Postcolonial Times Research Articles

Images of God in Toba Batak storytelling

This paper examines the ways in which God the Creator, the High God, is described in Toba Batak folk-tales. The sources for this investigation are stories recorded in pre-colonial (around 1850), colonial and post-colonial times (up to 2014). In different stories the High God can appear under various names, forms and gender, and resides in various places never inhabited by humans. Unlike a Deus otiosus, the Toba Batak High God is not “inactive” after creation, but continues to be involved in the life of mankind through local or supra-local manifestations. Although he rules the realm of death, he is nevertheless regarded as the source of life, fertility, health and prosperity. There are also stories about manifestations of God in which he shares the experience of suffering with human beings. The main Toba Batak community rituals in pre-colonial times were addressed to a manifestation of the High God.

The Beitbridge–Mussina Interface: Towards Flexible Citizenship, Sovereignty and Territoriality at the Border

ABSTRACTLocated at the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe, the Beitbridge border post aptly demonstrates border citizenship from below. Established as a result of the London Convention of 1884, the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe finds expression at the Beitbridge border post. However, Venda-speaking people on both sides of the border post who were “separated” when the border was drawn have always engaged in dynamic and agentive ways that defy the existence of the border. This interaction pre-dated and survived the colonial and apartheid years in the then Southern Rhodesia and South African Republic, respectively. After both countries attained independence, they have remained blind to the reality of border citizens. Consequently, the fact that Venda-speaking people have—against strict and successive regulatory regimes from colonial to postcolonial times—“defied” the border and continue to do so, establishes a case of their being de facto border citizens. This not only challenges the inflexible territoriality of citizenship at both the South African and Zimbabwean borders, but also presents a compelling case for the recognition of border citizens and the granting of easy and controlled movement based on best practices in other parts of the world.

Mapping histories: Many narratives of Tana pasts

By locating the Tana Bhagats in the shifting terrains of forests and fields in Chota Nagpur, and by examining the hierarchies within the Oraon community, this paper suggests an alternate reading of adivasi protest in colonial India. It also revisits the relationship between the Congress and the adivasis. Finally, by counterpoising the colonial archive with Tana pamphlets and petitions, it analyses different narratives of Tana pasts in order to make sense of how histories and memories of adivasi protest are reworked in postcolonial times.

Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Scruggs

Reviewed by: Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Scruggs Elaine Wong Scruggs, Bert. Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 216pp. $65.00 hardcover. The object of scrutiny in Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film is the formation of colonial identity or consciousness during Japan’s rule of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. Specifically, Bert Scruggs examines the colonial identity of the Han Chinese people who had settled in Taiwan before the Japanese occupation. Many of them came from southern China and the language they spoke, which became known as Taiwanese, originated from the Hokkien dialect of Fujian province. Since Taiwanese was a vernacular without a written form, the literature of these people was written in Chinese and, during the colonization, in Japanese. Apparently, it is in this linguistic context that Scruggs uses “translingual narration” to refer to the body of materials of his study: short fiction of the colonial period, as well as films of colonial topics produced in colonial and postcolonial times. Readers interested in colonial and postcolonial conditions will uncover such conditions in the specificities intricately carved into the ideological contours of a textual landscape. However, readers interested in translingualism might find its treatment compromised by conceptual limitations. Scruggs’s selection of fiction and film cogently shows the impossibility of pinning down a colonial Taiwanese identity in the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. As Scruggs notes when outlining the theoretical horizons in chapter one, for one thing, “Taiwan never attained independence or underwent formal decolonization” (5), but only passed from the hands of imperial Japan to those of a Chinese republic. For another, it was under Japanese colonization that the Taiwanese people experienced modernity, which, besides advancing material progress, stimulated awareness of personal choice, social opposition, and social empathy beyond the confines of colonialism. This conceptual frame enables nuanced readings of the colonial texts. The study delineates free will in the main characters of Weng Nao’s “The Remaining Snow,” Wu Zhuoliu’s “The Doctor’s Mother,” and Wang Changxiong’s “Torrent,” examined vis-à-vis ambivalence and mimicry in colonial identity construction in chapter three. Chapter four locates agency and action of revolutionary change in Yang Kui’s left-wing fiction, in contradistinction to the works of Yang Shouyu, Wang Shilang, and Zhu Dianren, which only passively reflect activism (72). Turning to the colonial female writers Zhang Bihua, Ye Tao, Huang Baotao, and Yang Qianhe, chapter five situates their female characters’ abilities to transcend class and ethnic boundaries in “a hegemony of matrimony” (96), one that while prescribing women’s roles as wives and mothers, paradoxically unified women in colonial Taiwan through common matrimonial concerns. The sixth and last chapter observes “cultural solastalgia”—a term used by Scruggs to describe the longings for a vanishing Taiwanese culture as a result of both colonialism and modernity (115; see also Albrecht et al, “Solastalgia,” Australasian Psychiatry 15.1 [2007])—in Zhu Dianren’s “Autumn Tidings,” Lü Heruo’s “Fengshui,” and Wang Changxiong’s “Torrent,” before exploring affective and pragmatic memories in the filmic narratives of Viva Tonal: Tiaowushidai, Lüde haipingxian (Emerald Horizon), Nanshin Taiwan, Wuyan de shanqiu (Hill of No Return), and Tianma Chafang (March of Happiness). In all these discussions, Scruggs facilitates critical intersections between global theoretical perspectives and Taiwanese studies vantage points, assessing their applicability to specific colonial and postcolonial circumstances along the way. Whereas each chapter has a well-grounded [End Page 517] conceptual frame, the individual frames only occasionally bridge across the chapters. Problematizing the free will that empowers selected members of the colonized in the stories examined in chapter three, for instance, might expand the understanding of why the “despondent, discouraged, or disappearing characters” of the exploited class in colonial capitalism discussed in chapter four “fail to inspire or lead” (86). This might also offer a more impartial alternative to Scruggs’s celebration of Yang Kui’s activist characters and sustain the otherwise open dialogue throughout the study. Yang Kui wrote in Japanese during colonial times, including the stories perused in the study. However, he switched to writing in Chinese under the Republic of China’s rule. For...

Genomic Insights into the Ancestry and Demographic History of South America.

South America has a complex demographic history shaped by multiple migration and admixture events in pre- and post-colonial times. Settled over 14,000 years ago by Native Americans, South America has experienced migrations of European and African individuals, similar to other regions in the Americas. However, the timing and magnitude of these events resulted in markedly different patterns of admixture throughout Latin America. We use genome-wide SNP data for 437 admixed individuals from 5 countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina) to explore the population structure and demographic history of South American Latinos. We combined these data with population reference panels from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas to perform global ancestry analysis and infer the subcontinental origin of the European and Native American ancestry components of the admixed individuals. By applying ancestry-specific PCA analyses we find that most of the European ancestry in South American Latinos is from the Iberian Peninsula; however, many individuals trace their ancestry back to Italy, especially within Argentina. We find a strong gradient in the Native American ancestry component of South American Latinos associated with country of origin and the geography of local indigenous populations. For example, Native American genomic segments in Peruvians show greater affinities with Andean indigenous peoples like Quechua and Aymara, whereas Native American haplotypes from Colombians tend to cluster with Amazonian and coastal tribes from northern South America. Using ancestry tract length analysis we modeled post-colonial South American migration history as the youngest in Latin America during European colonization (9–14 generations ago), with an additional strong pulse of European migration occurring between 3 and 9 generations ago. These genetic footprints can impact our understanding of population-level differences in biomedical traits and, thus, inform future medical genetic studies in the region.

Contract Archaeology in South Africa: Traveling Theory, Local Memory and Global Designs

This paper examines the historical development of contract archaeology in South Africa, placing it in a trajectory of local archaeological thought and practice. In doing so, it sets out to do three things. The first is to consider how metropolitan theory “travels,” takes root, and has particular, local effects as part of a disciplinary ordering of knowledge and practice. In South Africa, the advent of contract archaeology around the time of the 1994 elections was ironic in the sense that it foreclosed on the notion of a “people’s archaeology,” replacing it with forms of corporate accountability and models of business best practice. The second broad aim is to think about what is at stake in the politics of memory after apartheid, and the effects of contract archaeology in mediating and mitigating popular struggles around rights, resources and representation. I argue that, in many cases, the function of contract archaeology is to discipline and school such struggles, diverting them along approved tracks and bureaucratic channels. The third is to think about how contract archaeology functions as part of global coloniality, as an instigator and enabler of global designs. I briefly discuss the case of the World Archaeological Congress and Rio Tinto, as an example of the co-opting of a global organization and of a language of engagement. My argument throughout is that contract archaeology recapitulates the essential coloniality of disciplinary archaeology, presenting it with a new face and a contemporary disguise appropriate to global, postcolonial times.

Tradução entre saberes: construção teórica para o debate ambiental no telejornalismo do Sul

A atualidade marcada pelo saber científico num movimento de mudança de paradigma, coloca a ecologia no centro das relações de poder. Este artigo reflete sobre os fatores sociais e culturais conflituosos que obstaculizam a prática democrática de uma representação das questões ambientais através do jornalismo e suas especificidades culturais, de relacionamento com a ciência e com a sociedade, em tempo pós-colonial. Pensamento que compreende a importância da informação ambiental, na televisão, como motivadora do debate entre os atores sociais no contexto social da língua portuguesa, e que evoca um telejornalismo ambiental como práxis discursiva de tradução entre saberes no espaço público.

Peasant Farming, A Buffer for Human Societies

This article explores the importance of peasant farming worldwide, the debate about its disappearance and the way it is being impacted by differentiated policies. It takes two examples, Tunisia and Egypt, during post-colonial times. In both cases policies tended to favour the modernization of agriculture, ignoring the contribution of peasant farming to the national economies. But interestingly the data show a surprisingly significant importance and increase in the number of small farms in both countries. While theoretical debates continue about the disappearance of peasantries, reality demonstrates that peasant farming is a formidable and resilient buffer for human societies, which helps stabilize, balance and enrich them.

Trichuris trichiura in a post-Colonial Brazilian mummy.

Trichuris trichiura is a soil-transmitted helminth which is prevalent in warm, moist, tropical and subtropical regions of the world with poor sanitation. Heavy whipworm can result either in Trichuris dysenteric syndrome - especially in children - or in a chronic colitis. In heavy infections, worms can spread proximally and may cause ileitis. Here we provide first microscopic evidence for a T. trichiura adult worm embedded in the rectum of a post-Colonial Brazilian adult mummy. During Colonial and post-Colonial times, many European chroniclers described a parasitic disease named Maculo whose symptomatology coincides with heavy helminthiasis. Based on our findings and on comparison of ancient textual evidence with modern description of heavy whipworm, we feel confident in considering that the two syndromes are expressions of the same pathological condition.

WHO's MIND, whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHO's publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanon's call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.

‘Plenitude of the Singular: Draupadi in Literature and Life’

‘Draupadi's disrobing’ as a motif in the Sanskrit Mahabharata has been dealt with in a subjunctive mood of storytelling by Vyasa. This enables the appropriation of the episode by many literary authors who have deployed the figure of Draupadi through the popular theme of her disrobing, to express the socio-political concerns of their times. Through the many ‘sideshadows’ of Draupadi, thus constructed in the literary space in varied genres, she has traversed the realms of the divine, the mortal and the mythic. Through her differential treatment suiting the contexts of her authors, she has been able to go beyond her mythic and literary renderings and evoke a political agency of the mortal woman via her reclamation of her body. Analysed in this article through the genres of novel, short story and a poem are Draupadi's literary interpretations in the colonial and post-colonial times. Through an understanding of Jung's archetypal feminine, Draupadi has been depicted as a mould which has been filled in and redecorated as per her times and contexts for the literature.

The “I” in the Deconstruction of Frontiers through Memory: Postcolonial Diasporas

The North and South relations have changed in terms of migratory flow in the last 50 years. From colonial to postcolonial times, economic and political forces have been influencing men and women all over the world, particularly in Africa because of the heavy colonial inheritance, which explains the tight link between the two worlds. Besides, there has always been a reciprocal fascination between the West and developing countries, at the same time with a kind of distrust between both worlds. Beyond trade relations, the migration movements have surely inscribed those colonial and postcolonial links, those relations between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbarous’ world. The human geographical map has been transformed by these migrations. Within this prospect and reality, I propose to look into these migration movements first from a historical point of view, and then through their impact on the subject of the new diaspora in the sense that these migrations have changed the perception of the ‘Other’ in our postcolonial world. I will discuss how these various migrations have created a blurring of the frontiers, real or imaginative. I hope to show in fine also how these post-colonial migration flows created new identities, new maps, those of the diaspora in relation with key issues such as ‘identities and territories’ in the sense given by Homi Bhabha to internationalism, which is the “history of postcolonial migrations.”

Tourism imaginaries: anthropological approaches

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn PART I: IMAGINARIES OF PEOPLES Chapter 1. Toward Symmetric Treatment of Imaginaries: Nudity and Payment in Tourism to New Guinea's Treehouse People Rupert Stasch Chapter 2. Scorn or Idealization? Tourism Imaginaries, Exoticization and Ambivalence in Embera Indigenous Tourism Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Chapter 3. Deriding Demand: Indigenous Imaginaries in Tourism Alexis Celeste Bunten Chapter 4. Myth Management in Tourism's Imaginariums: Tales from Southwest China and Beyond Margaret Byrne Swain Chapter 5. Tourism Moral Imaginaries and the Making of Community Joao Afonso Baptista PART II: IMAGINARIES OF PLACES Chapter 6. The Imaginaire Dialectic and the Refashioning of Pietrelcina Michael A. Di Giovine Chapter 7. Temporal Fragmentation: Cambodian Tales Federica Ferraris Chapter 8. The Imagined Nation: The Mystery of the Endurance of the Colonial Imaginary in Postcolonial Times Paula Mota Santos Chapter 9. Belize Ephemera, Affect, and Emergent Imaginaries Kenneth Little Chapter 10. Envisioning the Dutch Serengeti: An Exploration of Touristic Imaginings of the Wild in the Netherlands Anke Tonnaer Afterword: Locating Imaginaries in the Anthropology of Tourism Naomi Leite Notes on Contributors Index

The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time

I have been arguing, over some years, that thinking about the postcolonial condition in relation to tragedy or, rather, through a critical perspective informed by the idea of the tragic is especially useful in a historical conjuncture in which the triumphalist narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism, and socialism have become exhausted, if not extinct (Scott,ConscriptsandOmens). Romance, it seems to me, is the predominant mode of emplotment of the anticolonial and radical postcolonial imaginarles. This is because the salient questions animating the critique of the colonial past have turned, understandably enough, on the identification of the disabling repressive harms of colonial power and the construction of the justificatory narrative of resistance that, at length, overcomes the perceived obstacles to a postcolonial state without these sources of (moral, political, cultural, economic) dissatisfaction. These are narratives of longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption. But what if the futures anticipated in this story form come to be fundamentally thrown into doubt so that they lose the self-evidence that so long sustained them as an effective horizon of political desire and political action? What if the futures anticipated by the past are now themselves a part of the past? I have been arguing that, as a consequence of the collapse of the great social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties, we do indeed inhabit a postcolonial present marked by such an irreversible transformation. I have been arguing that the problem about the former colonial worlds for the present is not the superficial one of finding better answers to existing questions but the more fundamental one of altering the questions concerning the relation between past and present that have organized our expectations of possible futures.

The Postcolonial Time That Remains

Sovereign authority to establish the colony of South Australia was given by Letters Patent (1836), signed by King William IV. The Letters Patent made explicit provision for the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and interests in traditional lands and waters, establishing the basis for a peaceable and respectful interaction between Indigenous and settler societies. However, the preexisting sovereignty of Indigenous peoples was not respected and these written orders were ignored by the South Australian Company in its executive action to establish the Province of South Australia. Accordingly, the potential for development of positive forms of intercultural social relationship remained unrealized in this region, as was also the case throughout the Australian colonies. This essay reflects upon the transformative force of this unrealized potential, which remains immanent within the trajectory of Australian history. It makes use of Agamben's conceptualization of time and exigency in The Time That Remains (2005) to theorize directed processes of historical discontinuity. We analyse colonial sources of contemporary Australian society, with a renewed attention to those aspects of political recognition and positively shared social life that were always possible but never came to pass into history. We argue that the experience of time and temporality in the ‘messianic mode’ enables new understanding of the problematic ‘time of the now’ and recreates possibilities for the communal invention of postcolonial futures that respond properly to ongoing and contemporary Indigenous practices of sovereignty and nationhood.

He came, He saw and He observed – An Analysis of Reis door Noord Amerika by Pehr Kalm

According to Carl Thompson, who teaches on English literature and Travel Culture, travel accounts are a quite popular genre these days. Just think about the television series by Michael Palin and Paul Theroux. Not only contemporary writings (or programmes) are in the centre of attention, but also the ones from the past. It creates curiosity and an illusion that there are still places in the world that are not yet discovered. Also the academic world pays growing attention to travel writings. The main aims for that research is to better understand the colonial and postcolonial times. The accounts show the activities of the travellers and the kind of ideas that were incentives for their journeys. Already at the beginning of a travel the traveller encounters “otherness” and difference from his own environment. In most writings a distinction between “us & them” can be found. This happens often in the form of stereotypes. As a result the genre of travel accounts has been seen as a morally dubious form of literature (Thompson, 2011, p. 1-9). The quotation above stems from a travel account, Reis door Noord Amerika, written by the Swedish scientist Pehr Kalm. In his journey to North America he steps into a new world and there encounters a totally new world. When he arrives back in Sweden he writes down his travel into three volumes. This paper will discuss his journey, and his depiction of the others and of the New World. The main question of this paper will be: “To what extent does the background of Pieter/Pehr Kalm influence his depiction of the Native Americans and the European Americans in his book Reis door Noord Amerika?” This paper will firstly introduce the author Pehr Kalm before it continues with the travel itself. Secondly the translation history of the book is briefly touched upon. After this the paper will look at his depiction of “the others,” both Native Americans and Europeans. The travel account that is being discussed is Reis door Noord Amerika, which is an Dutch translation of the original Swedish text ‘En Resa til Norra America’ written by Pehr Kalm, sometimes known as Pieter Kalm.

Book Review: No Continuing City: The Story of a Missiologist from Colonial to Postcolonial Times

Book Review: No Continuing City: The Story of a Missiologist from Colonial to Postcolonial Times

Germany and its West African colonies: "excavations" of German colonialism in post-colonial times

West African history is usually seen as mainly influenced by English or French colonialism. There is a new interest in German colonialism, but most research is done in European archives and with a European point-of-view. This book explores German colonial exploits and their consequences in Ghana, Togo, and Cameroon, mostly from an African point-of-view. By means of research on sites of the colonial hinterland and the agency of entangled people, the book reveals the simmering impact of the past encounters on indigenous religious, cultural, political, and socio-economic developments in West Africa. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 49)

Higher Education and Development: Students from Angola in Portuguese Higher Degree Education

The paper describes a research project on students from Angola pursuing their university degrees in Portugal. The author will analyze individual and family trajectories and how they influence the decision of going abroad as well as the choice of a certain destination (particularly the choice of studying in Portugal). The study also attempts to interpret these strategies and trajectories as inscribed in Angola's recent developments in post-colonial times (in both post-independency and post-socialism contexts), and how these dynamic contexts keep determining the specific conditions in which such individual and collective initiatives take place. Migrant capacities such as higher education, training, specialized skills and knowledge, human capital, combined with social capital (networks, norms and values that facilitate cooperation among individuals and groups), affective capital (commitment and good-will derived from emotional engagement in personal projects) and financial capital (savings, investments, remittances) are amongst the most influential factors in making development projects effective and sustainable.

10.5937/zrpfns48-6741 = Dispute between Nicaragua and Columbia concerning delimitation in Caribbean sea

It was a dispute over some islands and cays in Caribbean whose importance was that they were determining division of continental shelf. The islands are much closer to the coast of Nicaragua than the cost of Columbia, but this fact did not have decisive importance in attribution of sovereignty over the islands. The border on the sea, inherited from Spanish colonial time, was not easy to be determined. The both sides referred to certain legal acts of colonial authorities which might serve as colonial titles, but these acts were not precise enough. On the other hand, Columbia and Nicaragua settled some territorial issue by the 1928 Treaty and the 1930 Protocol thereto. Nicaragua challenged validity of the Treaty, but without success. The International Court of Justice found that Columbia has performed certain acts of sovereign power over the disputed clays in post-colonial time and resolved the dispute in favor of Columbia applying post-colonial effectivites.