Postcolonial Self Research Articles

A step back, a leap forward: tradition, heritage, and visions of a new postcolonial self in the Greek Cypriot popular music of the 21st Century

ABSTRACT In the contemporary Greek Cypriot popular music scape, we witness various and varying instances that feature cultural heritage elements: the frontman of a hard rock band performing in a vraka, the traditional male trousers; a trap song making references to lefkaritiko, a traditional lace; a metal band opening their album with an acapella tsiattisto, a traditional oral poetic style. This paper discusses these and other instances by placing them in the wider historical and political framework of the Republic of Cyprus. Distinguishing between tradition and heritage, as well as place and space, it suggests that the creative turn to the cultural past of Cyprus can be interpreted as a redefinition of the modernisation and decolonisation process of the Republic of Cyprus, which is accomplished through an inward look that emphasises the geographical and cultural particularities of the island. This inward look, it is argued, speaks back to the historical process of decolonisation that was defined by external references (attachment to the motherland(s), desire for Westernisation, and opposition to the ‘Other’). The decolonisation process, itself the cause and effect of conflict and sentiments of ethno-nationalism, defined the identity of postcolonial Greek Cypriot subjects.

A Language Spoken with Words: Decolonization, Knowledge Production and Environmental Injustice in the Work of Abdulrazak Gurnah

The paper analyses the relationship between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice as represented in the writings of Abdulrazak Gurnah. Gurnah’s work is considered an example of decolonial literature. Decolonial literature has focused on issues beyond the nature of the colonial subject, highlighting the relationship between the capitalist world economy and the formation of modern decolonial subjectivities, namely the exposure of those subjectivities to environmental injustice. The paper intends to answer the following research question: how does Abdulrazak Gurnah address the articulation between decolonization, climate change, and environmental injustice? The paper argues that Gurnah addresses such an articulation by discussing knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self and instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity. Building from two of Gurnah’s novels—By the Sea and Afterlives – the paper debates how Gurnah’s characters are afflicted by the racialization of social and economic relations and biopolitical and climate precarity. Questioning knowledge production about the colonial subject and the postcolonial self is significant because it underscores the importance of transforming how knowledge about climate change is produced. Instituting an association between environmental/climate precarity and biopolitical precarity permits debating how colonial and capitalist power structures are responsible for disseminating environmental injustice, foregrounding the epistemic importance of indigenous climate change studies. The work of Gurnah is critically analyzed, bearing in mind the need to discuss the relevance of addressing climate change and environmental injustice from the perspective of global south literature.

A Comparative Study of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic: The Crisis of Identity in Postcolonial Literary Works

Throughout postcolonial societies, identity is amongst the most contentious and problematic concerns. The topic of identity in postcolonial literature will be explored in this study, using critical postcolonial theory to examine the complicated topic of identity struggles in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969) and Hanif Kureishi’s short story My Son the Fanatic (1994). Following a detailed examination, the study highlights the complex concept of hybridity and identity in a neocolonial environment, where a false concept of ‘purity’ defines and establishes identities. The protagonists’ struggles to improve and preserve an identity that straddles the line between complete integration and abandonment of their own culture are depicted in the study. The findings of the study demonstrate how issues occur when the West is placed higher than the East, and the postcolonial self is brainwashed and absorbed by this ideology. According to this study, oriental and occidental identities conflict still exists as long as the West maintains dominance over the East.

Unhomed at Home: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherman Alexie’s “The Search Engine”

“The Search Engine” is a short story by Native American writer Sherman Alexie. The story depicts a quest undertaken by a young urban Indigenous woman to find an enigmatic Indian poet and, by extension, her own postcolonial self. This article proposes to read Alexie’s “The Search Engine” through the lens of postcolonial criticism to investigate the text’s anticolonialist ideology and approaches to resist the colonialist domination and deal with the postcolonial condition. The analysis reveals that the text presents an anticolonialist sentiments through marginal characters who are conditioned by the sense of unhomeliness as a result of their socioeconomic disadvantages. The text then subverts the colonialist ideology by secularising Christian terminologies and revisiting a literary canon from the point of view of the underclass. Finally, the text suggests that conflicting postcolonial identities can be reconciled and hybridised through respect and recognition at an individual level. Keywords: The Search Engine; Sherman Alexie; Native American; Postcolonialism; Colonialist Ideology

Documenting Africa on Film and Nkrumah’s Legacy in Pan-Africanist Africa

Following Ghana’s attainment of political independence, the new nation’s leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, made efforts to lead Africa’s decolonisation process. He used film as a medium of achieving this Pan-African agenda. Nkrumah restructured and renamed the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU), which the British colonial administration had established, as the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) and placed it at the forefront of documenting and propagating his version of the Pan-African narrative. From neighbouring Togo and Burkina-Faso, to distant Kenya and the Congo, GFIC cameras captured historical moments relevant to Nkrumah’s ideas. Whereas Nkrumah’s political legacy and diplomatic rhetoric are largely known, his use of cinema to execute his agenda remains unexplored. This article draws attention to the role documentary films of the GFIC played in the African decolonisation process. Drawing on information gathered about these films from interviews with key actors within the defunct GFIC, and from personal archives of these actors, it is argued that, although the functional use of documentary films in Nkrumah government appears similar to how film functioned in the colonial regime, GFIC films traversed national education and propaganda to become media of continental African integration and stimuli for post-colonial self- motivation and independence.

Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic” and the Illusion of ‘Pure’ Identity

This paper takes on a critical literary approach to Hanif Kureishi’s short story “My Son the Fanatic.” Through close analysis, the text reveals the intricate concept of hybridity and identity in a neocolonial setting. Identities are shaped and founded on a false notion of “purity.” The text presents the tensions facing immigrants and their attempt to formulate and maintain an identity that falls between complete assimilation and the rejection of one’s own culture. To find and maintain that balance is the complex burden of hybridity. The characters must find a sense of belonging, and it is increasingly difficult to do so in a society infested with racial ideologies. The findings of this paper reflect how problems arise when the West is placed above the East, and this ideology is indoctrinated and internalized by the postcolonial self.

Book Review on Post-Colonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church

Book Review on Post-Colonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church

Review: A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church by Choi Hee An

Review: A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church by Choi Hee An

Itinerant Figures: Textual Mobilities in Fiction’s Diasporic Turn

Diasporas are dynamic and volatile in today’s globalizing realities and imaginaries because the sense of place and location by which diasporic experiences are understood has become fluid, ambiguous, even contested, and no longer a fixed and static space. In the process of globalization fractured at the very site of identification of the postcolonial self, it becomes that liminal space in-between, constituting, at once, demand and desire. In the fictional texts analyzed in this special forum written either during or after direct colonial rule, an access is given to fleeting transnational images of the fugitive and ephemeral displacement, dispersal and migrancy of intellectuals and ordinary people that underscore cultural difference in their diasporic experience. However complex that access might be in view of the diverse and multi-layered methodological protocols of interpretive reading, we find diasporic subjects that are present but invisible in a foreign land, mobile but constrained, located but displaced, connected yet isolated, real but illusory. In other words, we see shadows of metaphorically liminal sites of possession and loss, participation and alienation, subjectivity and subjection.

A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church by Choi Hee An (review)

A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church by Choi Hee An (review)

Narrative Id/entity in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

Abstract Poststructuralist theory interrogates systems of thought and discursive regimes of knowledge in order to locate the underlying historical assumptions that shape and inform human subjectivity. Nowhere is this epistemological excavation more complex than in representations of the postcolonial self. Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas can be read as a representation of the hybrid self, one produced by transcultural processes of colonisation. Yet, if we read the novel through Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, we find that Joshi’s narrative representation of self is not confined to the postcolonial dialectic of self and other. For Ricoeur, self and other than self reside in a circle of sameness-identity; it is constitutive of selfhood. While critical work on Joshi’s novel has distinguished between the narrator, Romi, and the protagonist as two mutually exclusive entities, the primary focus being the existential experience of Billy, this paper suggests that the narrator himself is intimately implicated in this experience. Indeed, they can be read as two parts of a whole being, a ‘double consciousness’ that inhabits the dialectic self and its other. Ultimately, this reading will attempt to access an understanding of the hierarchy of significations that inform our hermeneutic experience of narrative self-identity.

Care of the Postcolonial Self: Cultivating Nationalism in The Philippine Readers

The article examines the cultivation of revolutionary nationalism and the production of postcolonial subjectivity under a foreign regime. The analysis centers onThe Philippine Readers, one of the longest published and most widely adopted reading series for elementary students in grades 1 to 7 in the Philippines from 1920s to 1960s. Due to its use and scope, the Readers significantly impacted the development of Filipino mind, character, teaching, and learning for generations. The article mobilizes Michel Foucault’s notion of care of the self, whereby individuals undergo intensive self-scrutiny through texts that serve as manuals for living. It contends that the Readers functioned as a crucial guide that enabled Filipinos to care for themselves in instilling furtive yet subversive forms of nationalism under United States rule. More specifically, two forms of nationalism are discussed, and the concepts of covert and hybrid nationalism are situated within scholarly discussions regarding colonial complicity and opposition as well as Western and indigenous influences.

Theorizing the Postcolonial Self: Arabo-Islamic Modernities, Modernisms, and Modernizations

Catching up with the developed world without losing authentic cultural identity is identified by many Arab cultural theorists as the way out of the current socioeconomic and cultural crises in the Arab world. This seemingly clear-cut formula has proved to be extremely difficult to put into practice. Catching up implies resentment, admiration, and envy of the Other, against whose progress the Self's own progress is measured and whose experience both inspires and poses an annihilating threat on the Self. A fixation with an immutable indigenous tradition, which has become the bearer of cultural identity in the postcolonial Arab states, may thwart the Self's passage into modernity. The past could be a trap of narcissism, delusion, or self-pity; the West could be a trap of self-betrayal or colonial mimicry. Simplistic attempts to take what is useable from both traditions could lead to confusion and loss of authenticity. Modernity and its sibling terms modernism and modernization inherently seek to replace tradition. But postcolonial modernity, modernism, and modernization are fashioned to preserve, rework, and reinterpret tradition in order to remain products of the specificity of their own time and place. This paradoxical relationship between the Self and its indigenous tradition goes hand in hand with a paradoxical relationship with Western tradition, which is at once espoused and resisted, admired and resented. This paper investigates manifestations of alliances, tensions, and negotiations between indigenous and Western traditions in cultural theorization, literary theory, and criticism through conducting a comparative analysis between a number of Arab and Western authors of different ideological orientations. I map out four attitudes that address this problematic ranging from wholesale acceptance (or rejection) of indigenous or Western traditions and simplistic attempts at reconciling them to identifying paths to modernize indigenous tradition and indigenize Western ones.

Beyond the Margins: Identity Fragmentation in Visual Representation in Michel Tournier’s La Goutte d’or

In the final scene of Michel Tournier’s postcolonial novel La Goutte d’or (1986), the protagonist, Idriss, shatters the glass of a Cristobal & Co. storefront window while operating a jackhammer in the working-class Parisian neighbourhood on the Rue de la Goutte d’or. Glass fragments fly everywhere as the Parisian police arrive. In La Goutte d’or, Tournier explores the identity construction of Idriss through a discussion of the role that visual images play in the development of a twentieth-century consciousness of the “Other.” At the beginning of the novel, a French tourist takes a photograph of Idriss during her visit to the Sahara. The boy’s quest to reclaim his stolen image leads him from the Sahara to Marseille, and finally to the Rue de la Goutte d’or in Paris. The Rue de la Goutte d’or remains one the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the city. In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self (the “Other”) through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions.

Trauma in African women and children: a study of the Kenyan experience as illustration of the phenomenon

In traditional African societies, roles and responsibilities of its members were carefully regulated, giving the community a sense of cohesion, continuity and integrity. Following the periods of colonization, wars of liberation, independence and post colonial self governments, many countries in Africa have disintegrated into volatile autocratic dictatorships that have led to many wars, genocide, internal and external displacements of the people, recently complicated by natural and man made disasters. AIDS is a recent entrant to the equation. In the midst of these changes (and traumas) the family unit has been denuded of its security, continuity and order. African traditional education systems have been replaced by ill tested western models of education, while time tested rites of passage have been declared health hazards (e.g. circumcision) in many parts of Africa. Marriage systems that traditionally conferred stability derived from the nature of the marital bonds have been replaced by fragile western monogamous unions. These changes have affected relationships “Behind Closed Doors”. This paper describes the effects of this type of globalization on Africans taking Kenya as a case example, exploring domestic violence and the abuse of children.

Narrative Authority: Performing the Postcolonial Self

Postcolonial displacement and resulting cultural nomadism of second generation diasporia is often associated with loss, lack, exile. This author's position is that the cultural and linguistic margins that nomads inhabit are places of abundance and possibility. Establishing decolonized autobiographical authority necessitates the type of recognition, deconstruction, and re-association that second generation diasporic populations are uniquely positioned to undertake.

Functions of Translation in Post-Colonial India

Pour comprendre la fonction de la traduction dans l'Inde post-coloniale, nous devons tenir compte de l'influence de cette activité sur l'image de l'Inde des orientalistes, ainsi que sur le rationalisme anti-colonial qui s'est opposé à la domination britannique dans un mouvement d'affirmation historique et identitaire. Aujourd'hui, en Inde, la traduction est reconnue et sert de lien entre les différents groupes linguistiques, jouant un rôle actif dans l'identité nationale. En Inde, peut-être plus que dans d'autres pays anciennement colonisés, il est possible d'écrire dans sa propre langue. À l'ère post-coloniale, il s'agit là d'un puissant outil d'affirmation culturelle.

The Violence of the Hyphen in Judeo-Christian

I would like to take note of violence of hyphen in some contemporary uses of phrase Judeo-Christian.* My principal contention is that this phrase is being deployed in criticism of colonial and post-colonial discourse in a mytho-pathological way that disjoins Jewishness from social and political practices of Jews and conjoins it to a generalized notion of the West so as to construct a generic post-colonial Other. The larger issue, which I seek to address within this frame, is structure of discourse of post-colonialism or critique and resemblance that persists in that discourse between hyphen that passes Jew into and hyphen that, proclaiming at once passing and persistence of a colonial past, retains native in post-colonial as an internalized memory of his or her formerly subjugated self. By examining relations across hyphen, between Jew and what is called Judeo-Christian heritage on one hand, and between post-colonial and colonial experience on other, I want to explore way in which hyphen serves development of ideologically reified representations of and postcolonial subjects and to explore impact of these reifications on social relations between and among people so described. By reviewing together relations of Judeo-Christian and PostColonial hyphen, I hope to show that Post-Colonial hyphen joins once colonialized subject to an interiorized ideological construct of himself or herself as Other, in a way that is discursively homologous to subsumption of Jewish history into putatively present. Moreover, I want to suggest that similarity in rhetorical form of two hyphens provides for a seductive chiasmus at which Judeois superimposed on colonial to identify Jew with persistence of subjugated other within post-colonial self.