Postcolonial Perspective Research Articles

Race, gender and religion: A postcolonial reading of Kipling's the light that failed and Kim

Rudyard Kipling cut across two culture, British and Indian and represented the face of the empire. This research paper aims at a study of Rudyard Kipling from Postcolonial perspective; how various tropes like race, class and gender have been treated in Kipling's novels will be discussed in the paper. The very theme of colonialism and nationalism has been focused upon and the researcher strives to show how Kipling has treated these issues, which are perhaps two faces of the same coin. This paper would also try to investigate how the theme of India has recurred frequently in various works of Rudyard Kipling and would like to make a study on the politics of Kiplingean representation of India. Another important theme in Kipling’s work is Victorian activism. The protagonists in several novels of Kipling represent this spirit. This paper would also focus on the dilemma that Kipling faced as an Anglo-Indian author, his penchant for India and his commitment towards the empire. The dilemma which has been faced by Kipling has been several times reflected in his characters. Kipling's misogyny is another issue which calls for a discussion. In Kim, we find Kipling created a masculine world in keeping with his obsession with the male machismo. The world of the Great Game was dominated by travel, trade and extraordinary adventures. Kipling's The Light that Failed also stinks of Kipling's misogyny. The researcher aims at investigating how the imperial mindset has influenced Kipling’s attitude towards women and how he has negotiated the gender issue in his works. The researcher has addressed the politics of race, gender and religion as delineated in Kipling’s two novels Kim and The Light that Failed.

Displacement in Sea of Poppies

In Sea of Poppies, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh presents the nineteenth-century British imperialist activities including the cultivation of opium as a cash crop in India for the Chinese market, the transportation of the Asiatic to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius Island, the introduction of the free trade, and the approach of opium wars. This paper will look how the environmental injustice created social injustice. British imperialists’ intensification of the production of the poppy planton the bank of the River Ganga to maintain the opium trade between India and China transformed local people first to peasant labour and then to the indentured workers. Ghoshre imagines their loss of local place and dispersion in global place as the indentured labour. He plots the afterlife of a former slave ship, the Ibıs, which was in the service of the East Indian Company to carry the indentured labour. This paper sets out to discuss how its traumatic movement to sugar plantations characterized diaspora; the ship became shared past, home, parent for the diverse characters. The emphasis will be put on Ghosh’s construction of identity in relation to the place from postcolonial eco critical perspective. In his engagement with the connection of place and people, both place and displacement are the essential parts of identity construction. Both places and identities are related and changed through the experience of displacement, mobility. The characters went beyond developing personal identification, fixity, and attachment to a local place within a national border, they were situated in a world of mobility and flexibility which promoted cultural and self-development.

“I can also write!”: narrating the production of a Portuguese as a Second Language to Deaf People teaching material from a postcolonial and translingual perspective

RESUMO Embora o contexto de educação de surdos conte com legislação que reconhece a importância de se garantir o ensino do português como segunda língua, ainda são poucas as pesquisas que focalizam estratégias para esse ensino e poucos os materiais didáticos desenvolvidos considerando-se essas estratégias. Neste artigo, focalizamos o processo de elaboração de um material didático de Português como Segunda Língua para Surdos (PL2/Surdos) produzido no âmbito da disciplina Estágio Supervisionado em Português como Segunda Língua/Língua Estrangeira, que faz parte do currículo da licenciatura em Português Segunda Língua/Língua Estrangeira, oferecida no Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, na Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Considerando o diálogo entre a prática e a meta-reflexão de fundamental importância tanto para a formação de pesquisadores quanto de professores, interessa-nos, mais especificamente, discutir como professoras em formação compreendem a operacionalização desse material didático a partir de uma perspectiva poscolonial e translíngue. Alinhadas à vertente crítica e indisciplinar da Linguística Aplicada (Moita Lopes, 2006), que tem no aparato da pesquisa qualitativo-interpretativa de viés etnográfico um de seus pilares, consideramos um corpus que, além de dados documentais, buscou focalizar as vozes das licenciandas, já que é nosso objetivo, aqui, iluminar questões relacionadas à formação de professores. Fazem parte desse corpus: (i) o programa de leitura da disciplina Estágio Supervisionado em PL2/LE oferecida no segundo semestre de 2021; (ii) trechos do material didático elaborado; (iii) excertos dos relatórios de estágio produzidos pelas licenciandas; (iv) excertos de uma das aulas teóricas da disciplina Estágio Supervisionado em PL2/LE. As reflexões realizadas pelas licenciandas apontam para a necessidade de (re)pensar a educação bilíngue de surdos a partir de projetos mais sensíveis à pluralidade cultural, social e linguística do mundo atual, tendo em vista o potencial heteroglóssico das práticas sociais de linguagem.

Deconstructing the Image of Third World Woman in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West: A Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

Pakistani writers, particularly Mohsin Hamid, have long highlighted women's struggle and their predicament under patriarchy in order to deconstruct their image as third-world women who remain passive against social and political injustices. Through the lens of postcolonial feminism as espoused in the classical postcolonial feminist works, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” written by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) respectively, this study intends to explore how female characters in Hamid’s novel, Exit West question and deconstruct patriarchal and colonial values which subdued them in the name of societal or western enlightened norms. These articles are used to explain the novel in the context of postcolonialism in general and postcolonial feminism in particular to investigate gendered roles and women’s resistance to patriarchal forms of gender violence and oppression. The study's outcome revealed that colonialism and patriarchy impose gendered roles on women to deprive them of agency and problematise their identity formation processes and independent thinking.

현실 인식을 위한 비판적 예술실천: 소니아 보이스(Sonia Boyce)의 작업에 표상된 인종주의와 흑인여성의 문제

Sonia Boyce(OBE, RA, 1962-) is a British Afro-Caribbean artist who discuss the pervasive racism and inequality in media and society, the harmful effects of imperialism and colonialism, and the subjectivity and discrimination of black women, from a political, social and cultural point of view. Boyce was an important figure in the 1980s, British Black Art Movement putting artists marginalized from mainstream art and culture into the limelight. At the 59th Venice Biennale(2022), Boyce, representing the British national pavilion, drew attention to black artists in the art world by receiving the prestigious Golden Lion Award. However, black, women, and migrant artists still lack a respected place in the British art world. In this paper, the works and exhibitions From Tarzan to Rambo: English Born ‘Native’ Considers her Relationship to the Constructed/Self Image and her Roots in Reconstruction(1987) and Feeling Her Way(2022) are considered from a post-colonial and feminist perspective.

Narratives of Plague in Arab Societies through the Lens of Select Western Travelers

To examine the narratives of plagues in Arab societies, the paper, along with the postcolonial perspectives, uses the concepts like ‘empathy’ or ‘detached concern’ to bring fresh and new understanding of the travel texts. It selected John Antes’ Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Egyptians, the Overflowing of the Nile and its Effects (1800) and Richard F. Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1857) for the study. The paper analyses their narratives to understand their approaches in describing the ‘native’ Arab societies. The key findings show that while Burton tends to construct the people and their culture as ‘the Other’ although his mode of presentation tends to follow a mode of ‘detached concern’, Antes is, on the other hand, more objective but stood by the plague-infected people in empathy. The findings show that these Western travellers considered the concept of predestination, lack of quarantine, lack of sanitation, mass gatherings during the plague, and the unscientific local treatments as the root causes of the spread of the plagues among the ‘natives’.

Ethical issues in community development: setting the scene

AbstractThis article introduces a special issue of the Community Development Journal designed to explore aspects of community development through an explicitly ethical lens. Arguing for a broad understanding of ethics as inextricably linked to practice and politics, it introduces the concept of ‘ethics work’ to capture the cognitive and emotional efforts community development workers expend to identify and handle matters of responsibilities, rights, harms, and benefits. Drawing inspiration and illustrations from contributions to the special issue, the article identifies ethical questions and concerns at three inter-related levels: micro (everyday relationships and interactions), meso (strategies for community development engagement and action), and macro (distribution of power and resources). After examining case examples of micro- and meso-ethical encounters, the article moves to consideration of macro-ethical questions linked to the political context of community development as a movement or project. The importance of interrogating the contradictory ideologies underpinning community development is stressed, ensuring the ethical lens is broad and versatile enough for practitioners to view their work reflexively with reference to postcolonial, postmodern, and posthuman perspectives. The article concludes with a call for a situated ethics of eco-social justice, seeing ethics as embedded in everyday practice while located in political and ecological contexts.

Native American Gothic as Third Space: Stephen Graham Jones? The Only Good Indians

The intention of the article is to examine Stephen Graham Jones’ most recent novel The Only Good Indians (2020) from combined ecogothic and postcolonial perspectives. The central concept informing the analyses is that of Third Space, as formulated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, and adapted by the spatial turn critic, Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace. Marking the onto-epistemological condition of in-betweenness, openness and ambivalent cultural identities, Third Space will be employed here to interrogate hybrid interspaces and generic dislocations in Jones’ new novel. As will be argued, Jones rewrites the Gothic slasher with a view of unsettling the inherited paradigms of thought, identity and representation. The writer reclaims the conventions and tropes of the genre, such as supernatural figures and events, the return of the repressed past, delayed revenge, and excessive acts of violence, and fuses them with the Native American settings, temporalities, tropes of spirituality and modes of storytelling. Jones’ novel, as we would like to propose, undermines any claims of a coherent identity and turns the Gothic mode into Third Space, characterized by an excess of ambiguous signification and revealing entangled ontological, ethnic, ecological and cross-cultural locations of horror.

Adoptees relearning their heritage languages: A postcolonial reading of language and dialogue in transnational adoption

AbstractThis theoretical article reflects on a recent development in adult literacy studies: transnational adoptees relearning their heritage languages. Literacy and adoption scholars have studied the replacement of the heritage language with a second language and reported it as a permanent loss. Returning to the country of origin, return adoptees challenge such notion by relearning the heritage language as part of their homecoming. We explore how this heritage language relearning could be seen as a renegotiation of the language hierarchies between the adoptive community and the community of origin of languages in the relationship between the adoptive region and the region of origin. Building on Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s “Enabling Violation” concept, we deploy a postcolonial perspective on understanding heritage language relearning in transnational adoptees. We discuss how language relearning can challenge and reproduce the asymmetrical relation between adoptees’ position in the Global North and their first families in the Global South. We argue that heritage language relearning can open the door for adoptees to engage with transnational literacy, carving out global learning trajectories and reconnecting their adoptive and first world. The last section of this article discusses adoption organisations’ dialectic response to this shift by partaking in the organisation of heritage language classes for adoptees. We argue that adult education centres and literacy educators can play a pivotal role in further institutionalising these heritage language classes for transnational adoptees.

Narrer la Négritude de façon transmédiale : le cas du rappeur Youssoupha

French rap music provides an original contribution to literary exposition, redefinition and re-adaptation. As a postcolonial product, rap music rehabilitates the memory of an often forgotten colonial past and offers a new transdisciplinary and post-colonial perspective on contemporary French society. Through his music, French-Congolese rapper Youssoupha enters into dialogue with French Martinican poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature. Through the analysis of the albums Sur les chemins du retour (2007), Noir D**** (2012) and NGRTD (2015), the purpose of the present study is to investigate how Youssoupha unfolds and actualizes Césaire’s works and the concept of Négritude across multiple media channels.

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES: CONTACT ZONES

The paper discusses the expedience and eff ectiveness of applying tenets of Postcolonial Theory for researching history and the current state of American literature. It argues that the United States was added to the domain of Postcolonial Studies as its legitimate object at the turn of the 21st century causing considerable controversy among representatives of both disciplines – Postcolonial, as well as American Studies, since this step required revision and extension of both fi elds. A brief overview is provided of some recent publications on the subject, including, in particular, the two 2000 monographs (Postcolonial America and Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature), edited, respectively, by Richard King, and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. The paper explores four zones of inquiry which seem to boast the greatest potential for the most productive encounters between American literary studies and postcolonialism. These include, but are not limited to 1) approaching American literature from postcolonial perspective in terms of its eff orts to assert its national identity; 2) studying American ethnic literatures in postcolonial light proceeding from the notion of “inner colonization”; 3) exploring the consequences of globalizing/migratory processes for US literature as generating hybridity and metissage; 4) and, fi nally, factoring in professional connections many renowned theorists of postcolonialism (such as Homi Bhabha, G. Ch. Spivak, Edward Said, and Edouard Glissant) have established with America. Propositions put forward in the paper are illustrated by referring to three American novels authored by recent migrants to the USA from the African postcolonial states: Teju Cole (Open City, 2001), David Eggers (What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, 2006), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah, 2014). It is concluded that a set of tools (terms, concepts and reading practices) fi rst devised for Postcolonial Studies may be (and already are) eff ectively used to analyze and interpret texts produced in the USA. Its relevance is enhanced by contemporary neoliberal global developments resulting in the emergence of broader and less visible forms of exploitation, which, in their turn, presuppose, in Simon During’s words, the turn from subalterneity to precarity. Key words: Postcolonial Theory, American Studies, American literature, ethnic literatures, globalization, subalterneity.

Fostering Bilingual Creativity in English Poetry Classroom: A Postcolonial Creative Writing Strategy

The study accentuates bilingual creativity as the pedagogical intervention of postcolonial creative writing strategy in poetry class through the writing of haiku and short poems. Twenty-five students in their freshmen year at the English Department were engaged in reading a culturally local text (Sumatra-Javanese ethnic poetry to compose poetry from a post-colonial perspective). The workshop's five phases exploring, inciting inspirations, drafting, editing, and peer feedback provided the student, as a novice writer, with the benefit of familiarizing themselves with character, theme, and cultural issues; developing a cognitive process to negotiate different meanings in their first and second languages; and exploring creativity to write their own poetry in the second language. The scripts written in English are the product of poetry classes, which reveal students' localized knowledge and cultural literacy. The works reflect the participants’ cultural identity, even though English is the dominant language showcased in the almost fifty poems composed by the novice writers. The existence of local languages points to the development of their bilingual creativity; students in the poetry classroom are not only able to handle the meaning in the first and second languages, but also to promote their local culture to the global world.

Эволюция структур насилия в спорте: от колониализма к капитализму с азиатским лицом

The author adopted the postcolonial perspective to analyze how sport has affected the destruction of violence structures, the emancipation, and the voice of subalterns since the decolonization. Having summarized the imperial sports policy, the article introduces 4 major trends in sports after decolonization. Nationalization is described through the prism of Indonesian badminton, Moroccan football, and petanque in Pondicherry. Integration is illustrated by the participation of former colonies in the Olympic Movement, world football, and IOC statistics. Commercialization is exemplified by the growing influence of new actors, i.e., non-traditional states, non-governmental organizations, multinational companies and by the migration of African footballers, Indonesian badminton players and rugby players from Oceania. The rise of Asian countries is revealed by means of the analysis of rankings of the highest-paid female athletes and leading sports manufacturers, LPGA Tour statistics on players’ origins, the geography of international tournaments, and the case of subaltern athlete P. V. Sindhu. The researcher concludes that the growing number and the changing nature of violence structures keeps subaltern athletes in a dependent and vulnerable position, forcing them to follow the rules set by longstanding and emerging centers of power, both politically and economically.

Intellectual humility in applied sociocultural contexts: a reply to Ballantyne

ABSTRACT We offer a brief reply to Ballantyne’s overview of intellectual humility (IH) research with an appreciation for the definitional, conceptual, and methodological issues he has highlighted across numerous areas of work. We give particular interdisciplinary attention to sociocultural, systemic, and postcolonial perspectives on IH and raise questions about cultural differences and social power dynamics that might impact IH. Some emerging and future directions in IH research are considered in the applied context of religious leadership drawing on a relational spirituality model of humility and the dialectical processes of dwelling and seeking.

A Postcolonial MIR?

The field of music information retrieval (MIR) offers tools for the analysis of music and sound, for example in archives of historical recordings; but it has also been widely critiqued for bias toward Western music and Western epistemologies. There seems to be a gap, or even an irresolvable friction, between computer science-based MIR tools, problems, and methodologies, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, humanities-based research in music and media that examines sound from critical and postcolonial perspectives. This essay draws from sound studies and critical technology studies to propose that this is an opportune moment for interdisciplinary collaborations between humanities scholars and technologists to enhance critical analyses of music and sound. Key to such collaborations would be a consideration of ontological differences between the two approaches, such as divergent understandings of the fundamental concepts of music, genre, and difference. The essay takes several examples from the author’s research into sound and Dutch colonialism at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision media archive in order to propose some examples of how MIR’s technological tools could potentially enhance critical humanities-driven analyses of sound, perception, and colonial difference. More broadly, the essay argues, the divergences and even tensions between disciplines can be productive for scholarly reflexivity, postcolonial or anticolonial scholarship, and applications of technological tools toward social justice goals.

Exploring representations of American Agricultural Farmers and laborers: a post-colonial reading of In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story By Jerry Apps

The article investigates how Jerry Apps’ novel In A Pickle: A Family Farm Story represents the lives of American farmers and laborers in Wisconsin in the 1950s and the relevant industrial issues humans are facing nowadays. The study applies an ecological approach and post-colonial perspective especially using Bill Ashcroft’s post-colonial concepts to scrutinize a variety of representations of things from neo-colonialization to surveillance in Apps’ narrative and the post-colonial issues regarding humanity, agriculture, and industry which are elicited in the story. A post-colonial analysis of the novel deals with themes such as hegemony, othering, and ecological imperialism. Through his observations and factual evidence, Apps offers his readers some historical phenomena that impacted American farming workers, especially in Wisconsin in the 1950s. In general, his novel portrays the conflicts and sufferings of workers after the industry began to penetrate their agricultural lives. Some conflicts resulting from financial failure, crop failure, and inability to meet standards imposed by industry lead them to suffer economically, socially, and culturally and to lose the capability to produce sustainable foods.

Manifestation of Colonial Subjects in Twilight in Dehli and A Passage to India

The goal of this research is to examine how the colony is portrayed by both the colonizer and the colonized. This paper focuses mainly on the politics of depiction by implementing the insights of postcolonialism. In this context, Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali also deals with the same subject from the view of the colonized, whereas A Passage to India is a narrative of the British colony by its colonizer E. M. Forster. It may be argued that the writers’ two depictions of a similar colony represent different political and cultural viewpoints. The two authors’ representations of the same colony, one from a colonized civilization and another from that was colonized, consistently reflect their distinctive voices. Additionally, the latest research has incorporated Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said’s analytical works on the depiction in the postcolonial theoretical perspective and explored the problem of cultural representation while using textual analyses. The research has shown that both works’ representations of colonial India differ significantly because of the authors’ respective cultural roles as colonizer and colonized.

Review: Cairo in Chicago: Cairo Street at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893

Review: <i>Cairo in Chicago: Cairo Street at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893</i>

De la inversión de los roles tradicionales o el declive de un mito familiar africano en Las tinieblas de tu memoria Negra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

This article analyzes, from the novel (colonial) Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, the reversal of traditional roles or the decline of an African family myth from a postcolonial perspective. The novel is about an innominate child who is forced to become one of the best defenders of vernacular customs of his people to the detriment of the Judeo-Christian religion chosen by his father. The central problem of the work to study is the difficult attempt to preserve the African tradition in a world that has changed after the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in Equatorial Guinea, in the case at hand. The main objective of the study is to show the importance of Occident colonization in what we can call the decline of an African family myth. Another task of this work is to show the survival of the perennial tradition-modernity dichotomy not only in literature but also in contemporary African societies.

Dislodging the Colonial “Nable String” of Primary Teacher Education in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

The St. Vincent Teachers’ Training College (SVTC) was founded in 1964 with assistance from The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Unarguably, teacher education in the St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) has evolved slightly from its colonial beginnings. It now includes secondary, technical vocational teacher education, and early childhood education. While still operating within a postcolonial context, the philosophical underpinning of teacher education in SVG is a mirror of its colonial origins. Therefore, I believe that primary teacher education in SVG is yet to cut its colonial “nable string” which is the English creole phrase for the umbilical cord. Set against the backdrop of postcolonial perspectives this paper contends that there is a need to reconceptualise the length of initial primary teacher education to meet the demands of 21st century primary education in SVG.