Postcolonial Thinking Research Articles

Sport, Maoism and the Beijing Olympics

The development of sports in China since the 19th nineteenth century has been influenced to varying degrees by imperialism, nationalism, Maoism, and postcolonial thinking. This paper explores these ideologies and political practices connected with sport during this time from three angles: Mao’s early thought thinking on regarding physical culture and sport; the development of sports under Mao’s socialism and the Cultural Revolution; and China’s breakthrough in the post-Mao era. In sum, sport remains connected over time with the idea of « imagined Olympians » and of a response to the « Sick Man complex. » TFinally, he advent of postcolonial thought has opened the possibility of more diverse understandings of sports in China.

Terrorism, Orientalism and Imperialism

This essay argues that there are striking parallels between what Edward Said called orientalism and the dominant discourse of counter-terrorism underpinning the war on terrorism. Beginning with a discussion of the contribution that postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak have made to understanding the imperialist determinants of the discourse of terrorism, the essay proceeds to examine how the orientalist stereotype of the anti-colonial insurgent is interrogated in Sahar Khalifeh's novel Wild Thorns and Yasmina Khadra's novel The Attack.

Kulturelle komplexitÄt, postkolonialismus und pÄdagogische verÄnderung: herausforderungen für vergleichende pÄdagogen

This study explores various elements in the struggle for a post-colonial refashioning of cultural identity through education. Drawing on experiences in Australia and the Caribbean, the author illustrates how educational systems undergoing decolonisation reflect socio-cultural tensions of race and power. The author discusses the complexities for comparative educators in engaging with suppressed knowledge, recognising the yearnings of the marginalised, challenging the conditions that lead to poverty, and refashioning education for social justice in an era when the achievement of justice seems increasingly difficult. She argues that comparative educators can benefit from using post-colonial thinking to understand cultural complexity and promote lifeaffirming practices in educational change.

Nationalism and ambivalence: ethnicity, gender and folklore as categories of otherness

ABSTRACT Roginsky suggests a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between nationalism and its ‘ambivalent Others’, namely, ethnicity, gender and folklore. She proposes a cultural interpretation of these elements, considering them to be dialectically connected within a single macro socio-logical system. The theoretical background for this proposed framework derives from sociological and historical research concerning nationalism, national identity creation through ethnicity and folklore, postcolonial thinking about the Other and feminist research regarding gender and the body. A case study of the Israeli nation-building project will serve as the focus and will provide the empirical data for exploring the theoretical link between nationalism and its Others. Roginsky follows seventy years of Israeli folk dance, from pre-state Israel to the present day, suggesting a historical ethnography of the field. She examines questions dealing with the sociology of nationalism and the politics of identity, focusing on the national bodily arena of folk dance.

Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Postcolonial Other in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride

Margaret Atwood published her eighth novel, The Robber Bride, in 1993; it marks a moment when postmodernism and post-colonialism that have always been discernible in Atwood's work came to fore in critical dialog. (1) The Robber Bride is a novel concerned with place and with origins. Many of characters have complicated ethnic and cultural histories, reflecting something of increasingly multicultural composition of contemporary Canada. But this multiculturalism is always in tension in novel with traditionally White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of British colonial Canada. Consequently, question where do you come from? recurs throughout novel, and Atwood reads it as an aggressive rather than a neutral question: seeking to distinguish insiders from outsiders. In this article I examine this tension between insiders and outsiders--which is effectively classic tension between self and other--and I suggest that The Robber Bride articulates a peculiarly Canadian view of postcolonial Canada is caught between two opposing power positions. It is ex-colonial nation (that is, colonial other to Britain's colonizing self), and it is also undeniably a First World nation, with a position of privilege and power in world (and therefore is First World self to Third World other). This unstable division continues even within borders of Canada, as Donna Bennett points out: both French and English Canada, while they may be postcolonial to a dominant Other, have played, and continue to play, role of imperial power to Native (Bennett 2004, 115). This article examines Canada's dual power position, and much of argument is framed by an examination of parallel experience of ambiguous power positions faced by white feminists addressing problems of Third World women. Both topics--feminism and nationalism--are connected by a quest for power and a quest for identity. I demonstrate that Atwood's examination of women's power is frequently employed as a metaphor for Canada's experience as a postcolonial nation. Identity in The Robber Bride is frequently shifting, and by this, I argue, Atwood attempts to reflect what she sees to be shifting identity of Canada itself. In novel and nation, boundary between self and other--between colonizer and colonized--is fluid and uncertain. In The Robber Bride, Atwood articulates a common late-twentieth-century interest in postcolonial discourse, but she translates prevalent postcolonial ideas of difference and otherness to fit her own understanding. The split voice of a racially divided culture becomes, in this novel, separation of narratorial focus into three separate speaking subjects. For each of three (white) protagonists, Tony, Roz, and Charis, there is a detailed history; for each woman, origins are of fundamental importance. Post-colonialism in this novel is largely read through experiences of white women, which may seem to undermine potency of examination, but this allows Atwood to challenge Canada on some of its assumptions of postcolonial innocence by examining, in abstract, manner in which First World self responds to presence of Further to this, Atwood interacts with many of issues thrown up by postcolonial thinking in her depiction of shape-shifting Zenia. This character's instability--demonstrated by her compulsive re-reading of her own origins--creates a powerful depiction of the other woman. Most frequently read in terms of sexuality and greed (most notably by Coral Howells and Atwood herself, as discussed below), Zenia's otherness, when considered through lens of post-colonialism, becomes simply a metaphorical figure of the other. By examining interaction of each of three protagonists with this alien other, The Robber Bride plays out a number of tensions, including exoticism and orientalism, currently being articulated by postcolonial theorists. …

The Construction of the Other and the Self in André Gide's Travels in the Congo and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Reportedly, André Gide's Travels in the Congo (1929) had fostered reforms of the colonial policy in French Africa. In Travels, Gide reports cases of economic exploitation, abuses of power, use of terror, torture, and even homicidal raids against recalcitrant villagers and, at least in one case, Gide takes it upon himself to have a man prosecuted. Yet his account, through the lense of post-colonial thinking, betrays reactionary and biased views of Africans. Gide does not object to the colonial system per se, but rather blames its malfunction on both a lack of infrastructures and administrative involvement. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon denounces colonialism, focusing on its dehumanizing effects. If Fanon believes that it is the responsibility of those oppressed to regain their freedom, he is also aware that colonized people have internalized racial stereotypes to the point of self-loathing. Hence Black Skin can be read as a rebuttal to Travels. While Travels, published only twenty years earlier, clings to values of past centuries—supporting France's "civilizing" mission in Africa, Black Skin looks toward the future as it condemns the ideology of colonialism. Both liberals, communist sympathizers and social activists, Gide and Fanon represent the two opposite poles of the colonial issue.

COMMENTARY: Problems of Translation in Postcolonial Thinking

COMMENTARY: Problems of Translation in Postcolonial Thinking

Postcolonial Scholarship?Productions and Directions: An Interview With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This interview took place on December 18, 2000, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's office at Columbia University, New York. In a room lined with books and papers stacked high, Spivak spoke about postcolonial scholarship and its global challenges. Spanning a diverse range of interests, Gayatri Spivak's work has influenced critical scholarship across multiple disciplines throughout the world. Her scholarship has significantly shaped the course of postcolonial thinking and has had profound impact on conceptualizing issues of culture, identity, communication, and transnationalism. When asked about her interest in the areas of global communication flows, new technologies, and the politics of culture, Spivak referred us to two of her recent essays where she writes about global cities and cyberliteracy in the journal Gray Room and in Judith Butler's edited volume What's Left of Theory. In this interview, we asked Spivak to speak to issues concerning the intersections between communication and postcoloniality.

Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The Nation

This article seeks to view colonialism in a historical perspective, including the perspective of the future. It argues that, in spite of the devastation it has wrought globally, colonialism has transformed the identities of the colonized, so that even claims to precolonial national identities are products of colonialism. Recent postcolonial insistence on the hybridization of identities has revealed the irrelevance of the search for national identity that was prominent in the postcolonial thinking of the 1960s. Nationalism itself, the essay suggests, is a version of colonialism in the suppression and appropriation of local identities for a national identity. All identity, historically speaking, is a product of one or another form of colonialism, and hybridization of identities is an ongoing historical process. What is particular about modern colonialism, the article concludes, is its relationship to capitalism, which a preoccupation with colonialism and national identity has driven to the margins of political and cultural thinking. This relationship, which was central to postcolonial thinking earlier, needs to be foregrounded once again without, however, dissolving colonialism into capitalism.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere: a critical review of his contributions to adult education and postcolonialism

Despite being one of Africa's greatest postcolonial thinkers, implementing an award winning national literacy campaign and writing extensively on adult education and development, the contributions of Julius Kambarage Nyerere remain relatively unknown within mainstream adult education. This paper critically examines the contributions of Nyerere to adult education and postcolonial theory. The paper makes two assumptions. First, it assumes that there is a relationship between the discourses of postcolonialism and the project of constructing a more inclusive knowledge base of adult education. Second, that postcolonial theory provides a relevant framework for understanding the politics of adult education and development. Through a comprehensive and critical textual analysis of Nyerere's major works on adult education and development, the paper concludes that Nyerere's philosophy of adult education and lifelong learning was very progressive if not radical. Nyerere's ideas on education for liberation and development resonate with those of Paulo Freire. By linking the principles of education for liberation to the goal of building an egalitarian, socialist society based on the philosophy of Ujamaa, Nyerere provided an innovative and yet ‘localized’ theory of social change. Finally, Nyerere provided a sustained critique of colonialism and racism, and was a committed advocate of equality, unity and economic and social justice for the postcolonial world.

Who Sets the Terms of the Debate?

In response to Bourdieu and Wacquant, I argue that American hegemony in setting the terms of debate on ethnicity and racism is nothing new, led in the first half of the century by US heterotopic intellectuals, immigrants, outsiders and descendants of slaves. Ironically, in the light of claims made by the authors, in the post-war era the debate is increasingly dominated by ex-imperial British and French postcolonial thinkers. The authors' disquiet is more explicable, however, if viewed against the background of French republican discourses that deny the legitimacy of `difference' in the public sphere. But in the final analysis, terms such as multiculturalism or ethnicity are not legislated from above but respond to grassroots social movements, and in France minority groups are presently claiming a voice and presence in the public sphere.

Bortom ödelandet. En läsning av Stina Aronsons roman Hitom himlen

In this artide the novel Hitom himlen (1946) (This side of heaven) written by the swedish au thor Stina Aronson (1892-1956) is analyzed and put into a historical context. In previous scholarly research Hitom himlen usually has been very tightly connected to the province, the laponia area, an archaic landscape beyond Logos. Inspired by new historicism and postcolonial thinkers my thesis here is that Stina Aronson with Hitom himlen created something more than just a picture of a remotely situated landscape. Both textually and structurally, I mean, Hitom himlen generates textual strategies con cerning intercultural encounters, which must be read in the light of the end of the second world war and the racist and fascist thoughts that occured at the time. Structurally these intercultural strategies principally appear through the narrator's constant negotiations between different groups of people, privileged and unprivileged; samer, laestadians and academic priests. According to this the narrator applies a polyfonic multi-lingual language where an intellectual, western language and a language which is influenced by the local people is used at the same time. In addition to this the narrator in Hitom himlen also uses a lot of misfitting words, "catachresis" to speak with Spivak, which indicate different understandings of the world. Hitom himlen then turns out to be an explicitly political text. A text where the narrator manages to criticize epistemological grids, a text where the narrator t hrough the ruptures focuses the rift between the narrow and the general.

Falling Through the ‘Savage Slot’: Postcolonial Critique and the Ethnographic Task1

This paper observes that recent theoretical developments in anthropology present a challenge to ethnography understood as a holistic study involved in the task of translation. By addressing the critiques of postcolonial thinkers, and some postmodern thinkers, the paper seeks to re‐formulate what the ethnographic task can and should involve at the end of the twentieth century. The discussion is premised on the view that a practice of ethnography is central to a continuing and distinctive identity for anthropology. It is argued, nonetheless, that this can be only an ethnography that has expanded the sites at which it is practised and escaped the classification of the world into ‘the West and the rest’.