric dam in the south of Egypt in the early 1960s, Egyptian botanists undertook salvage surveys of the area to be flooded behind the dam, known as historic Nubia. Scientists in these surveys searched for a type of palm tree (Medemia argun) well documented in ancient Egyptian tombs but unrecorded “in living condition” since the late eighteenth century. Gathering written and photographic accounts in memoirs, archives, and botanical tracts, this essay charts the documentary traces of the search for Medemia argun and the affective responses that surface along the margins of texts to show how debate over the potential absence or extinction of a “flagship” endogenous plant coincided with two important shifts in botanical knowledge production: transitions in botany as a discipline that employed new research methodologies and located Egypt “geobotanically” as the temporal and spatial origin for world flora; and transitions in botany as an arena of scientific expertise during postcolonial nationalism's reordering of the Egyptian academy. Building on extinction and destroyed landscape studies, this article explores ecological lexicons of absence and practices of “following” in botany.

Songs of nation-building: a deliberation on selected nationalist songs telecast by Doordarshan from the 1980s to the 2020s

ABSTRACT This research article studies selected songs telecast by Doordarshan, the national channel from the 1980s to the 2020s to understand the representational politics of India’s national culture. It explores how the national culture has been imagined and propagated by the state-owned channel by adopting a comparative focus on the selected songs. The discussion is foregrounded on Partha Chatterjee’s theory of ‘the spiritual’ domain which is at the core of the national identity for a postcolonial nation. The article also attempts to understand the dynamic nature of India’s national culture and how its transformation can be read from the songs.

(Im)Possibilities of Development: Women and the Paradox of Growth in the Malaysian Novel

Abstract: Though women figure prominently in the discourses of postcolonial nations that concern development, these discourses position women in a way that vacillates between tradition, which needs to be preserved, and modernization, essential for "catching up" to the developed or so-called first world. This article approaches the ambivalence surrounding the question of women and development through the lens of literature. It turns to two turn-of-the-century novels, Chuah Guat Eng's Echoes of Silence (1994) and Yang-May Ooi's The Flame Tree (1998), to problematize the depiction of the "Third World" woman and development in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. The article explores the coloniality embedded within narratives of growth of the women protagonists against the backdrop of the developing nation—and highlights when the conditions for women underwent far-reaching changes, for instance, at the end of colonial rule, when women became a part of an independent social and political nation, and persistent structures of marginalization and discrimination resulted in decreased opportunities for women. The article's focus on Malaysian Chinese writers foregrounds the colonial constructions of race and gender that Malaysia inherited from the colonizers, which continues to shape the lives of postcolonial subjects. The two novels provide a glimpse of the problems underlying the developmental agendas in postcolonial nations and call for a shift in the understanding of development—from a prescriptive sense of "how it should be for the third-world women" to a consideration of national and global frameworks of development that limit the choices and agency of women.

Whiteness and the Animal Question: Revisiting Coetzee's Postapartheid South Africa

Abstract: Scholars such as Evan Mwangi argue that postcolonial animal studies is all too often considered through white environmentalist perspectives, a point exemplified by the critical focus on white perspectives provided by writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Barbara Gowdy, and Lauren Beukes. Such focus bestows the authority to care for African natures to (white) Western visions of worldmaking. Mwangi's criticism suggests the white environmental discourses that have informed prominent readings of Disgrace (1999). The uncritical discourse of animal welfare in the post-colony has ties to apartheid governance and its rhetorical legacy. Through a comparative reading of Coetzee's Disgrace , the rhetoric of euthanasia used by animal welfare organizations, and contemporary reporting on the state of the animal, I outline a historical centering of white environmentalism—in particular welfarism—in institutional South African discourses about the animal. In opposition to assertions that the animal becomes a vehicle of redemption for the main character, David Lurie, and other redemptive readings of white characters in the novel such as Bev Shaw, I suggest that Disgrace reveals the legacies of white nationalist imaginaries that continue to undergird state and institutional environmental discourses in South Africa. The purportedly humane ideologies of animal population control and welfare perpetuate white interests. Disgrace reveals the tension between institutional expressions of care and the forceful integration of postcolonial nations into global markets, which sustain colonial legacies of white worldmaking.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HOTELS OF THE JET AGE IN PAKISTAN AND INDIA: THE INTERCONTINENTAL IN KARACHI AND THE OBEROI INTERCONTINENTAL IN NEW DELHI

This paper focuses on the architecture, interior design, and promotion of new United States-financed international business and tourist hotels of the 1960s in Karachi and New Delhi, analysing these as transcultural spaces of modernity during the early jet age. In part, these and many other US-financed hotels in locations relatively close to the Soviet sphere of influence in Asia, North Africa and Europe were political symbols, promoting the the American way of life, but they were also symbolic of the aspirations of mainly post-colonial nations to project images of progress and national development. The research builds upon other recent scholarship on the manifestations and experiences of modernism in architecture, planning and travel in the Indian Subcontinent in the post-Second World War era and how modern architecture and post-colonial political framework went hand in hand with each other. Keywords: Post Colonial Architecture, Nationalism, Modern Architecture, Hotels, Subcontinent

Review of Eleonora Esposito. 2021. Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Сritical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Review of Eleonora Esposito. 2021. Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Сritical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Transportation and Agon in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah

ABSTRACT This article analyzes public transportation as a trope for networked narrative forms in two novels by Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah. Combining insights from mobility studies with criticism on tragedy, the present article suggests that intersections of tragedy and transportation remain understudied aspects of Achebe’s fiction. While agon implies the struggle or dispute that drives literary plots in general, I argue that Achebe settles elements of the deliberative agon from classical Greek theatre within transport networks to structure agonistic exchanges amongst characters and social groups, to juxtapose forms of thinking, and to expand the idioms within his novels. As much as Achebe’s novels pivot on the experiences of singular and seemingly heroic protagonists, he is deeply invested in the relations between individuals and collectives and the representation of both in novels concerned with the problems of postcolonial nations and nation-states. As such, Achebe’s transportation systems facilitate fleeting modes of assembly for the exchange of ideas. Studying No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah together crystallizes the orchestrated and often ironic interplay between individual and collective insights. Achebe’s representations of conviviality and agonism in public transportation thus present models of thinking and feeling collectively in the novel. Moments of transportations in Achebe’s fictional worlds impart the modes of thinking animating the imagination of the nation and the machinery of the state.

Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane

Abstract: This article considers twenty-first-century Mozambican works of fiction that contest the foundational status of nineteenth-century Gazan emperor Ngungunyane (circa 1850–1906) to Mozambique's postcolonial nationalism as a symbolic representation of ongoing imperial patriarchy. A century after Ngungunyane's defeat by the Portuguese, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa published Ualalapi , widely read as a devastating critique of Mozambique's FRELIMO party's postcolonial politics as a continuation of Ngungunyane's bloody reign. A series of subsequent works respond to Ualalapi 's critique: Mia Couto's As areias do imperador trilogy, Khosa's As mulheres do imperador , and Paulina Chiziane's As andorinhas . These works deploy female protagonists and narrative experimentation to respond to Ngungunyane's famous final speech in Ualalapi . I argue that each of the contemporary works break the speech's imperial logic in different ways. Khosa, Couto, and Chiziane show that an excess of empire pervades contemporary rewritings of this history. These works draw on female voices and a constellation of anti-imperial communities of Black women—what philosopher María Lugones has theorized as a coalition and through Michelle M. Wright has analyzed through the dialogic—to break colonial-postcolonial continuities of power and imagine different futures in their wake.

Decolonising the Earth: Anticolonial Environmentalism and the Soil of Empire

The relationship between humanity and the soil is an increasingly important topic in social theory. However, conceptualisations of the soil developed by anticolonial thinkers at the high point of the movement for self-determination between the 1940s and the 1970s have remained largely ignored. This is a shame, not least because theorists like Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Suzanne Césaire and Amílcar Cabral were concerned with the soil. Building on recent work on human-soil relations and decolonial ecology, we argue that these four thinkers conceptualised the connection between soil, empire, and anticolonial revolt. Williams and Rodney ground understanding of soil degradation in global relations of economic power, while Césaire and Cabral reconceptualise postcolonial nationhood in terms of the mutability and diversity of the soil. The article concludes by suggesting that these two anticolonial counterpoints, global connectivity and more-than-human identification, anticipate and deepen contemporary attempts to decolonise ecological thinking.

The Student Labor Camp Movement, Postcolonial Development, and the Shaping of Citizens-to-Be in Independent India, 1954–65

The Government of India organized over ten thousand student labor camps for the purposes of village development between 1954 and 1965. This camp movement functions as a key to the novel idealizations of youth in the postcolonial world and the shifting development agendas of independent India. The image of the toiling and vigorous camper committed to serving the newly created nation-state came to be constructed as India's model citizen-to-be, and this figure embodies the emergent forms of postcolonial nationalist politics and ideologies of the 1950s and 1960s. This youthful labor force was depicted in the developmentalist imagination of India as literally building and metaphorically embodying the nation-state and its ideologies of physical fitness, secularism, anti-casteism, and national discipline. This article will argue that camp life negotiated a hierarchy of citizens that made the educated youth the agent of development and the villager the object of development. The running of these camps by volunteer movements such as the National Cadet Corps, the Bharat Scouts and Guides, and the Bharat Sevak Samaj brings to light how the developmental apparatus in India worked or did not work in practice for the students and the poorer classes.

Understanding the Kashmir Conflict: A Complex Multiplicity Perspective

Understanding the Kashmir Conflict: A Complex Multiplicity Perspective

“Why shouldn’t I Be Wanted, Even loved?”: Eugenics, Reproduction, and the Postcolonial in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death

ABSTRACT This article focuses on two postcolonial novels, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and argues that through the novels’ explorations of sex, both narratives reconstruct eugenic views that haunt postcolonial societies today. Through sex scenes (and their interruption or absence), the novels illustrate how the characters from India and Sudan respectively experience oppression and discrimination. These experiences are direct outcomes of eugenic views on and practices aimed at selected groups. Through its focus on masturbation and female genital mutilation, as described in the two novels, this article frames the analysis of Animal’s People and Who Fears Death in relation to eugenics, sexual deviance, and sterilization, and foregrounds the ongoing oppression of postcolonial nations. This article carefully examines how eugenics has shaped or further intensified inequality. In particular, it draws parallels between eugenic practices and two kinds of oppression described in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death: the control exercised by the West over postcolonial countries, highlighted through western industrial capitalism’s lack of concern about the genetic health of postcolonial nations and the dysgenic impact of their industries, and patriarchal control of women.

Reckoning with Colonial Legacies of Harm: Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission

ABSTRACT Australia’s colonial era is formally over. Yet the legacies of structural inequality, dispossession, exploitation and racism against Indigenous Australia remain alive and well. In 2021, Victoria established the Yoorrook Justice Commission, culminating in a formal truth-telling and treaty process. Seeking to address harm since colonization, the state process is unprecedented both nationally and abroad. This article considers the relevance of the commission to truth recovery, accountability and structural reform in Australia. To date, national efforts to deal with the colonial past have been piecemeal and relatively ineffective. The Yoorrook Justice Commission departs from previous single-issue inquiries as well as from reconciliation policies driven by white-Australian federal institutions. While the Commission is not a panacea for resolving colonial injustice, it provides an important means of relational and structural truth-telling towards more just relations and righting racial wrongs. Ultimately, the Yoorrook Justice Commission sets a valuable precedent for Australia and other postcolonial nations. Its level of Indigenous ownership, its authority as a Royal Commission and the breadth of its inquiry make it a significant transitional justice project.

Postcolonial imaginaries in the West: secular state-building and cultural defence in Québec since the Quiet Revolution

ABSTRACT This article addresses an understudied aspect of public secularity in the Canadian province of Québec, namely how its self-perception as a postcolonial nation vis-à-vis English Canada has shaped its secular state-building since the 1960s. In so doing, it shows that postcolonial legacies and imaginaries, a key theme for studying secularity in non-Western cases, may also prove productive for the North Atlantic world. The historical account proceeds in two parts. In the first period (1960-1980), the Quiet Revolution’s disestablishment of Catholicism was intimately linked to its anticolonial spirit, where the Church was identified as impeding development and self-determination. In the subsequent period (post-1980), the consolidation of Canadian multiculturalism and the rising accommodation demands of minority religions led to a contradictory form of ‘cultural defence’: an increased emphasis on Catholic heritage as well as on laïcité (state secularism), both deployed to underscore Québec’s unique society in distinction from English Canada. Exhibiting the consistent yet evolving effect of (post)colonial identity and memory in a North Atlantic example, and nuancing the concept of cultural defence by identifying its religious and secular forms, the article contributes to building a common vocabulary for the comparative analysis of secularities in Western and non-Western contexts.

포스트식민 필리핀 사회의 변혁 가능성

This paper examines F. Sionil Jose’s Ermita, a seminal text of Philippine English literature since its publication in 1988, to explore the possibility of social change through Ermita’s prostitution, as well as Roland Cruz’s complicity with neocolonialism and his ensuing suicide. To that end, the paper focuses on demonstrating that Ermita’s body is not a mere national allegory for the Third World, but it serves as a scope of specific Filipino experiences which interrogate the establishment in cahoots with imperial powers, thus raising the possibility of resistance and solidarity. It also analyzes Cruz’s suicide from the perspective of not only the postcolonial nation’s failure but predatory neocolonialism as well, implying that his decision ironically serves to empower Ermita and other women to form solidarity against dictatorship and corruption for social transformation in the Philippines.

Ukraine, language policies and liberalism: a mixed second act

AbstractThis article analyses Ukraine’s language policies from 2002 to 2022 within a framework of liberalism, while avoiding making normative judgements or recommendations, updating the discussion raised in Kymlicka and Opalski’s Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? The analysis takes into consideration Ukraine’s present and historic position, including the challenge that postcolonial nation building can pose for achieving liberalism and linguistic justice. The paper focuses on three main areas of language policy: education, businesses and media, and assesses if they can be described as liberal orthodox, pluralist or illiberal. The article begins by defining liberalism and illiberalism, discussing the context of Ukraine’s linguistic diversity and postcolonial context, before outlining the language situation until EuroMaidan. Then, the main issue of language policy in the areas of education, business and media is analysed, before considering whether Ukrainian language laws might be considered liberal or illiberal. Finally, potential future trajectories are outlined.

Working inside/out films division: the discursive documentary practices of Joshy Joseph

ABSTRACT Films Division stands as one of the pioneering institutions in post-independent India that played a crucial role in shaping and envisioning the country's identity as a post-colonial nation. Established in 1948, it is the largest repository of moving images in India. Despite being a state-regulated institution responsible for overseeing the production and distribution of newsreels and documentary films to support the objectives of nation building, integration, and development, there is a school of filmmakers inside Films Division who made films beyond the perceived boundaries of the institution. Identified as the 'transient outliers', these filmmakers have created experimental films within Films Division that challenged the collective and homogeneous vision of Films Division films. Joshy Joseph is one among the transgressive voices within the institution who has created innovative and experimental cinematic works despite operating within the confines of state censorship. In the context of the recent decision by the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to merge Films Division with the National Film Development Corporation, this interview with Joseph explores his life and politics as a filmmaker in Films Division. The interview also delves into Joseph's creative contributions, including innovative editing, incorporation of found footage, and utilization of still images, which emphasize his unique cinematic style.