Postcolonial Relations Research Articles

Between Europeanisation and Domestic Influences: Portugal's Post-colonial Relations with Angola

This paper builds on the Europeanization literature to explore the impact of EU membership on Portuguese foreign policy towards Angola. The analysis is centred on trade issues, focusing on Portugal’s accession negotiations and the reform of the Lomé Convention. Portugal is a small and open economy, with a colonial past in Angola. Trade is one of the most integrated policy areas of the EU, which has long and highly institutionalised relations with Africa. Preliminary results point to great evidence of Europeanization understood as national adaptation to the EU. However, the projection of Portuguese priorities onto the European level also received some support. History, cultural links and the presence of strong national interest groups appear to have limited the EU’s impact on Portuguese preferences. Such findings give support to studies stressing the need to adequately account for domestic conditions, even in highly integrated EU policy areas and for smaller member states.

Queering Natal

The media coverage of President Jacob Zuma and the “problem” of his foreign and potentially threatening polygamy reveals the long-extant gendered and raced fault lines of the presumably postcolonial relationship between Britain and South Africa. The discourses in the British press that marked Zuma as a “buffoon,” “barbaric,” and less civilized than his “distinctly monogamous” hosts can be traced to nineteenth-century settler colonial regimes and their violent attempts at reordering the lands and peoples they sought to occupy and replace. The arrival of British settlers in the nineteenth-century colony of Natal brought them into conflict with the Zulu peoples they sought to supplant and exploit. A reading of emigrant letters, missionary pamphlets, and newspaper correspondence reveals that the persistence of the practice of isithembu (polygamy) and ilobolo (the ritual exchange of cattle upon marriage) among Zulus in the face of British attempts to control their social and political formations challenged the very heart of the settler project. As British settlers sought to create and define a “modern” sexuality predicated on a heteronormative family unit, polygamy became the flashpoint in a biopolitical battle between colonists and indigenous peoples in Natal. For settlers, polygamy failed at being properly heteronormative, instead indicating an overweening hyper-heterosexuality in Zulu men. As a result, to white observers, polygamy presented a dangerous and disruptive challenge to the gendered, raced, and sexual order they wished to construct — in short, it became queer. The destabilizing queer potential of indigenous polygamy to the settler project reveals the assumptions about sexuality, civilization, and conjugality that underwrite colonial aspiration and postimperial anxieties.

Discursive Frictions: Power, Identity, and Culture in an International Working Partnership

This article builds on previous work in power, identity, and culture in organizational communication and transnational feminism. Drawing on a six-year capacity-building partnership between a U.S. and a Kenyan team to promote HIV/AIDS education, it explores the discursive frictions that can arise when universal goals, such as science and health, come into contact with the material, cultural, political, and religious realities of local practitioners. These frictions can reinforce and, at times, shift dominant (post)colonial power relations. It ends with a discussion of the theoretical, practical, and material implications of discursive frictions as they relate to power, voice, and identification.

Zazirocratie: très curieuse introduction à la biopolitique et à la critique de la croissance by Yves Citton

Commitments,” a treatment of the vastly widening scope and semantics of engagement , 2) “The Practice of Memory,” offering a table of twenty-three recent literary works, including remembrances of Rwanda, 3) “Lifting the Burden?” on the diversification of aesthetics related to gradual shifts from old ideas of engagement and post-colonial relationship and 4) “The Fashioning of an Engaging Literature,” a focus on the creativity and contradictions of production and interpretations of African arts. With regard to that creativity and production, the authors discuss the “ghettoization ” of Francophone African literature, its accessibility, and the bridging of Francophone and French literatures by new series offered by publishers (142). Some writers plead for a world literature in French which values creative innovation , regardless of the place from which that emanates, rather than a distinction between French and Francophone literatures which may devalue and exclude the latter as little more than the product of decolonization. As to its accessibility, globalization could open markets for Francophone African literature and cinema, but concern over control of these by foreign interests is noted. Details are also provided with regard to la politique du livre (148) in terms of the price of books and availability in Africa, given competing forces in the publication industry. In the balance, continuing and new series, as well as festivals and salons endeavoring to showcase Francophone African writers, are highlighted. The volume offers notes, an extensive bibliography, including literary titles, and an index. The authors point out that not all of the Francophone African authors, including major ones such as Sembène, Mongo Beti, Sow Fall, Kane and Diop, as well as African intellectual legacies, limit themselves to French or European languages, given the need to develop “literacy and cultural productions in African languages” (14). Viewing women’s literature, such as that of Léanora Miano, as on the cusp of politics and exploration of form, and not restricted to gender issues, the authors choose to integrate rather than treat it separately. The role of other art forms, such as film and the fine arts, and especially music, as even more central to cultural production in Africa, is acknowledged and discussed as well. This timely study contributes not only fresh information about contemporary Francophone African literature (both for the classroom and for building collections), but also a way for scholars to approach these texts aesthetically . The authors articulate theoretical issues across a “variety of perspectives and generations” (14) and a nuanced, panoramic view of writers, works, and issues emerge. Ultimately, Cazenave and Célérier characterize the production of contemporary Francophone African writers, created out of freer choice of commitment and artistic expression, as shifting from engagé to “engaging” literature (185). Rockhurst University (MO) M. Kathleen Madigan CITTON, YVES. Zazirocratie: très curieuse introduction à la biopolitique et à la critique de la croissance. Paris: Amsterdam, 2011. ISBN 978-2-35480-088-8. Pp. 378. 21 a. In this lengthy study of biopolitics and a critique of ‘Growth,’ Citton redefines literature as an encounter between an author and an interpreter that will help the latter reframe what it means to make sense. Such an interpretation reveals the collective enterprise of all literary interaction. In minor writers Citton discovers the lieux communs of a multitude that speaks through each and all of us. Multitudes 1258 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 never speak without reason though each voice has its own inflection. It is an analysis of biopolitics and biopower in their productive and critical sense that justifies the choice of corpus, that of Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche (1722–74). Citton frames the study of this writer with a prelude consisting of a quick explanation of his theoretical apparatus (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Hardt, Negri, Latour, Derrida, Nancy, but also Lucretius). A postlude elaborates on the power (puissance) of literature. For Citton, an understanding of the stakes of biopolitics and literature, requires painstaking preparatory work that constitutes the main part of the book in the guise of a journey (his own and Tiphaigne’s) or a ‘frayage,’ a term used by Derrida and others haunted by Freud, to open passages leading to the affirmation of the power of literature. While offering a synthetic reading of...

Postcolonial Stakes of Congolese (DRC) Political Space: 50 Years after Independence1

Abstract This joint contribution interrogates the postcolonial relations that are at play in the Congolese political sphere in Belgium, the former colonial metropolis. Two lines of argument are developed. First, the politicisation of the postcolonial relations, which pre-dates the Congolese immigration to Belgium, is viewed from a historical perspective. Second, the highly competitive political pluralism, as observed since the early 2000s, is examined. After having restored historically the constitution and the reconstruction of this political sphere, wherein new technologies deepen the transnational movements, the authors will examine the tensions that arise from the unifying dynamics of the politically engaged Diaspora, on the one hand, and its intrinsic logics of division and fragmentation, on the other. The postcolonial issues that are at stake are to be seen on different levels: transnational, local, within the Diaspora, and between the Congolese minority and the Belgian majority. Their interconnectedness further reveals the postcolonial character of this political sphere.

Sacred Music, Sacred Journeys : What Makes an Event Postcolonial ?

Fanon, Senghor, and Ela took a radical stance in criticising the structures and mechanisms of power in hegemonic situations and relations between colonial subjects and colonial masters. They aimed to liberate African societies by decolonising the mind, culture and religion of colonial subjects. In this respect, we are concerned with the continuities and ruptures of the colonial encounter and its unequal relationships. Switzerland does not have an official colonial history and yet, Swiss companies and migrants were and are part of the world’s colonies. In our contribution, we question what makes an event postcolonial : in other words, how are postcolonial relations negotiated in Switzerland?We discuss this question by analysing two annual sacred journeys in Switzerland that have been invented for and by African Christians (clerics and laity) together with the leaders of the Swiss Catholic church : one to the relics of African saints in St. Maurice, canton Valais and the other to the Black Madonna, the Virgin Mary of Einsiedeln, in the canton Schwyz. These events are empowered by the performance of African choirs – their music, dance, and costumes – but to which end and in which way?

A Congolese Virus and Belgian Doctors? Postcolonial Perspectives on Migration and HIV1

Abstract Based on collaborative research between a Congolese activist in HIV prevention in Belgium and a French anthropologist, this paper hopes to initiate a debate about the issue of HIV /AIDS in light of the postcolonial links between Belgium and its former colony Congo/Zaire. By exploring the social representations that HIV has generated in Francophone Belgium and the changing political management of the epidemic since the 1980s, the paper focuses on how Congolese HIV-­positive migrants have been viewed, treated and allowed (or not) to settle in Belgium. It analyzes how the HIV/AIDS epidemic was seen as an ‘African disease,’ and more precisely a ‘Congolese virus.’ It concludes that Achille Mbembe’s ‘postcolonial scoriae’ must be taken into account (without necessarily implying a linear passage from colonial to postcolonial relations) in order to understand European and international policies in Africa or policies concerning African migrants.

Embodied genealogies and gendered violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's writing

This essay examines two recent novels by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus ([2003] 2005) and Half a Yellow Sun (2006), placing them first in a dialogue with each other, and more broadly with selected Nigerian writing on the Biafra conflict. Arguing with Adesanmi that Adichie belongs to a ‘third generation’ of African literary work, it traces the novels' work of historical revisionism through gendered and embodied discourses of pain and violence. Adichie returns the reader to an aesthetics of excess firmly grounded on potently disturbing images of the ‘body in pain’, in Elaine Scarry's memorable phrase (1983): the battered, bruised and scarred body emerges as a key image, a corporeal evocation of the individual self that is traced in both novels to a legacy of colonial and post-colonial relations, and specific gendered configurations.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship (review)

From 1945 through 2004, the number of intercountry adoptions in the United States increased steadily as families increasingly considered ways to expand outside of biological relations. Initially, this phenomenon was linked to a more sentimentalized vision of childhood and the social chaos amid the aftermath of World War II. Although some postwar adoptees were of Japanese descent, most were of European descent and could be accepted as a natural part of the family. Two US organizations, the League for Orphan Victims in Europe (LOVE) and the American Joint Committee for Assisting Japanese-American Orphans, helped to create an infrastructure to address the needs of orphaned children, many of whom were fathered by US soldiers.Beginning in 1955, transracial adoptions began to take offas Korea, also recovering from the social chaos of war, placed more children for intercountry than any other country. Despite these overwhelming trends, the last several years have seen the numbers of adoptions decline from a high of 22,991 in 2004 to only 11,058 in 2010.1 Also changed are the rationale for adoption, the countries sending children out for adoption, United Nations' and state legislation, and popular and scholarly understandings of adoption. Kristi Brian's compelling book, Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship, focuses on one form of transracial/transnational adoption-the of Korean children by white American parents (6). Known as Korean-American Adoption (KAA), this form of has declined in numbers since the 1990s but has still resulted in 160,000 Korean children being placed in US families, most of whom are white. In interviews, Brian asks involved in the process about how they navigate US understandings of race and kinship, and offers her reflections on the formerly overshadowed and silenced participants in this quiet migration (18).Over the last decade, scholars of intercountry have analyzed through post-colonial relationships, cultural identity, and understandings of race and power (e.g., Eng 2003, Volkman 2005, Dorow 2006, Kim 2010). Noting that adoptive kin making in the United States must always contend with racialized social policies and legislation (17), Brian utilizes a critical race feminist methodology that promises to probe the micro to better understand their dialectical relationship with social structures and hierarchies at the macro level (16) and the ways in which certain knowledge has been subjugated within practices and discourse (17). Brian lays bare the structural inequalities inherent in the transnational practice of KAA, including the new racism of today...that preserves white supremacy in a mostly 'kinder and gentler' way (175). Reframing Transracial Adoption ultimately argues that the of overseas from Korea, which began with the lure of 1950s American prosperity, will hopefully come to a close through collaborative efforts to move beyond histories of denial, racialized rescue missions, and the privatization of the (176).Brian effectively analyzes the inherently political act of family building. In Chapter 1, she describes why and also addresses the matters of adoption. Keeping the focus on KAA, she provides an important and comprehensive overview of the history of this form of transracial and transnational adoption. Beginning in the 1950s, Henry Holt institutionalized his child rescue mission rooted in notions of Christian salvation and the perceived best interests of children devastated by war and related catastrophe. These salvation narratives, combined with Holt's charisma, patriotism, and New World optimism, led him to found an agency and establish the formal networks that would enable the transfer of children from Korea to the US (13). KAA was made popular at a time in which the stigma of unwed motherhood, and the lack of reproductive services constituted an adoption mandate. …

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

India–Myanmar Relations

Despite long historical ties, post-colonial relations between India and Myanmar have fluctuated between magnanimity and mistrust. While India often stood for high moral grounds and promotion of democracy, it did so at the cost of losing Myanmar to China. This affected both India and Myanmar adversely: while New Delhi’s economic, energy and security interests were hurt, isolated Yangon became more China-dependent. However, since the early 1990s, domestic developments in Myanmar and post-Cold War structural changes in the world order necessitated conditions for cooperation and mutual gains. It appears that blatant domestic suppression in, and international seclusion of, Myanmar is not desirable. Having witnessed two eras of magnanimity and mistrust, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Myanmar in 2012 heralds a prospective era of market interdependence while opening Pandora’s box: can India get a better share of Myanmar’s commercial possibilities without compromising its core interests in promoting democracy, development and diaspora protection?

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Julian Stannard The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli Salmon Poetry This is the last installment in poet Stannard ’s Genoese trilogy; Rina’s War and The Red Zone were the first and second collections in the series, respectively. With a voice and subjects that are distinctly British in nature, the poems in this collection span many of the major cities of Europe, including Paris, Rome, Bucharest, and Amsterdam . Stannard’s poems were featured in WLT’s July 2011 online issue. A Polish Book of Monsters Michael Kandel, ed. PIASA Books Five contemporary Polish authors, each with a distinctive voice, are represented in this collection of newly translated stories of fantasy and science fiction. Every selection contains an “utterly convincing alien world that nonetheless refracts our own,” with fantastical characters and themes of power, violence, and possession (Helena Goscilo). Through these themes, each author has penned a tale that predicts a sinister future. Nota Bene American sf. Its compass is fiction from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico written between 1850 and 1920—nationally formative years during which Latin America contributed distinctive “local appropriations and local adaptations” to the “global genre” of sf. After steering us through a first chapter on utopian proto-sf, Rachel Haywood Ferreira guides us into darker territory: stories that vivify the raging conflict between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution; that prophesy the end of the world; that pit canonical science against spiritualism , theosophy, occultism, and the like; that consider (seriously!) eugenics as a tool to counter threats to national identity ; and much more. In lucid, jargonfree prose, she layers this complex story onto a meticulously constructed skeleton that is simultaneously thematic and chronological. Wediscoverhowauthorsusedthe distancing in time and space allowed by sf to address the burning issues of national identity and its attendant political baggage of “nationality, race, and social class or profession.” Complicating this issue were postcolonial relations with first-world countries of the Northern Hemisphere. This uneasy dynamic was further muddled by the investiture by Latin America in science as “the supreme guarantor of truth” and in technological advancement as the means to progress —science and technology then being localized in the United States and northern Europe. Furthermore, individual works typically addressed geographically and temporally specific political agendas of the authors, many of whom actively participated in nation-building. Haywood Ferreira recounts this intellectually exciting literary adventure with skill and verve. Crucially, she does not assume we know anything about these authors or their political and cultural contexts. Rather, she regularly injects into accounts of their fiction doses of background that keep us on track. She thereby builds a persuasive case that viewing these works “through a lens of science fiction ” illuminates “Latin American attitudes toward science, literature, national identity, and other [social and cultural] issues of their times.” Anyone with even a passing interest in Latin American literature will want Emergence and Cosmos Latinos . Both belong on your shelf next to Thomas Colchie’s A Hammock beneath the Mangoes (1991), an anthology of late-twentieth-century stories, mostly in the fantastic mode, and the endlessly delightful Antología de la literatura fantástica, edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo (2nd ed., 1965; Eng. The Book of Fantasy, 1988). Optimists will leave room for future anthologies by Bell and Molina Gavilán and literary histories by Haywood Ferreira. Both of their books cry out for successors . Wesleyan, are you listening? Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Christopher Hitchens. Arguably: Essays. New York. Twelve / Hachette. 2011. isbn 9781455502776 Ordinary book reviewers have three tasks: to determine what the author set out to do; how well that task was accomplished; and whether it was worth undertaking. Here the reviewer is in a way subordinate to the book. Not so reviewers given the space to show their credentials as public intellectuals. January–February 2012 | 75 In their work, readers often find it difficult to discover just what book is being discussed because the reviewer subsumes the discussion in a wider consideration of the topic. Christopher Hitchens is preeminently in the second group. He seems to be as widely read and traveled as he is prolific—the publicity sheet for the book notes that...

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in <i>Kuroshitsuji</i>

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji Waiyee Loh (bio) In 2007, Toboso Yana began publishing Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in disguise, and his young master, Count Ciel Phantomhive. With its Western European setting, its aestheticization of the demonic and the deathly, and its penchant for roses, Rococo motifs, and the color black, Kuroshitsuji exemplifies a type of “Gothic” style that has become popular in postwar Japanese shōjo culture since Hagio Moto’s classic vampire manga Pō no ichizoku (1972–76, The clan of Poe).1 Through a reading of Kuroshitsuji as a representative case study, I examine this shōjo Gothic style and its relation to Japanese national identity in the age of postmodern globalization and post-colonial reevaluations of the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialism.2 In the first part of the essay, I consider the relationship between the superflat visual aesthetic and the postmodern condition of simulation, which the shōjo Gothic style makes explicit. I then discuss how the shōjo Gothic style, as a postmodern and postcolonial practice of enunciation, simulates, recontextualizes, and reinvents a Western European past in order to articulate the enduring desire of the contemporary Japanese nation for an idealized “Western modernity,” characterized by “tasteful” consumption. In the last [End Page 111] part of the essay, I argue that Kuroshitsuji, through its Gothic style, paradoxically intervenes in its own idealization of Western modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures and to disseminate its hybrid cultural commodities around the world as a cultural superpower in the age of postmodern globalization. The shōjo Gothic style in Kuroshitsuji thus expresses the profound ambivalence of postcolonial Japanese national identity vis-à-vis the West in the twenty-first century. Through reinscribing the signs of a Western European past, Kuroshitsuji articulates the split in the Japanese “Self” between the endless striving for the ideal of “Western” modernity and the nationalistic affirmation of an empowered “Japanese” (post)modernity, while eliding the inherent cultural hybridity of the shōjo Gothic style and of the national identity articulated through this style. Lastly, it is important to note that Japan was (and is) a (neo)colonial power in Asia, and I touch on the significance of this double postcolonial relationship at the end of the essay. Murakami Takashi first introduced the concept of “superflat” within the context of an art exhibition titled Super Flat, which was presented in 2000 at the PARCO department store gallery. He later developed the concept through two more exhibitions: Coloriage (2002) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005). Murakami and several other critics, including Azuma Hiroki and Sawaragi Noi, interpret superflatness as a visual manifestation of the postmodern collapse of hierarchies and the fragmentation of the modern Cartesian subject.3 In this essay, I will argue that the shōjo Gothic style points to a connection between superflatness and another principal element of the postmodern condition: simulation. In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Fredric Jameson reads the formal planarity of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a symbolic expression of “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality” in our world where objects “now become a set of texts or simulacra.” 4 Likewise, the shōjo Gothic style suggests that the superflat visual aesthetic implies a particular postmodern mode of vision and knowledge—a “way of seeing” (John Berger) or “scopic regime” (Martin Jay)—that “flattens” all “real” phenomena in the world into hyperreal signifiers “without origin or reality.” 5 Kuroshitsuji illustrates this connection between literal and figurative flattening through its depiction of the Undertaker’s shop. In Figure 1, the façade of the shop is depicted in a highly planar, nongeometric perspectival [End Page 112] style. The figures of the characters, the door of the shop, and the coffin and tombstones flanking the door are positioned in a highly linear arrangement, and the speech bubbles add to the planarity through their superimposition, also in a linear fashion, over the picture...

Theatre Review: <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>

As a young, black, female artist, Dada Masilo inhabits a position which affords her ample opportunity to refer to conventions of race and gender local to South Africa, even as she attempts to negotiate the difficult bond between the contemporary South African moment and its history of colonial and post-colonial relationship to Shakespeare's England. Her version of Romeo and Juliet is a fascinating example of the way in which creative artists map the border between the past and the present, and the difficult attempt to pay homage to inspirational precursors without sacrificing the integrity of their own creative vision.

Who Knows Tomorrow: Berlin and Beyond

This essay focuses on Who Knows Tomorrow, which ran in Berlin from June 4 to September 26, 2010. Hosted by the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, this exhibition featured the work of five prominent international artists of African origin— El Anatsui, Zarina Bhimji, António Ole, Yinka Shonibare, MBE, and Pascale Marthine Tayou. The artists’ work engaged visitors with a range of difficult issues, including the role that Germany and the city of Berlin played in the colonization of Africa. The exhibit also acknowledged and explored the complex postcolonial relationship between Africa and Europe, an interconnected history that remains an integral component of modern-day globalization. This essay considers the historical significance and legacy of this exhibition as well as the extensive accompanying catalogue and concludes that the challenging questions posed by Who Knows Tomorrow urgently warrant answers today.

Indigeneity, Sovereignty, and the Law: Challenging the Processes of Criminalization

The processes of criminalization lay the foundation for creating significant disadvantage among Indigenous people across the former settler societies of Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Yet the massive incarceration of Indigenous people has not resulted in ensuring the safety of individuals within Indigenous communities. Imposed criminal justice systems have not ensured the maintenance of social order in Indigenous communities. This essay explores the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. Throughout Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, Indigenous communities continue to exercise authority or have at least attempted to develop localized methods of dealing with problems of social disorder. Indigenous practice has provided us with the opportunity and the necessity to rethink the possibilities of a postcolonial relationship between criminal justice institutions and Indigenous communities. The essay argues that the recognition of Indigenous claims to governance offer the possibility of new ways of thinking about criminal justice responses to entrenched social problems like crime.

Strangers in the Family Home: Spanish Former Emigrants Imagine a Return to Cuba

This article contains an analysis of contemporary reflections by indiano descendants, as represented in two Spanish novels. Indianos were those Spaniards who emigrated from Spain to Cuba to try their fortune and subsequently returned to their country of origin, sometimes going back to Cuba again after a few decades. These novels explore the complex relationships between former Spanish immigrants and the receiving country, as the emigrants imagine a return visit to Cuba in order to reconnect with their former country and overcome the incomprehension that distance has created. Both narratives, set respectively in post-Special Period Cuba and the colonial times, evidence the strong ties between Cuba and Spain throughout history, as well as the barriers that contemporary experience in Spain poses for a true understanding of race, post-colonial relations, and diaspora in Cuba.

Editorial

This special edition of the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies highlights the work of emerging scholars in the field of Indigenous Studies. The five featured authors were all finalists for the prize awarded by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) to the best post-graduate student paper at the NAISA meeting held in 2010 in Tucson, Arizona. While the breadth of scholarship encompassed by the term 'Indigenous Studies' and the global representation of Indigenous peoples at NAISA mean that the topics and approaches vary widely, a common thematic of fraught post-colonial relations can be discerned within all five articles.

Who Knows Tomorrow

Who Knows Tomorrow, an exhibition of independent projects by five African artists, opened at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in June 2010. Conceived in response to an invitation by the office of the then federal president Horst Köhler to propose an “African art” exhibition in Berlin to coincide with a conference of the president's Africa Forum initiative, the project explored the difficult and complex colonial and postcolonial relationship between Africa and Europe. The curators imagined an art exhibition that was not so much about Africa and African art, as a platform for African artists to contemplate the place of Berlin in the history of European colonization of the African continent, a process that officially began with the Berlin-Congo Conference (1884–85) convened by Germany's first imperial chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.1 While Bismarck's conference was meant to resolve the “Scramble for Africa” by rival European nations attracted by the continent's vast wealth of raw materials and mineral resources, it provided him a unique opportunity to secure a significant role for the newly unified German nation in European imperial politics. The context of the exhibition—the personal involvement of the German president, and its location in key German art museums, each with a history steeped in the politics of German national identity—provided a unique opportunity to reexamine the long-established and often ignored or underacknowledged relationships between art and state power, between aesthetics and nationalism, and between the artistic avant-garde and political ideology.

Creating Poetic Subjectivity in Mar�a Zambrano and Jos� Lezama Lima

Creating Poetic Subjectivity in María Zambrano and José Lezama Lima Tania Gentic In a 2007 article published in a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies, devoted to elaborating a new "decolonial" approach to knowledge, Aníbal Quijano argues that postcolonial hegemony is rooted in the perceived relationship between self and other that is the cornerstone of Western post-Enlightenment thought. In the same issue, Arturo Escobar goes on to say that one possible challenge to this hegemony would be a reformulation of Western epistemology through the recuperation of "worlds and knowledges otherwise." Presumably such a project would entail, at least within the realm of Hispanic letters and history, a recuperation of indigenous, non-Western modes of thought. Yet in order for such a project to effectively break down the imposed (and, decolonial theorists aver, intimately linked) systems of coloniality and modernity, I would stress that attention must be paid to how "worlds and knowledges otherwise" would be put into dialogue with the established Western epistemologies with which we continue to frame our theoretical discussions of literature. This essay takes a small step in that direction by studying how a similar breaking down of traditional structures of thought might occur from within the very rational tradition that spawned the theory and practice of postcoloniality, by studying the poetic theories of Spanish philosopher-cum-mystic María Zambrano (1904–1991) and Cuban poet-philosopher José Lezama Lima (1910–1976). One a woman writer in exile after the Spanish Civil War, the other a reclusive, voracious reader and poet who only once left the island of Cuba, both form part of the canon of Spanish-language literature but also occupy the outer margins of it. Both also formulate theories of poetic aesthetics that present an alternative conception of subjectivity to that traditionally posed by rational philosophical structures rooted in ideology, statehood, or other forms of Western epistemology. Finally, although both writers' theories are necessarily products of the Cartesian notion of subjectivity that grounds Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, they also strive to break through it by thinking poetry, affect, and subjectivity together, challenging the self-other dichotomy in the process. In this article, I seek to make connections between José Lezama Lima's "poetic system" and the "poetic reason" of María Zambrano that both conceptually preceded [End Page 173] and was influenced by it.1 More specifically, I consider how they ground their approaches in metaphors of space that call into question the geographical limitations of nation and state, allowing us to link their questioning of the self-other dichotomy to the postcolonial relationships that exist between state, nation, and subject. I will argue here that reading their poetic theories together as a model of Transatlantic movement, rather than stasis, may permit us to heed Quijano's and Escobar's calls to destabilize Western epistemologies of power by finding alternative ways of figuring knowledge and, in this case, the concepts of selfhood that derive from it. My analysis will focus primarily on Zambrano's works "La reforma del entendimiento español" (1937), "La metáfora del corazón" (1941), and "La Cuba secreta" (1948). For Lezama, I draw mainly from his essays "Introducción a un sistema poético" and La expresión americana, published in 1954 and 1957, respectively. I also put these works into dialogue with the concepts of "deterritorialization" and "nomadism" formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Just one aspect of Lezama's extensive, dense, and complex work is the "poetic system" he elaborated in bits and pieces throughout his oeuvre.2 The texts that most directly address this system include his best-known novel Paradiso (1966) and its unfinished sequel Oppiano Licario (1977), poetry from "Muerte de Narciso" (1937) to the posthumous collection Fragmentos a su imán (1978), and disparate essays such as "Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez" (1937), "Introducción aun sistema poético"(1954), the series of essays La expresión americana (1957), "Confluencias" (1968), and "Introducción a los vasos órficos" (1971), among others. Given the contradictions bound to arise in a work of such breadth, Lezama's poetic...