Postcolonial Response Research Articles

Adapting (to) Jane Eyre: Racial Violence, Intergenerational Trauma, and Black Optimism in Lauren Blackwood’s Within These Wicked Walls

This article draws on Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe’s writings on ‘optimism,’ ‘wake work,’ and ‘fugitivity’ to present a reading of Lauren Blackwood’s 2021 rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a metafiction of Black literary adaptation as survival. In rejecting the overdetermined stereotype of the mad subaltern woman as the localised focus of the novel’s commentary on racial violence, Within These Wicked Walls departs from twentieth-century, postcolonial responses to Jane Eyre exemplified by Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Wide Sargasso Sea to offer an explicitly Black and anti-racist rewriting of the Victorian novel. I show how Blackwood draws on the diasporic discourse of “Ethiopianism” and American genres of multiethnic and Black Gothic storytelling to explore the trauma of racialised violence (including its imperialist literature) as a cultural and intergenerational curse that must be faced, exorcised, and grieved by a younger generation. This analysis highlights the contributions Blackwood’s novel makes to the Black radical tradition, underscores the need for more Critical Race Theory in the study of Victorian literature, and reminds scholars of the vital role literary adaptation once played – and should still play – in criticism of race and imperialism in Victorian literature.

From ‘village tanks’ to ‘evaporating pans’: Colonial and Post-colonial responses to ancient village tanks in Sri Lanka

Village tanks, prevalent since ancient times, were an integrated part of the irrigation system in Sri Lanka (‘Ceylon’ till 1972). It was under these village tanks that paddy cultivation took place, and they were a part of the socially, technologically, and ecologically cohesive way of village life. The colonial authorities, who tried to renovate that ancient system, perceived village tanks as technically inefficient due to excessive evaporation and uneconomical land use. However, for several reasons, that perception could not be materialized during their renovation works. During the post-colonial period, with the implementation of the land colonization schemes in the 1930’s and the multipurpose river valley development schemes in the 1960’s, the scenario took a different shape. The technically perceived inferiority of the village tanks was brought into the new water management policies and the engineering designs. As a result, many of the village tanks were demolished, and those lands were converted to the farmlands. Instead of water availabilities assured through village tanks, canal irrigation became prominent. The socio-technical bondage between the village tanks and the village communities was not considered, presenting a classic case study for the consequences of neglecting social component of the technology. This paper discusses the social, political, and technical implications of these moves and their influence on shaping the present irrigation setup in the island.

Race, Whiteness, and Absence in Studio Practice

My work as a visual artist and scholar frequently engages with issues associated with racialized violence, lynching, queer identity, and post-colonial responses to historic displays of racial difference in museums. This paper grew out of a CAA panel, entitled “The Color of Joy,” in which I used my practice as a conceptual lens from which to revisit the events surrounding the deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021 in our nation’s capital. This provided an entry point from which to consider the parallels between the photographic depictions of pleasure or joy found in lynching postcards and the media images of the events of January 6th. I then sought to reposition “joy” as a generative response to art because of its potential to reconfigure and reimagine complex historical and cultural narratives, even as they continue to unfold around us. In discussing my work, I laid out my own artistic practice as both a critical and generative response to historic events which can be seen as part of a movement towards decolonizing art history.

Rally Day

Abstract March 5, 2018, was the final rally day for the Sierra Leone People's Party prior to that country's national elections. The SLPP held its last day of public demonstrations in Bo, the country's second largest city and primary urban center in the Mende-dominant southeast. As was true of other political parties in other cities and other elections in Sierra Leone's turbulent past, violence played a key role in structuring rally day events and participants’ experiences of them. Yet this violence has not always been the same. In 2018 the beating of a young man by a rally crowd was in some ways unexceptional, both in Sierra Leonean politics and in the postcolonial response to urban crime. And yet it marked a subtle shift in both Sierra Leonean electoral politics and in the way such vigilante justice in African cities is interpreted. Contrasting the ethnographic elements of this single day with other representations of crowd violence in West Africa, this article explores an urban landscape that complicates the distinction between political and nonpolitical violence and between the presence and absence of the postcolonial state.

“The heart has its reasons”: Elizabeth II and the post-colonial response

Edward Shils’ and Michael Young’s “The Meaning of the Coronation,” took up crucial aspects of Shils’ thinking about differentiating types of social bonds, which led to his distinction between primordial, civil, and sacred bonds, and to his focus on center and periphery and the charisma of central institutions. The relation of these concepts to colonialism and post-colonialism is complex, but the reign and death of Elizabeth II illustrate them clearly. Colonial subjects responded to the same bonds, devised alternatives to them, and accepted the revisions represented by the Commonwealth after decolonization. But they also sought liberation from the colonized mind, and in doing so reconfirmed the centrality of the institutions they were attempting to liberate themselves from. Her death evoked dual reactions consistent with this problematic relation.

European tragedy as requiem, ruin, revenant in Magnet Theatre’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Thomas Köck’s antigone. a requiem

Offering a comparative case study of two different postcolonial responses to Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone from European and African perspectives, this article brings together Magnet Theatre’s Cape Town production of Antigone (not quite/quiet) with Thomas Köck’s play antigone. a requiem that premiered almost simultaneously in September 2019 in Hannover, Germany. Both re-examine Sophocles’s tragedy to come to terms with their respective colonial histories and postcolonial challenges: while Magnet Theatre engages with the ancient material to reflect on the difficulties of fully overcoming the legacies of colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa, Köck explores the afterlives of ‘thebaneuropean’ colonialism as manifested in current European migration policies. Comparing the adaptation principle of Magnet Theatre’s ‘ruinous’, fragmenting approach to the literary and theatrical archive of European colonialism to Köck’s postdramatic recomposition of Antigone as a requiem for migrant deaths and for European tragedy itself, the article discusses the productions in their respective contexts of political protest movements. Drawing on cultural theory of ungrievability, domopolitics, and postcolonial shame, it explores the central functions of the chorus – indecisive Europeans on the verge of anagnorisis in Köck’s play, the post-apartheid South African generation caught between rage and disillusionment in Magnet Theatre’s production – and as well as the prominence of Ismene as a problematic survivor figure in both adaptations.

Iklan Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

<i>Iklan</i> Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy as a Response to Post-9/11 Islamophobia and as Implicit Critique of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy (2009) to argue that Home Boy constitutes a postcolonial response to 9/11, an explicit critique of the ensuing American response and Islamophobia, and a tactical alternative to and implicit critique of Hamid’s novel. The article highlights some problems created by the narrative strategies Hamid uses and shows how Naqvi takes a different approach, in particular by foregoing the temptations of ambiguity and gender stereotyping and highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims from 9/11 and its aftermath. In so doing, the article suggests how critical readers can recognize both the drawbacks of Hamid’s celebrated novel and the alternative possibilities of other strategies that Muslim writers can use to address the problems of neo-Orientalism and global Islamophobia.

REVISIONISM: CHALLENGING THE CANON THROUGH THE REVISIONARY NARRATIVES OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA AND FOE

Revisionism is the exercise of revising or reforming of one’s point of view to a previously held belief or accepted viewpoint of a situation. In literature, revisionism is the retreading of a canonical text through a different point of view. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is one such retelling of the story of the canonical text of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, from the viewpoint of the minor character Bertha Mason. While Jane Eyre tells the story of a simple girl, Jane Eyre, and the happy ending of her romantic narrative, this paper will study Wide Sargasso Sea as a revisionary text that picks up the minor narrative of Bertha Mason as Antoinette, a Creole heiress, making it a tragic feminist grand narrative of postcolonial response to the romantic tale of Jane Eyre. Similarly, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe is a revisionary text based on the canonical text Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Placing a woman in a male dominated world, the novel Foe highlights the issues of patriarchal oppression, colonial oppression, authorial tyranny, and language and power, which remain hidden in the romantic canonical narrative of Crusoe’s adventurous life and his valorous escape from the island where he was stranded for twenty eight years. This paper will trace the difference of a woman’s life and journey than a man’s in a world ruled by patriarchal laws. Moreover, this paper will establish the novel Foe as a revisionary text that retells Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from a realistic and colonial point of view instead of a heroic tale.

Postcolonial Theory and the Challenge of Caste

Colonialism in India that postcolonial studies centrally theorizes is almost exclusively the understanding of colonialism of the caste-Hindu elites. Colonial modernities of caste groups other than the dominant caste-Hindus are not only at variance in priorities and textures but often do not share the latter's articulated anticolonialisms. To demonstrate this difference, I discuss in this paper a site – one out of many possible ones – where caste difference explodes the framework of postcolonial theory: English in India. I further show how vernacularism as the chosen postcolonial response also obscures the caste-privileged constituency of postcolonial theory in the Indian context. Given this difference, from the vantage point of my pedagogy, I argue that postcolonial theory needs disentangling from anti-colonial nationalism to be useful to, hold up to the scrutiny of, and offer more equitable entry points for students with different caste histories. I propose that postcolonial is taught – in and for the Indian context at least – in a tense juxtaposition with caste scholarship, annotating its lacuna and interrupting its intense interlock with nationalism.

Postcolonial responses to decolonial interventions

ABSTRACT In the last decade, the terms ‘decolonial’ and ‘decoloniality’ have been deployed in an expansive manner and have gained increasing traction across many theoretical and political domains. Therefore, a critical assessment of the specific decolonial vocabulary is both timely and necessary. The relationship between the decolonial and the postcolonial especially requires more critical scrutiny than it has received so far. This special issue takes a step in this direction by staging critical dialogues between postcolonial and decolonial approaches on different terrains. While decolonial theory tends to operate as an expansive and centripetal force, pulling within its orbit a variety of other theoretical and political formation, our focus is on the original formulation of ‘decoloniality’ – or the ‘decolonial option’ – within the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) group. In this introduction, we outline some of the main objections that decolonial critics have formulated against postcolonial theory, and we argue that these critiques have been instrumental in defining the decolonial option itself. While advocates of decoloniality have been very vocal in their critiques of postcolonial theory, we note among postcolonial critics – with some exceptions – a predominant tendency either not to respond to these charges or to downplay them in favour of reconciliatory moves. As an alternative to this tendency, we stress the value of a postcolonial critical response to the decolonial intervention. We argue that postcolonial theories still have something to offer to a critique of the present and the past. In the face of the decolonial claim to have radicalized or surpassed postcolonial theory, we suggest that the postcolonial must speak back and reclaim the value of its critical apparatus in the context of the unfinished struggle for decolonizing knowledge and the social unconscious of postcoloniality.

The ‘commodified’ colonial past in small cities: shifting heritage-making from nation-building to city branding in South Korea and Taiwan

ABSTRACT Amid increasing interest in city branding in East Asia, the municipalities of Gunsan (South Korea) and Chiayi (Taiwan) chose colonial heritage-making as their city branding strategies to recreate their cities’ identities and regenerate their economies. Both cities were mostly built by Japanese imperial authorities and thrived in the 1920s and 1930s but deteriorated in the post-colonial period. Seeking to overcome long economic recessions, these two small cities endeavoured to rebrand in the twenty-first century. Their cases illustrate novel approaches to adopting colonial heritage-making at the small city level in national contexts where the management of colonial heritage is conducted mostly as part of the nation-building process. By comparing post-colonial Gunsan and Chiayi, this study presents comparative perspectives on post-colonial city branding processes and sheds light on different post-colonial responses to colonial heritage-making. The strategic and pragmatic preservation of colonial heritage in these two small cities has simultaneously produced city narratives of ‘commodified’ colonial modernity that represented the would-be cities’ aspiration for being identified on the global map. We analysed the effects of ‘commodified’ colonial modernity – the recolonisation of past by now – and identified possibilities for alternatives.

Cultural Diversity in Igbo Life: A Postcolonial Response to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.

A Postdramatic Engagement with Robinsonade Motifs in Tim Crouch’s I, Caliban

Tim Crouch’s I, Caliban is a postdramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest included in a collection titled I, Shakespeare in which he recreates Shakespeare’s most marginalised characters. The focus in this sequel adaptation is on Caliban who tries to survive after Prospero and all others have left the island. Different from the representation of Caliban in postcolonial reworkings of Shakespeare’s play, Caliban, in this work, is not preoccupied with taking revenge. Instead, he emphasises the need for social interaction as he has been left alone on his island. Drawing on former structural comparisons of The Tempest and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe based on their common themes such as the island setting, master-servant relationship, colonial expansion, and power politics, the aim of this paper is to discuss Crouch’s adaptation as a transformation of common motifs of the Robinsonade in its attempt to respond to the ideologicalformations of Shakespeare’s text. Among such transformations, the concept of survival, for instance, is handled from the native’s viewpoint in Crouch’s work. Instead of the figure of the stranger who finds life on an unknown land difficult to cope with, this time, the native turns into a captive on the island though it is a familiar setting. Another motif used in an alternative manner is isolation, which is not presented as fuel for civilisation but as Caliban’s psychological trauma, which he explores through storytelling as a postdramatic element. Apart from the narration, the play demonstrates other uses of postdramatic elements to suggest an isolated figure on an uninhabited island like the use of objects such as toy boats and tape of sea sounds. Instead of seeing Crouch’s work as a postcolonial response to Shakespeare’s work, this paper will try to investigate how the use of island setting and the theme of isolation can make it closer to a Robinsonade. By this means, it will also try to ask whether an adaptation could also be read in relation to a work that is not intended as its source text.

PALIMPSEST IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICAN NOVELS

Critics have often discussed African novels on postcolonialism as subversive and counter-discursive to European representations of Africa with limited attention paid on the layers of inscriptions relating to pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa embedded in these texts. This study uses the metaphor of the palimpsest to explore the layers of writings ranging from the pre-colonial culture, the colonial textual depictions of Africa and the postcolonial response and re-portrayal of Africa within selected African novels. It argues that these novels encourage Africa to reflect on its pre-colonial and colonial past with the intention of learning from its mistakes, the positive aspects of its culture and the colonial experiences, and forging a future based on hindsight rather than continually blaming colonialism for its development maladies. To achieve this, palimpsest in this paper becomes a self-reflective metaphor for understanding the effects of colonialism, the complicities of Africa in the colonial enterprise and the need to forge a future that transcends the colonial experiences. While the palimpsest provides a means of understanding the past, the ‘metaphors of transformation’ by Hall provides the impetus for progress. Article visualizations:

Languages in the Malaysian Education System: Monolingual Strands in Multilingual Settings

Malaysia is ethnolinguistically diverse. According to Ethnologue, for a population of over 30 million, 134 languages are spoken within its territory, of which 112 are indigenous and 22 non-indigenous. Against this backdrop of ethnolinguistic vitality, only some of these languages figure in the formal education system either as the medium of instruction (as in the case of Malay and, for some time, English) or as a subject within the school curriculum (as in the case of Iban, Kadazandusn, Tamil, Chinese and Arabic). This edited volume, which is published under the Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education series, provides an overview of the “positioning of these languages” within the education system, “for the purpose of integration of the Malaysian peoples” (p.1). In this regard, the “positioning” of languages within the education system is ostensibly political in nature, and is tied closely to Malaysia’s postcolonial responses to the project of nation-building, of developing national unity with a population that is linguistically and also culturally and socially diverse. The book is organized in 10 chapters, each authored or co-authored by key researchers in the area.

Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett by Nels Pearson

<i>Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett</i> by Nels Pearson

Intertextualidade, narradores e outras vozes em Wide Sargasso Sea, de Jean Rhys

O romance Wide Sargasso Sea, de Jean Rhys, é geralmente considerado uma resposta pós-colonial à obra Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë. Embora ambos os romances apresentem conexões intertextuais, a estrutura narrativa de Rhys distancia sua obra da narrativa de Brontë, mas também a complementa. Assim, é o objetivo deste artigo estudar o nível de intertextualidade presente em Wide Sargasso Sea em comparação a Jane Eyre, além de apresentar análises sobre os tipos de narrador e focalização observados nas três unidades narrativas distintas da obra por meio de teorias sobre narradores homodiegéticos com base em Bal e Nieragden.

Regulating Eco-Sensitive Zones

The monograph examines the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel on making the Western Ghats eco sensitive zones in the light of Indian environment laws. The Indian environment debate of conservation and protection of biodiversity has been sustained by post colonial response that has two major opposing strands. The first is the cultural opposition characterised by the indigenous people of their homestead, religious and livelihood rights. The second is the opposition within the political and legal framework that has taken the judicial and policy making route. Both these strands have richly contributed to the environmental policy that India has today. In this context, an expert panel on considering Western Ghats as eco sensitive zone observes the cultural and natural history of the biodiversity hotspot through the lens of planning and regulation. This brings out the tension between the natural habitat perspective of the people, flora and fauna of the forests and the regulatory band that the state imposes on it from outside. Understanding the conflict is the beginning of a sensitive policy toward incorporating forests as spaces of natural and cultural importance.

Decolonizing Science and Science Education in a Postcolonial Space (Trinidad, a Developing Caribbean Nation, Illustrates)

The article addresses how remnant or transformed colonialist structures continue to shape science and science education, and how that impact might be mitigated within a postcolonial environment in favor of the development of the particular community being addressed. Though cognizant of, and resistant to, the ongoing colonial impact globally and nationally (and any attempts at subjugation, imperialism, and marginalization), this article is not about anticolonial science. Indeed, it is realized that the postcolonial state of science and science education is not simply defined, and may exist as a mix of the scientific practices of the colonizer and the colonized. The discussion occurs through a generic postcolonial lens and is organized into two main sections. First, the discussion of the postcolonial lens is eased through a consideration of globalization which is held here as the new colonialism. The article then uses this lens to interrogate conceptions of science and science education, and to suggest that the mainstream, standard account of what science is seems to represent a globalized- or arguably a Western, modern, secular-conception of science. This standard account of science can act as a gatekeeper to the indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing of postcolonial populations. The article goes on to suggest that as a postcolonial response, decolonizing science and science education might be possible through practices that are primarily contextually respectful and responsive. That is, localization is suggested as one possible antidote to the deleterious effects of globalization. Trinidad, a postcolonial developing Caribbean nation, is used as illustration.