Postcolonial Space Research Articles

Hà Nội: Weathered Art: Radical Instinct, Community resilience and forecasting in a post-colonial space

Hà Nội: Weathered Art: Radical Instinct, Community resilience and forecasting in a post-colonial space

Metaphysics of the Dead and Existence in the Poetry of John Pepper Clark

Critical investigations into the works of John Pepper Clark, have always paid attention to the social thrusts of his works and his fidelity to the Nigerian landscape which he has copiously deployed in the heterogeneous corpus of his poetry. However, the social vents of his poetry have become the most controversial on account of an alleged token attention, inconsistency or disinterestedness with the social traumas that pervade his space. This article conducts a postcolonial study on one of the ardent subjects that pervade the poetry of John Pepper Clark. While identifying with the fact that responses to social traumas, through an engagement with the political issues of the society is just one of the purposes of poetry, this paper identifies with Clark’s philosophy of poetry which is mostly concerned with the subject of life and existence discernible, mostly, in his thoughts on death and dying. After looking at the diverse tentacles of the subject, the paper concludes that Clark’s death consciousness has not only validated some Africanised values that his discussions about death and dying are his moralising agents through which he dispenses mitigating pills on the social ills that have pervaded his postcolonial space.

Race, gender, and Occidentalism in global reactionary discourses

Abstract This article seeks to deepen understanding of the global politics of reactionary discursive formations, which at the current conjuncture increasingly coalesce around self-victimising articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as ‘elitist’ in Western core contexts or ‘Western’ in postcolonial spaces. Drawing on insights from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on racial entanglements, masculinism, and Occidentalism, I argue that racialised and gendered imaginations about an emasculated and overly multiracial West and, relatedly, renewed East/West binaries enable reactionary discourses in both Western societies and elsewhere through adaptable mechanisms of mediating between the international and the domestic. I then extend an analysis of global racial entanglements and gendered East/West binaries to Chinese anti-baizuo discourse from both online nationalists and dissident intellectuals, which provides a prime example of how grammars of global reactionary discourse are localised in different political projects and ideological constellations. It demonstrates how reactionary imaginations of the West are instrumental for animating narratives of racial-civilisational hierarchy and masculinist notions of politics and society hostile to egalitarian and emancipatory ideals in a ‘non-Western’ context. Moreover, by highlighting overlaps and divergence in the refashioning of dualistic constructs in American and Chinese ‘anti-woke’ narratives, I show that reactionary discourses operate not only across the geopolitical divide, but also through it, invoked by opposing political forces sharing ethnonationalist and masculinist logics in processes of mutual othering to perpetuate antagonistic identities. The article contributes to the intersection between critical research on the global right and postcolonial International Relations (IR).

Contribution of Culture-loaded Loanwords to the Class of Etymological Doublets in the Contemporary English Language

The article examines the loanwords from the autochthonous languages of South Asia and (or) regional variants of English into the Inner Circle English (according to Br. Kachru) – ayah, baboo / babu, baksheesh, feringhee / feringhi / ferinji / firanghi, gooroo / guru, maharaja / maharajah, maharani, maharishi, mahatma, mandarin, mantra, pagoda – and their role in expanding doublet pairs in contemporary English. The topicality of the study is due to the replenishment of the class of etymological doublets as a result of extensive borrowing process from the languages of the postcolonial space into pluricentric English due to increased population mobility, dispatriation, growing bilingualism, and expansion of global contacts. The scientific novelty is explained by the insufficiently studied subject of the research – the distinctive features of new doublets (native word vs. loanword, loanword vs. loanword) and the dynamics of their usage in contemporary English. The continuous sampling, statistical, descriptive methods are used in order to determine the role of culture-loaded loanwords in expansion of rows of etymological doublets. The major conclusions of the conducted research can be summed up as follows. The conditions for the formation of etymological doublets can be classified into mandatory (etymological similarity, i.e. relation to the same etymon: *awo-; *bhag-; *gwere-; *meg-; *men-; *pəter-; *preg-, *pregn-; *ten-;) and additional (acceptable graphical, phonetic, morphological variation and semantic identity). The study of empirical material allows us to identify trends towards, firstly, maximum divergence of the components of etymological doublet pairs and, secondly, increased frequency of culture-loaded loanwords due to the development of polysemy, strengthening of word-formation potential, formation of syntagmatic connections and inclusion in paradigmatic relations. Using the example of etymological doublets, one can trace the formal (mainly phonetic) and functional (mainly semantic) evolution of prototype words in donor languages.

Unraveling Trauma and Heterotopic Spaces in Michael Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost": A Postcolonial Exploration

The present paper explores Michael Ondaatje's novel "Anil's Ghost" through the lens of trauma theory, postcolonialism, and the concept of heterotopic spaces. As space studies examine migration, displacement, and exile, which are inherently linked to traumatic experiences, the investigation illuminates the intricate connection between heterotopic spaces and encounters with trauma, providing a valuable understanding of their interdependence. Michael Ondaatje, the acclaimed author of "Anil's Ghost", has drawn upon his own traumatic experiences of displacement and emigration in the novel. Therefore, the purpose of the research paper is to analyze how changes in space shape traumatic experiences. Spaces are integral to one's sense of place and identity, and traumatic events might disrupt this connection, leading to a profound loss of identity or a struggle to reconcile personal identity with changed or disrupted spaces. Studying the connections between trauma and space reveals a better understanding of how environments and spatial contexts impact the occurrence, perception, and recovery from traumatic events. The research contextualizes Foucault's concept of heterotopia within postcolonial distinctions in time and space, emphasizing its relevance in understanding the novel's narrative. It highlights the complexity of trauma and the challenge of reconciling historical narratives within these spaces. Employing a multidimensional methodology integrating cultural studies, trauma theory, and literary analysis, results uncover the complexities of trauma within postcolonial spaces, notably Sri Lanka, showcasing the profound impact of historical conflicts and Western interventions. Ultimately, the research concludes by recognizing the intertwined nature of trauma, history, and identity within physical and metaphorical spaces. It acknowledges the evolution of characters’ identities like Anil Tissera, who navigate their personal traumas and their nation's scars, seeking a path forward while acknowledging the weight of history. In summary, the manuscript contributes to a deeper understanding of how "Anil's Ghost" navigates the complexities of trauma, identity, and history, shedding light on the relationships between individuals, society, and historical narratives in postcolonial contexts.

A Post-Colonial critique on A Passage to India by Edward Morgan Forsterand Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

This study is centralized on the significance of post-colonial criticism implanted in Edward Morgan Forster’s A Passage to India and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable employing varying quintessential post-colonial theories coined by important post-colonial theorists. The following research involves scrutinizing the post-colonial space and the major critics in it corresponding with the horrifying ramifications of imperialism that alters the socio-political, cultural, and economical dogmas of a nation including the linguistic approach which plays an important role in the development of the literary canon. This research explores the subject of colonial implications presented by two different writers originating from far away poles which conclusively examines how two distinct categories of colonial exploitation work one being triggered by foreign agents and another being planted inside the premises of a nation making a distinction between the mechanism of oppression. The two primary texts’ projects justify the outlook on the aftermath colonialism and also portray important theories of Hybridity, Oppression, and Othering.

The ‘situatedness’ of security in postcolonial spaces: Examining the historical and spatial trajectories of localised practices in Tunisia

Preventing and countering violent extremism programmes (P/CVE) programmes in western and postcolonial countries present several differences as well as similarities. The differences are a consequence of specific coordinates of time and space in which security programmes are situated. This article builds on a growing scholarship focusing on the dimension of time, highlighting how the investigation of global and local historical trajectories brings to light postcolonial processes of security policymaking and their role in shaping local security measures. Through interviews carried out in Tunisia with local and international NGOs working on P/CVE, this research examines the agency of international and local actors, and their role in implementing or challenging global and local security narratives. The objective of this research is to show the connection between global and local security narratives and practices, and the role of colonial historical trajectories in the evolution of security.

The Opacity of the World: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Abstract Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time explores the complex ways in which women relate to each other across cultural difference and generational gaps, as mothers and daughters, as rivals and friends. My article traces the friction between Black feminist group solidarity and aesthetic distance in Swing Time to suggest that the novel can be brought into dialogue with a postcolonial aesthetics of opacity, as coined by Édouard Glissant. The tension between opacity and transparency is the organizing principle of Swing Time, as the novel engages with movement and change, postcolonial spaces, and the mysteries of friendship, while vacillating between ironic narrative commentary and a more elusive aesthetics of concealment. Reading Smith’s work through a Glissantian lens also sheds light on affinities between her essayistic writing and her fiction.

“What Is This Palestine, Anyway?”: Two Second-Generation Palestinian American Women Negotiate Roots and Routes

This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: “What is this Palestine, anyway?” through a reading of Najla Said’s and Suheir Hammad’s memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of “Palestine” geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within.

Religious Meditations and Mediation in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka

Major critical inquiries into the theatre of Wole Soyinka agree that his plays draw inspiration from two basic levels. One, which is a purely mythic consciousness perceptible in his early plays such as such as The Road and A Dance of the Forests, presents his etherealisation of African spiritualities and their interpolations with modern existence. The other is a social or political consciousness which deploys those mythic forms from ancestral memory (especially that of Ogun) as intervening tools on the conditions of dystopia in the postcolonial Nigerian landscape mirrored in his plays. By focusing on his plays The Trials of Brother Jero, Death and the King’s Horseman, Requiem for a Futurologist and Alapata Apata, this article argues that these two thrusts are harmonised in Soyinka’s mimesis on spiritualities or religion in his dramaturgy. The article locates the ambivalences in Soyinka’s refractions on spiritualities which anchor on the polarities of meditation and mediation and recognises that while meditation gives allowance for the playwright to engage on the locus of spiritualities, mediation is inspired by the crises of “modern” spiritualities which is one of the malaises in Soyinka’s hybridised postcolonial space. The conclusion of the article is sceptical about Soyinka’s prescription of hybridised spiritualities as panacea to the crises of religion but sees the need for continuous dialogue as precursor to mutual understanding and cohabitation between adherents of diverse spiritualities in the pluralised communities.

Decolonizing Discourses of Tropicality: Militourism and Aloha ‘Āina in Kiana Davenport’s Novels

This paper contextualizes Hawai‘i as a tropical landscape submerged under the discourse of exoticism which conceals the continuing American militarism, nuclearization, and tourist-oriented development in this archipelago. Militourism, as defined by Teresia Teaiwa, argues that the perpetuation of tourism based upon the imagination of tropical paradise conceals the continuation of colonial/neocolonial exploitation of the Hawaiian Islands. Under the discourse of tropicality, nature is instrumentalized, denying the agency and subjectivity of both the environment and Hawaiian indigene positioned as the Other. Kiana Davenport’s literary imagination of Hawai‘i contextualizes this locale as a postcolonial space, a site of conflict and contestation concerning discourses of nature. Her fictions decolonize colonial conceptions of nature by construing the Kānaka epistemology of aloha ‘āina which refigures nature as an active subject. It further posits the intertwined aspects of nature, place, and culture in Indigenous epistemology. Aloha ‘āina functions as a locus of Indigenous resistance interwoven with their political resistance, ongoing struggles for reclaiming ownership of land, and eventual sovereignty.

Poetry Analysis of Osundare’s Random Blues: Using Speech Act Theory

Osundare's involvement in performative poetry is an attempt to fulfill her social responsibilities and connect with her community as her collective poetry is expressed through performance. The rhetoric of his poems and the structure of their presentation explains why he uses the techniques and resources of the African oral tradition in many of his poems. The purpose of this study is to explore the intertextual relationship between the second generation of Nigerian artists and the new Nigerian artists in terms of colonial influences and relationships. This study shows that poet Niyi Osundare is a second generation iconoclast through which he influenced the poetic landscape of contemporary Nigeria. This study shows that contemporary poets are not significant and methodologically influential to other secular poetic texts, so the aesthetic principle of poetry is emphasized when the dialogue between texts is seen in the form of Osundare poetry. Osundare tells about the paradigm shift of intertextual relations from a vertical point of view, and the artistic practices preserved from the colonial period are the vertical practices of the postcolonial space. The research is qualitative in nature and primarily analyzed primary and secondary data from the literature, original research and literature review. This study also uses poststructuralist intertextuality as a theoretical framework to explore the extent of intertextual relationships. This study suggests that in order to understand recent Nigerian poetry in English, there is an urgent need to explore the history of their intertextuality. Beyond the intertextual dimension, this study demonstrates that the symbiotic relationship between power and traditional formation provides an ontological framework for examining the aesthetic experience of recent English poetry in Nigeria.

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

Religious metaphors and the crisis of faith in Wole Soyinka’s poetry

Most commentaries on Wole Soyinka’s works across genres engage with his constant invocation of cultural tropes, most of which revolve around Ogun, his self-proclaimed muse. In this article, I highlight the centrality of religious myths and metaphors in a selection of Soyinka’s poems, namely, “Idanre” in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibman (1976), “Joseph”, one of the “Four Archetypes” poems in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), “Mandela’s Earth” in Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989), and selected poems under the sections “The Sign of the Zealot” and “Elegies” in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). While identifying the limitations of the poet’s Ogun trope, I dissect the centrality of faith issues in Soyinka’s poetry into two slants. The first, which is seen as encompassing his widely explored Ogun trope, is his use of religious metaphors to intervene on the dystopias in his postcolonial space. The second is his concern with the crisis of faith, a menace that has continued to threaten global peace. After drawing copious examples of religious tropes from Soyinka’s selected poems, I focus on the attention given by the poet to crisis in faith relationships. The copious examples of Soyinka’s use of religious metaphors lead to the conclusion, at the end of the paper, that access to Soyinka’s poetry is best achieved by paying attention to his religious metaphors. I also identify Soyinka’s antidote for the crisis of faith which lies in his prescription of tolerance and respect for humanist ideals.

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

Spatializing Narrative: Postcolonial Spaces of Oswald Andrew Bushnell’s Ka’a’awa

This study explores the representation of space in O.A Bushnell’s Ka’awa in which the seemingly contradictory spatial scene of the urban, the rural, the picturesque and the macabre delineates the complexity of postcolonial spaces. Ka’a’awa foregrounds the journey of Hiram Nihoa through his travel all around O’ahu in the 1850’s. Nihoa’s first-person account provides a vivid avenue for the readers through textual cues delineating spaces as they mentally mapped the slowly unfolding and unfamiliar spaces as his narration progresses. This study is the intersection between environmental/eco-criticism and geo-criticism which focuses on the complexities between spatial referents and their real-world referents as is stated by Tally Jr and Prieto, especially the postcolonial contexts of Hawai’i-West interaction during the second half of the 19th century. The finding posits how the readers familiarize themselves with the picturesque landscape of O’ahu through Nihoa’s evocative narration and how the spatial scene later resurfaces as space connotes death and diseases due to epidemic which defamiliarizes readers from prior spatiality. The spatial scene narrating scene of disease, despair and death highlights the discursive and material condition of Hawai’i as a postcolonial space. Space in Ka’a’awa alludes both toward the referential condition of 1850’s Hawai’i and symbolically represents the decline of the Hawai’ian natives.

Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty

Reviewed by: Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty Grace Akese Jacob Doherty, Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 288 pp. I review this book from Accra, Ghana, where I am researching the aftermath of the demolition of Agbogbloshie, the infamous e-waste site in Accra, popularly known as the world’s largest e-waste dumpsite. In the summer of 2021, as part of the Greater Accra Regional Ministry’s campaign of #letsmakeAccrawork, the site was violently torn down amid armed military and police presence, and economic activities there were brought to a halt. What appears to be a complete erasure had precedents in evictions and similar demolitions in 1993, 2002, 2004, and 2015. Reading Doherty’s Waste worlds in the here and now of Agbogbloshie’s very own morally charged rhetoric of urban decongestion, displacement, economic precarity, and environmental harm, I couldn’t help but draw parallels about how urban social and environmental transformations manifest through waste and its infrastructure in Africa’s major cities. The title of the book Waste worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s infrastructures of disposability is telling of the grounded and ethnographically rich nature of his accounts. Doherty offers a lively and engaging ethnography of Kampala’s waste and its infrastructural life. Waste is not just a matter of management within a technocratic regime. Waste foments lively engagements with people and places; as such, it is part of and creates lived worlds that “emerge through the process of inhabitation—the everyday world-making practices of cleaning, sorting, discarding, and salvaging” (6). Waste worlds are “the official and unofficial infrastructures and economies that constitute the city’s waste stream and develop around it” (3). In three parts, each with five chapters, Doherty thoroughly and engagingly transverses the “heterogeneous assemblage—of waste, technologies, [End Page 177] discourses, moral logics, forms of work, political rationalities” (22)—that make up these emergent worlds. What, then, do the densely inhabited waste worlds of Kampala look like? The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), a new municipal authority formed by President Museveni’s government, features prominently in Kampala’s discardscape. Created primarily to subvert the power of the city’s elected officials, KCCA’s mandate includes cleaning the city. Doherty shows that the KCCA evangelizes this mandate and embraces a moral charge to cleanse, reorder, and eventually redeem a city that has fallen from grace. Assuming an overlord, the authority enrolls a regime of disposability, which among other things, manifests in evictions and displacements, a process that Doherty describes as a “destructive creation” (69) where in the name of development, some places and livelihoods are inevitably sacrificed. Even as the KCCA actively renders some livelihoods and space waste as a necessity for development, it must also remove the waste created by residents. In its waste removal efforts, the authority is unable to maintain a sealed waste stream where waste collection, often outsourced to private services (in low-income settlements), travels from spaces of generation to final disposal–from homes, offices, and factories to landfills. Para-sites comprised of so-called informal waste scavengers and salvagers punctuate the city’s imagined linear waste stream. In a system designed to exclude them, they are the conditions of possibility that makes it function properly. In this highly charged field of struggles around waste and its infrastructure, the KCCA thinks of itself as a-political, wielding only a technical mandate to clean Kampala. In this field of struggle, I find Doherty’s attention to the play out of race and racialization in Kampala one of his most compelling contributions. There is limited direct engagement of race and racialization logic in the burgeoning studies on the politics of waste in Africa. To the extent that race is engaged, studies more broadly focused on toxic waste flows from the West to Africa and associated environmental justice concerns. Following Jemima Pierre’s (2013:xii) insight that a “modern, postcolonial space is invariably a racialized one,” the final part of the book sheds light on the racialized scripts and framings of urban futures that play out in highly publicized yet mundane events like the monthly cleaning exercises organized by...

<em>POST-SPACE</em> SEBAGAI BENTUK PERLAWANAN IMIGRAN TERHADAP TATANAN KOLONIAL DALAM NOVEL <em>BRICK LANE</em> KARYA MONICA ALI

Brick Lane's is a post-colonial literary work that raises the issues of the Bangladeshi diaspora in England. The raise of diaspora writers who settled in Europe and America has colored modern world literature. The ideas of diaspora writers do not only present works with monolithic ideas, they have also presented various spatial constructions and identities about immigrants living in the Western world. This research was conducted as an effort to answer the formulation of the problem as follows: (1). What is the postcolonial spatial response in Brick Lane Monica Ali's novel? (2). How about urban space construction and postcolonial spatial strategy in the novel Brick Lane? This study uses qualitative research methods to explore how the author constructs postcolonial space and offers post-space in his work. Data was collected inductively through the depiction of characters in the novel and classified for later analysis using Spatial Politics Sara Upstone's theory. The results of this study indicate that the authors attempt to present chaos as a postcolonial spatial response. The chaos presented by the author appears when certain individuals in the novel feel discriminated against in a space with colonial-created boundaries and orders, either because of their identity or social class. The author also constructs city space by offering a strategy displacement in the form of transferring a sense of belonging to the smaller things that construct urban space, and the relationships between figures that make individuals feel comfortable with their existence.

“It’s Karachi, Its, Where Life and Love Come to Die”: Representing Gender, Space and Identity in Karachi You are Killing Me

This paper demonstrates that Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi You Are Killing Me, re-conceptualizes the relationship between urban spaces and female bodies. The traditional urban theories define space as unchangeable physical reality that profoundly affects its inhabitants. Feminist urban theorists question the traditional gendered perspective on both space and corporeality. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz (1998) concept on bodies cities, I will investigate how woman as being both spectator and spectacle renegotiates her identity within the patriarchal urban spaces. This research argues that Grosz’s (1998) concept of Bodies-cities is an important intervention in our understanding of spatial politics in postcolonial spaces, as it discusses how female bodies play an important role in the formation of urban corporeality. Her seminal feminist work invents a new insight into the city-body nexus that also helps to address issues such as gender discrimination, inequalities, and urban violence.

Afro-Asia as method: Bandung, the production of postcolonial space, and the cruel optimism of the 1960s

ABSTRACT This article provides a conceptual intervention regarding how postcolonial space was reimagined in the aftermath of global decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that political imagination operates not only temporally by rethinking pasts, presents, and futures, but it equally functions spatially by reconsidering normative geographies such as the continent and the nation-state. This article examines in particular how “Afro-Asia” as a space was invoked and generated in the wake of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, by African newspapers and periodicals. Assisted by the popularity and growing mythology of the Bandung meeting, the term “Afro-Asia” evolved in the years after 1955 as shorthand for collectively referencing the countries that participated at the summit to becoming a wider point of orientation for countries that sought to participate in a broader intercontinental endeavor. This larger inclusion combined with the failure to hold a “second Bandung“ in 1965 contributed to the eventual decline of “Afro-Asia” as a new territorial space. Nonetheless, the legacy of “Afro-Asia” as a spatial idea for readdressing political, historical, and cultural geographies can still be found in recent work in Indian Ocean studies and China-Africa relations.