Postcolonial Strategies Research Articles

Brown Britain: post-colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually-existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post-colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post-colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.

Acts of Negation : Modality and Spatiality in the Satanic Verses

This paper reads Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses through a postcolonial critical perspective. It argues that the author rewrites the history of Islam by utilizing postcolonial strategies of historiographic modality and spatiality in order to challenge Islam as a colonizing force and deconstruct what he considers its essentialist creeds. Ironically, Rushdie negates postcolonial discourse by essentializing Islam and evaluating it from an imperial perspective and a Eurocentric point of view. Such practice undermines his claims to modality and to spatial history writing and compromises his decolonizing project against Islam.

What's the Difference? Reflections on Discourses of Morality, Modernism, and Mosaics in the Study of Music in Canada

In different periods of Canadian cultural history, social difference has been articulated by means of discourses of morality, modernism, or mosaics (among others). Each realm of discourse has negotiated various fields of tension between, for instance, the local and the global, tradition and hybridity, or mediated and live performance. These fields of tension are not easily apparent unless we compare discourses relating to different genres of music and sociomusical spheres. The ways in which Canadian ethnomusicology has been complicit with strategies of "managing difference" become clearer with such analysis. Possible post-colonial strategies for empowering voices of difference are also considered in relation to Canadian studies.

Sikh Dharam and Postcolonialism: Hegel, Religion and Zizek

This article ponders what it would require to rethink Sikh dharam today, given the irreversible transformation that occurred from a (pre-colonial) sikhi to today’s (colonial/modern) Sikhism. Such reassessment is approached through the employment of a third term, sikhi(sm). This third term operates as a postcolonial strategy to foreground the legacy of powerful colonial inscriptions, and in doing so, this study aims to recall how (colonial) power continually affects the production of (modern) knowledge. The article therefore charts not only how Europeans created the modern, and now, ‘world religion’ called Sikhism, but how this mode of naming the other as religious through an abstract conceptualization of religion in general, derives from Hegel and his colonial era—an era where the manufacture of religion as a universal category is simultaneously understood as a racial one. Furthermore, Hegel’s way of confronting difference was through an intellectual/academic project of conceptualizing history as the evolution of religion, and that this way of conceptualizing the other married well with colonial adminstrators that sought to control their colonies. This intellectual project to name the other as being part of a religion and therefore of the past, along with its inherent colonial subjugation, has persisted up to the present—even evident in the critical theory of the Left (Žižek). The persistence of this coloniality in contemporary academic discourse is marked by a mode of enunciation that operates to keep the other at bay and relatively voiceless in their subjugated speech. This subjugation is achieved and maintained through a theory of translation-as-representation; where the difficulty of translation proper (as a real meeting of equals with their varied epistemic centers that are allowed mutually to affect each other) is substituted by one where a singular epistemic center is seen as authoritative, and interacts with the other through orientalist modes of representation only it itself fashions, revealing less a heterolingual dialogue and more a hegemonic monologue. After charting the colonial/modern context, the article then briefly sketches some of the key principles that are required to begin the figuration of a postcolonial sikhi(sm).

Media Archipelagos: Inter-Asian Film Festivals

The potential of Asia as method is this: using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other's points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a different understanding of world history.-Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as MethodContemporary scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities tends to settle upon two somewhat overworked topological relations of islands. The first predominant relation presents a clear focus on islands' singularity, unique histories and cultures, crafted and inscribed by the border between land and sea. The second distinguishes islands from mainlands/ continents, and dwells on their differences from these larger settings.-Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko, and Andrew Harwood, Envisioning the ArchipelagoThis essay centers on emerging material and imaginary configurations of/in Asia, suggesting an alternative mapping to the still dominant Cold War logic of the East and West. Taking film festivals in Asia as its chief example, it aims to engage and build on a range of provocative scholarship examining cultural regionalization and Asian theory (e.g., not simply theory from Asia but theoretical engagements with Asia itself) as well as inter-Asian media flows, creative industries, urbanisms, social movements, and related cross-fertilizations. The Asian festival's marginal status-at the center, of course, is Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Sundance, etc.-both repeats dominant epistemological structures by which the non-West must go through the core to communicate in the non-West and, at the same time, fosters significant new sites and modes for inter-Asian connectivity. Festivals across Asia-including the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), previously known as the Pusan International Film Festival; the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF); TOKYO FILMeX; Taipei's Golden Horse Film Festival; and the International Film Festival of India, but especially the many smaller exhibitions-can be understood as a clustering of sites or archipelagos that reframe the self-referential logic of Western media capitals.Chen Kuan-Hsing's Asia as Method provides us with a useful starting point. The work signals a thickening shift toward Asian interreferencing-as well as Third World or fringe interreferencing-as world building. Put otherwise, inter-Asian exchanges, rather than Western modernities, serve as the basis on which to build new social, economic, and political formations. As a conceptual apparatus, Asia as Method attempts to dissolve the oftencriticized coupling that takes Asia as data or source material and the as method or theory. As many scholars have noted, this hegemonic process produces the as a singular model to which the non-West must endlessly measure or catch up. A key aspect of Chen's intervention is to theorize modes of engagement that do not proceed directly through the and instead crystallize around multisited regional capacities. These sites do not dissolve Euro-American presence and related structural inequalities but instead act to dislocate their position as and at the ontogenetic core. Provincializing Europe-to borrow the title concept of Dipesh Chakrabarty's seminal study-does not go far enough.1Critiquing postcolonial strategies that continuously locate the as the reference and point of opposition, Chen offers a molecular approach that understands the West as bits and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never totalizing, way.2 Here, the is one cultural resource among many. Simply put, Chen's aim, alongside many theorists associated with inter-Asian cultural studies, is to potentiate new modes of becoming that are rooted in Asian experiences and entanglements, where Asia is not only raw material but also model and method. …

Post-Russian Eurasia and the Proto-Eurasian Usage of the Runet in Kazakhstan: A Plea for a Cyberlinguistic Turn in Area Studies

Drawing on the theoretical discussion of common features of cultures in the post-Soviet space, this paper proposes to refocus on the linguistic dimension and to investigate post-Russian Eurasia. Is not the role of the Russian language coming under serious challenge in the post-Soviet context, where independent states are downgrading the status of Russian in administration and education and where ethnic Russians are ‘remigrating’ from former Soviet republics to the Russian Federation? There is, however, one medium in which Russian is gaining new significance as a language of inter-regional communication: the Internet. Albeit to a lesser degree than English and Chinese, Russian serves as a means of communication between Russian-speaking communities all over the world. What is more, the Russian Internet (Runet) offers access to elaborated resources of contemporary culture (video and music downloads etc.). The paper discusses the role the Russian-based Runet plays for Eurasian webcommunities outside the Russian Federation, mostly relying on Kazakh material, and asks whether post-colonial anxieties about Russian cultural imperialism through the Runet are justified or not and what the Kazakh, possibly post-colonial strategies of coping with this situation are. Essential to this essay is the notion of cyberimperialism, which combines aspects of media studies with post-colonial studies. The interdisciplinary approach to Internet studies is completed by a linguistic focus on the performativity of language usage online for creating situational language identities. The essay rounds off by offering an analysis of Nursultan Nazarbaev's ambiguous inclusive-exclusive logic of argumentation and confronting it with Russian Eurasianism.

Stance and strategy: post‐structural perspective and post‐colonial engagement to develop nursing knowledge

How should nursing knowledge advance? This exploration contextualizes its evolution past and present. In addressing how it evolved in the past, a probable historical evolution of its development draws on the perspectives of Frank & Gills's World System Theory, Kuhn's treatise on Scientific Revolutions, and Foucault's notions of Discontinuities in scientific knowledge development. By describing plausible scenarios of how nursing knowledge evolved, I create a case for why nursing knowledge developers should adopt a post-structural stance in prioritizing their research agenda(s). Further, by adopting a post-structural stance, I create a case on how nurses can advance their disciplinary knowledge using an engaging post-colonial strategy. Given an interrupted history caused by influence(s) constraining nursing's knowledge development by power structures external, and internal, to nursing, knowledge development can evolve in the future by drawing on post-structural interpretation, and post-colonial strategy. The post-structural writings of Deleuze & Guattari's understanding of 'Nomadology' as a subtle means to resist being constrained by existing knowledge development structures, might be a useful stance to understanding the urgency of why nursing knowledge should advance addressing the structural influences on its development. Furthermore, Bhabha's post-colonial elucidation of 'Hybridity' as an equally discreet means to change the culture of those constraining structures is an appropriate strategy to enact how nursing knowledge developers can engage with existing power structures, and simultaneously influence that engagement. Taken together, 'post-structural stance' and 'post-colonial strategy' can refocus nursing scholarship to learn from its past, in order to develop relevant disciplinary knowledge in its future.

The uneasy masculinities of dissidence and exile: Reinaldo Arenas’s fight for textual‐sexual freedom

The exiled Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, regarded as a dangerous “counter‐revolutionary” by his government, uses alternative sexualities as both means and metaphor of social insurgence. As a writer, he foregrounds traumatic and personalized issues of politics and sexuality – critiquing both communism and capitalism – in order to explicate the meaning of freedom from homosexual and human rights perspectives. This article investigates how Arenas pushes the limits of satire and the absurd as postcolonial strategies for liberating oppressed masculinities.

The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction Naomi Lindstrom Keywords Naomi Lindstrom, Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, Art History, Architectural History, Spanish America, Spanish Art, Latin American Art, Latin America Zamora, Lois Parkinson . The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. xxiii + 420 pp. The sumptuously produced, clothbound volume The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction offers a fusion of literary criticism, art and architectural history, and interdisciplinary cultural criticism. Lois Parkinson Zamora does not just allude to visual expression, but analyzes specific examples in as much detail as the literary texts she discusses. The book includes twenty-three meticulously reproduced color plates and eighty-five halftones of images ranging from codices containing indigenous writing, sculptures of Quetzalcoatl and the oft-reproduced image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, through colonial religious art and baroque churches, to the painting of Diego Rivera and other muralists and of Frida Kahlo. Analyses of these visual productions are coordinated with studies of Spanish American narrative and essays. The literary examples are principally from the twentieth century, though there are comparative references to earlier writers, Sor Juana in particular. With such a wide-ranging collection of exemplary texts, The Inordinate Eye requires a strong central thesis to give it unity, and it possesses one. Throughout her study, Zamora follows the evolution of the baroque in Spanish America. While the baroque style was, of course, brought to the New World as part of the imposition of European culture and religion, it became transformed over time, as interaction with Amerindian and African cultural currents resulted in original hybrid [End Page 459] forms. The New World Baroque resulting from this lengthy process of transculturation is reclaimed as a force for cultural resistance by Latin American writers of the twentieth century. In Zamora's summary, "the New World Baroque has become a self-conscious postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and and perceptual categories" (xvi). This project of recovery is not only manifested in essays, such as those of Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy, that openly discuss the relation of the Baroque to Latin American realities. In Zamora's view, it is also present, at a more implicit level, in creative writing and the visual arts. The first chapter treats the initial coming together of Amerindian and European cultural forms. Zamora discusses a wealth of examples, but focuses most closely on two narratives, that of Quetzalcoatl's encounter with a mirror and that of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The author examines the aspects of ancient Amerindian signifying media that current-day Westerners find most difficult to grasp. Zamora's analysis of the Virgin of Guadalupe brings to the fore the dynamic and productive nature of the interaction between Amerindian cultures and the Spanish-Catholic one just then in the process of becoming dominant. In the second chapter, Zamora explores links between the indigenous codices and twentieth-century cultural productions, specifically, the literary narratives of Elena Garro and Eduardo Galeano and the murals of Rivera. The author reminds readers that, in the cosmology of Mesoamerican peoples, space and time were a unitary entity, and reading and writing included public performance (70). It is this integrated outlook that Zamora identifies in the work of the modern-day creators, calling Rivera a tlacuilo, which she translates as "diviner/painter/priest/performer" (70). Only a specialist in ancient Mesoamerican writing and cosmology could evaluate the solidity of Zamora's information and her tracing of these pre-Hispanic concepts in modern Spanish American productions. However, the resulting analysis certainly makes for fascinating reading, and this chapter is outstandingly original. Chapter 3 directly explores the twentieth-century reconceptualization of the Baroque, and the discussion is especially helpful to readers seeking to grasp the central concepts uniting the vast range of topics in this study. Summarizing the ideas of Carpentier, Lezama Lima, and Sarduy, Zamora observes that while all were perfectly aware of the colonial imposition of the Baroque, "they came increasingly to understand the Baroque as a postcolonial strategy . . . by means of which Latin American artists...

Burying the Dead: The Postcolonial Strategies of Achebe and Naipaul

Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the ‘native intellectual’ is a worthwhile endeavour in this global era, especially as the postcolonial subject is bombarded with countless Western-based theories that emphasize ‘fragmented’ or ‘floating’ identities, which occupy an ambiguous space. This paper will examine the strategies undertaken by two current postcolonial writers, V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, who have negotiated for themselves ideologically opposed strategies, which as I will argue, represent radically different psychological states of development on the part of the two writers as evidenced by their work. Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the development of the ‘native intellectual’ will be used to help bring the psyches of these two writers into sharper focus..

4 - Apartheid’s University: Notes on the Renewal of the Enlightenment

This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apart- heid. The paper suggests that the university’s responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present. Rather than merely invoking the Enlightenment traditions of the modern university as sufficient grounds for proclaiming a post-apartheid reorientation, I track the career of notions of academic freedom and university autonomy in the outlines of complicity. I show how the concepts of academic freedom and autonomy obscured a prior contract with the state and how that complicity extended a process of sub- jection. By deploying the postcolonial strategy of ab-using the Enlightenment, the paper outlines the failure of opposing apartheid in the name of academic freedom and autonomy. That failure, I argue, resulted in an inability to investigate the relationship be- tween the university and the state and blinded the university to its role in the crea- tion of racial subjects. Rather than merely casting the university in terms of the foundational concepts of academic freedom and university autonomy, I suggest that it might be more productive to consider the epistemological and political potential of a renewed reference to the Enlightenment. Apartheid’s University, cast as conti- nuity of the Enlightenment legacy, might allow us to rewrite its abject script in the direction of resisting the forms of subjection supported by that process of normali- sation.

Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania

AbstractTanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activatingbongo, ‘the brains’.

POSTCOLONIAL METACRITIQUE

Several critics have eschewed Fredric Jameson's by-now infamous concept of ‘national allegory’, rejecting it as simply one more manifestation of the Eurocentrism of First World theory. Yet an elucidation of the concept's metacritical emphasis demonstrates that it offers an important point of departure for the development of a systematic and rigourous postcolonial hermeneutics. At the core of Jameson's thesis is a recognition that ‘Third World’ texts are a priori interpreted as Third World: there is and can be no possibility of unmediated access to the Other and thus postcolonial strategies of reading are ineluctably informed by an allegorical consciousness that accesses the Other through an anterior set of signs that pre-exist in the cultural realm. While several theorists aside from Jameson have recognized that all interpretation is essentially allegorical, his insights have a particular relevance for specifically postcolonial interpretation, especially since postcolonial critics have been slow to realize that postcolonial texts are ‘always-already-read,’ apprehended only through the residue of previous interpretations. Jameson's insights direct us forward, away from the ultimately banal task of classifying and categorizing ‘properly’ postcolonial texts and toward the more important imperative of examining the conditions that shape the process of postcolonial literary production, publication, dissemination and reception. Reading postcolonial texts as ‘national allegories’ does not, then, represent the hopelessly unsophisticated hermeneutical task that many critics now assume; rather it involves disrupting the monologic, nondialectical model of reading exemplified by what Abdul R. JanMohamed has termed ‘manichean allegories’. Allegorical reading in the Jamesonian sense exposes the breaks and gaps in colonialist logic by detecting and analyzing non-contingent and contradictory meanings.

Global Comparativism

Global Comparativism

Global Comparativism

Global Comparativism

Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis

Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant culture. Orientalism remains even more critical now than twenty-five years ago because the task of taking hold of self-representation has become, for Palestinians, a matter of life and death. Resistance (muqãwamah) was first applied to literature by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, and the example of post-colonial literature remains the crucial model for the Palestinian people. This article proposes that the post-colonial strategy of transformation turns resistance from a simple opposition to a control of the means of representation. Success for the Palestinian people will never come from armed struggle but from the control of representation and the communication of the Palestinian situation to a dominant audience. In this way the achievement of Orientalism can be extended to the level of contemporary politics.

Performing Postcolonially: Contextual changes in the adaptations of Wole Soyinka's death and the king's horseman and Femi Osofisan's once upon four robbers

Postcolonial theatre and intercultural theatre have different aims and performance strategies. The former seeks to “dismantle the effects of colonialism” (Lawson 153) while the latter re‐packages foreign materials for new “target” audiences (Pavis Crossroads 137). Rustom Bharucha challenges Western adaptations for misinterpreting other cultures’ ideas, but the problem is both conceptual and practical. Adaptations that gloss over the political agenda of texts and their concerns for cultural authenticity or that privilege transcultural presentation strategies produce mere “atmospherics” (Soyinka Dialogue 3) and “cultural fragments” (Brandon 31) instead of reinforcing the postcolonial intentions of “source” texts. This article will distinguish between postcolonial and transcultural strategies and analyse how transcultural approaches to space, mise‐en‐scene and characterisation in Western productions of Wole Soyinka's Death and King's Horseman written in 1975 and Femi Osofisan's Once Upon Four Robbers first published in 1991 undermine both texts’ postcolonial intentions.

Building diaspora and nation: The 1991 ‘Cultural Festival of India’

ABSTRACT This article discusses the production of Indian ethnicity in the United States through a close reading of the Cultural Festival of India, an event that took place over four weeks in 1991 in Edison, New Jersey. The festival, organized by the Gujarati Hindu sect, Bochasanwasi Swaminarayan Sanstha, presented an extravagant and general vision of ‘India’ for Indian as well as non-Indian Americans through arts performances, shopping displays, food stands and cultural exhibits. The Cultural Festival of India can be seen as an occasion for a new type of ‘imagined community’, or as an instance of diasporic nationalism, that is, produced by immigrant Indians intent on projecting a positive image of themselves, and is steeped in romantic notions of the home country. As Indians in First World countries form larger and more visible populations, they begin to develop elaborate strategies for constructing associative identities. In the United States, the Indian middle class has chosen the terminology and the historical precedents of ‘ethnicity’ to construct itself as a group within the political and cultural landscapes of a ‘multicultural’ nation. The rapidly expanding Indian capitalist economy simultaneously procures foreign investment through connections maintained with these overseas Indians as well as through a new image projected abroad of India as a source of progress. Nationalism, diaspora, culture and identity become confounded both as theoretical categories and as material forces. The Cultural Festival of India illustrates these developments through the reification of Indian ‘culture’, the portrayal of idealized Indian social values and the celebration of technological innovation. Through an examination of the festival, the article explains the continuities in colonial and postcolonial strategies of building national and transnational communities.

The Hispanic Post-Colonial Tourist

The Hispanic Post-Colonial Tourist Jaume Marti-Olivella Allegheny College The Transnational Subject as Post-Colonial Tourist In this paper I want to bring together my critical interests in the fields of Feminism, Hispanism and Cultural Studies. ' More specifically, I want to argue the creation of a new narrative figure, what I will term the "transnational subject" which, if seen from the perspective of post-colonial studies becomes a new site to articulate the historical and narratological tension between the old metropolis and new decentered cultutal locations . I will focus on the ongoing trend among women writers from the Hispanic world to deconstruct popular narrative genres which have been traditionally dominated by male authors. This trend constitutes a parodie rewriting of some of the "foundational fictions" that established the (male) national subject, as Doris Sommer has so persuasively argued.2 My goal in this essay is to contextualize this new Hispanic feminism and its textual politics against the patriarchal consolidation of those national subjects. Quite consistently, these writers create characters who are "travellers ," who ate separated, both factually and/or imaginatively, from their desired others. It is this "travelling condition" that is central to my study since it produces a new narrative figure, that of the "post-colonial tourist " or the "transnational subject." To analyze this figure requires a critical shift from the ongoing process of textual decolonization of traditional Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 24 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies travel narratives and colonial chronicles in order to focus our critical gaze on the most important form of travel today: tourism. In the Iberian and the Latin American contexts, the role tourism has played in the socioeconomic transformation of society is an obvious one. Much less obvious, however, is the significance of tourism as an important factor in the process of (trans) national refiguration in our countries. A different and yet quite relevant question is to ask if tourism, both intellectual and recreational , becomes a multicultural practice of ideological and narratological significance. Or, to say it in Homi Bhabha's terms, if our transnational narratives ate not destabilizing the traditional "location of culture."3 The work of Carme Riera, Mercedes Abad and Ana Lydia Vega constitutes an illustration of such "an innovative site of collaboration and contestation" (Bhabha 2) In what follows I will study the parodie gestures of these three leading voices in the new Hispanic feminism, as a contestation of the foundational romantic fictions of their patriarchal predecessors. Before beginning my textual analysis, however, I would like to establish mote death/ the theotetical connections between tourism as a social practice and its narrative consttuction in the context of other postcolonial strategies. Interestingly enough, tourism has already generated a considerable amount of analytical literature in the social sciences. And yet, it has received far less attention from the fields of post-colonial and Cultural Studies. Most studies on the subject have been devoted to early travel writings, from the Spanish so-called "conquest" of the Americas to the British "imperial travelogues" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . Instead, I want to suggest that tourism has become the contemporary privileged scenario of the "colonial encounter," or, as Mary Louise Pratt has it: of "the contact zone."4 Briefly put, my contention is that tourism constitutes the most salient aspect of a neo-colonial situation, that is, the massive exploitation of natural and/or cultural resources of the so-called Second and Third Worlds by members of the so-called First World. This consideration is both highly contested and widely echoed by many statements coming from sociological and anthropological studies of tourism. Dennison Nash's essay on "Tourism as a Form of Imperialism " offers one of its clearest formulations: If productivity is the key to tourism, then any analysis of touristic development without reference to productive centers that generate tourist needs and tourists is bound to be incomplete. Such metropolitan centers have varying degrees of control over the nature of tourism and its development, but they exercise it—at least at the beginning of their relationship with tourist Jaume MartÃ--Olivella 25 areas—in alien regions. It is this power over touristic and related developments...

On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture

In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a more particularistic focus on the scene of ethnographic interaction.