Post-colonial Transition Research Articles

The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Theme Parks in Contemporary Transatlantic Fiction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I use “situational” to mean that there were no public spaces who bore this function full-time, given the scarcity of leisure time during this period, though sites like the village square could be transformed on occasion to meet this need at, say, the time of a major festival. To draw on Baudrillard's much-abused critical term, hyperreality is the experiential domain of the postindustrial developed world, one in which such successive degrees of the virtual and the simulation permeate our social space that the ontological and epistemological distinction between the real and the copy has become inextricably muddled. Or, as Miodrag Mitrainovic defines it, the “theatrical” staging of a “narrative that links together the domain of … a great variety of attractions” (114). Though in a slightly different register, these efforts were anticipated by such works of speculative fiction as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990), which dramatizes the resistance of nature and happenstance to humanity's hubristic attempts at environmental engineering, and Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park (1981). In a review of one of his collections, Stephen Amidon describes Saunders's America as “half theme park, half television advert” (65). Whereas the Situationist International called for spaces on unending carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense) possibility, the postindustrial theme park came to offer a mild variation on the consumption patterns, ruling corporatist ideologies, and entertainment figures already ruling late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century existence. Historian David Blight chronicles the strategic negotiations involved in the Civil War's entry into popular memory in his groundbreaking study Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. The unifying themes of Saunders's fictional theme parks are rife with implications for collective identity formation through historical consciousness—for instance, the American Civil War, in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline” is commonly seen as one of the defining moments of American history. In “Pastoralia,” the primitavistic envisioning of Neanderthal life testifies to how our imagining of our origins has all sorts of implications for how we culturally define ourselves as a species. This catering is often carried out in a particularly dehumanizing and poorly remunerated manner, as Barbara Ehrenreich illustrates in her magisterial participant investigative report, Nickel and Dimed (2001). In Bounty the gap between rich clients and poor workers is emphasized by the fact that the former devour lavish feasts while the latter subsist on black bean soup and little to no meat. Derivé, from the French verb “to drift,” is to actively reclaim urban environments through the act of wandering in search of what is novel, captivating, and personally useful. The flaneur is an idle urban wanderer who takes in and processes the sensations of the city and of losing him or herself in its crowds in a particularly artful manner. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael K. WalonenMichael K. Walonen is a specialist in transatlantic modern and contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature. He is the author of the book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature.

LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media ed. by Christopher Pullen (review)

Reviewed by: LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media ed. by Christopher Pullen Margaret Rhee (bio) LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media edited by Christopher Pullen. Palgrave Macmillan. 2012. $95.00 hardcover; $72.00 Kindle. 336pages From Vito Russo’s groundbreaking 1981 The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality at the Movies to Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) by José Esteban Muñoz, and more recently Mary Gray’s 2009 book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, scholarly studies on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer representations provide critical sites of intervention for identity, praxis, and theory.1 As a consequence of and despite the mainstream media’s fraught and frayed portrayals of same-sex sexuality and nonnormative gender expressions, these works and others illuminate the rich, fertile, and growing scholarly contributions to understanding the stakes of queer visibility. However, much of the research has been US-focused, and the anthology LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media offers a critical intervention. Edited by UK-based scholar Christopher Pullen, LGBT Transnational Identity provides unique contributions from a refreshing list of twenty academic scholars largely based outside of the United States. More specifically, the anthology offers a compelling framework that decenters the West in our understandings of “LGBT identity” and media. As Pullen argues in his introduction, “This book considers the potential of LGBT transnational identity, exhibited through varying media forms, challenging the notion [End Page 169] of a Western-centric LGBT identity.”2 In doing so, LGBT Transnational Identity largely focuses on locations—geographically and theoretically—outside the United Kingdom or the United States and signals a turn in the construction of LGBT identity and media beyond the “national.” LGBT Transnational Identity offers interdisciplinary and transnational critique through an axis of media, including television, film, novels, radio shows, and parades. The stand-alone articles include geographic locales rarely covered within the fields of LGBT media studies, such as Malaysia, Uganda, Turkey, Argentina, and Iran. Thanks to this scope, the anthology illuminates vibrant and provocative media work produced outside the United States and Western Europe. For example, Stephanie Selvick argues that the Egyptian novel and film adaptation of The Yacoubian Building (Marwan Hamed, 2006) connect to “non-Western” narratives that restrict the film’s representations within the framework of “social stereotypes.”3 Under such a rubric, Selvick argues, desire in The Yacoubian Building then may be only understood as “sexual abuse.”4 Yet by decolonizing literary and filmic expectations, she suggests that these restrictions offer transgressive “queer intimate possibilities.”5 Gustavo Subero highlights subversive Latin American gay porn such as Argentinos con orgullo 2 (Darío Marxxx, 2007) that, he demonstrates, traces and historicizes Latino gay history as autoethnography and queer historiography while troubling Western pornographic tropes.6 Andrew Hock Soon Ng shows that Bukak Api (Osman Ali, 2000), a documentary film on Malaysian female myk nyah (transsexuals), sympathizes with their community yet ultimately reifies the aberration of myk nyah as well.7 Theoretical topicality, geography, and medium specificity help shape the anthology’s organization, with the volume divided into three parts: “Politics and Citizenship,” “Adaptation and Postcolonial Transitions,” and “Performance and Subjectivity.” The first part largely includes articles on questions of marginality, citizenship, and legality in Uganda, Iran, and Malaysia. The second convenes articles from India, Egypt, and the United Kingdom and for the most part refocuses on the Western and non-Western divides within literature, radio programming, and documentary, with two articles on Pratibha Parmar’s documentary films. “Performance and Subjectivity,” the concluding section, builds on the first two parts with articles on camp, porn, and space and demonstrates the diversity of LGBT transnational themes, issues, and media. LGBT Transnational Identity’s central argument relies on an identity construction that challenges “Western LGBT identity.” Pullen writes, “I argue that LGBT transnational [End Page 170] identity should not be framed as Anglocentric, or Anglo-responsive; it should represent a coalescent flux of diverse, yet connected, voices.”8 Pullen cautions against “a Western-oriented ‘universal’ gay rights identity, in which dominant discourses of queer identity potentially disenfranchise the non-Western.”9 The collection troubles “Western-centric LGBT identity” by providing “a multifaceted scope...

From baseball colony to basketball republic: post-colonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines

The paper examines the celebrated rivalry between baseball and basketball as the premier sporting pastime in the Philippines, from the early American era to the early post-independence period. In tracing the growth of a national sporting culture in this Southeast Asian country, the discussion tries to show how the close association of baseball with America as an ‘occupation force’, in contrast to basketball's general image as a representation of the ‘benevolent America’, has resulted in the decline of the former and the rise of the latter as the Philippines' most popular sport.

Indonesia and the Liberal Peace: Recovering Southern Agency in Global Governance

It is necessary to move beyond the marginalization of the global South towards a perspective that takes it as a relational, generative, and agentive site within world politics. Indonesia is an instructive case in this regard: its participation in various multilateral peace projects constitutes a narrative of Southern agency that runs counter to dominant accounts of contemporary global governance. The dominant methodologies of peacekeeping, worked out through various iterations into a project of liberal governance, have been deeply implicated in many sets of illiberal relations. This illiberal side to the ‘liberal peace’ can be seen in the ways particular North–South relations have been structured into peace governance, as well as its instrumentalization by powerful domestic elements of Southern states. This is well exemplified by the Indonesian case, whose postcolonial transitions have been caught up in problematic civil–military relations, with both its governments and armed forces deriving various types of support from the international community at various times. Following the Cold War, and especially post-Suharto, these have intertwined with matters of ethno-religious violence, military authority, democratization, and the rise of political Islam. Indonesia's participation in global liberal governance interventions raises questions about peace operations as a world-ordering technology. Es necesario desplazarse más allá de la marginalización del sur global hacia una perspectiva que la toma como un sitio relacional, generativo y de cambio dentro de la política mundial. En este aspecto, Indonesia es un caso instructivo: su participación en varios proyectos de paz multilaterales constituyen una narrativa de la agencia del sur que va en contra de cuentas dominantes de gobierno global contemporáneo. Las metodologías dominantes de mantenimiento de paz, trabajaron a través de varios ciclos dentro de un proyecto de gobierno liberal, han estado implicadas en varias series de relaciones conservadoras. Este lado conservador de ‘la paz liberal’ puede verse tanto en la forma como las relaciones particulares de norte-sur han sido estructuradas dentro de la gobernanza de paz, como en su instrumentalización bajo los elementos domésticos poderosos de los estados del sur. Esto ha estado bien ejemplificado por el caso indonesio, cuyas transiciones poscoloniales han sido envueltas en relaciones civiles-militares problemáticas, con sus gobiernos y fuerzas armadas, derivando varios tipos de soporte de la comunidad internacional en varias ocasiones. Después de la guerra fría, y especialmente después de Suharto, estos se han ligado con asuntos de violencia etnoreligiosos, de autoridad militar, democratización y el surgimiento del islam político. La participación de Indonesia en las intervenciones de gobierno liberal global, plantean dudas sobre las operaciones de paz como una tecnología de orden mundial. 我们有必要超越全球南方边缘化的想法，迈向一个将全球南方视为世界政治中一个相关的、有生产力、有动力场所的视角。关于这点，印度尼西亚是一个富有教益的案例：其在各种多边和平项目中的参与构筑了对南方能动作用的一种叙述，这种叙述与当代全球治理的主流解释相左。维和的主要方法，是通过各种循环进入自由主义治理项目从而解决问题，这些方法深深地涉及许多非自由主义关系。“自由主义和平”的非自由主义这一面可见于特定的北-南关系被结构为和平治理，以及通过南方国家强有力的国内因素被工具化。这通过印度尼西亚这一个案得到了很好的例证，印尼的后殖民主义转变正逢军民关系困难重重，其政府和武装力量在不同时期都从国际社会获得各类支持。继冷战之后，特别是后苏哈托时期，这些与族群-宗教暴力、军人威权、民主化以及政治伊斯兰的崛起等问题交织在一起。印尼对全球自由主义治理干预活动的参与提出了有关作为世界-秩序技术的和平行动的各种问题。 남반부의 주변화를 넘어서 남반부를 세계 정치 내에서 관계적, 생성적, 행위적 공간으로 연기는 관점을 갖는 것이 필요하다. 인도네시아는 이러한 점에서 교훈적이다: 여러 가지 다자간 평화 프로젝트에 인도네시아의 참여가 현대 지구적 거버넌스에 대한 지배적인 설명에 반대되는 남반부 행위자의 내러티브를 구성한다. 여러 반복을 통해서 자유 거버넌스의 프로젝트를 통해서 만들어진 지배적인 평화유지 방법론들이 비자유적 관계 속에 깊숙히 연루되어 있다. ‘자유주의 평화’의 비자유주의적 측면이 특히 북부-남부가 평화 거버넌스에 구조화되어 있는 방식과 남부 국가들의 강력한 국내적 요소들에 의해서 이루어진 북부-남부 관계의 도구화에서 보여질 수 있다. 이것은 인도네시아 사례가 예시한다. 인도네시아의 정부와 군 모두 여러 차례 국제사회로부터 다양한 형태의 지원을 받으면서, 인도네시아는 포스트콜로니얼 이행이 문제가 되는 민군관계에 포획되어 있다. 냉전 이후 특히 수하르토 이후 이러한 문제들은 인종-종교 폭력 문제, 군의 권위, 민주화, 정치적인 이슬람의 등장과 얽혀 있다. 지구적 자유 거너번스 개입에 인도네시아가 참여하는 것은 세계 질서를 만들어 내는 기술로서 평화활동에 대한 의문을 제기하게 만들었다.

Millennial Politics in Modern Egypt: Islamism and Secular Nationalism in Context and Contest

AbstractAs a type often linked to societies in transition, millennialism provides a useful framework of analysis to understand the contestation between the two movements that shaped Egypt’s modern identity: Islamism and secular nationalism. Both movements blended political and religious form and content as they strove to unite people in a collectivist effort to create an ideal society that addressed the nation’s material and cultural needs. Indeed, millennial discourse provided a medium through which Egyptians worked out their nationalist aspirations in a religious key and envisioned their religious values and identity in nationalist form. The volatile, irrational character of millennial movements made Egypt’s postcolonial transition to modern politics fraught and uncertain. And the authoritarian trend among Egypt’s ruling secular nationalists exacerbated the situation. In the end, Egypt’s seminal Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, proved capable of reorienting itself, downplaying its millennial claims, and espousing a rational politics. Its evolution speaks to the capacity of millennial movements to transform themselves and the societies of which they are a part.

Minorities in Postcolonial Transitions: The Ndebele in Zimbabwe

AbstractThis article argues that there is a legal and political basis for attending to concerns of ethnic minorities in postcolonial transitions. If left unattended, this issue may prompt members of minority groups to resort to preservative measures, including violence to the detriment of the security which is a fundamental objective of the transition. This reaction is often generated by an axiomatic fear of assimilation. The case of the Ndebele of Zimbabwe illustrates this. The article’s position is confirmed by post-colonial state practice that implements minority rights and accords affected groups a right to self-determination or autonomy in tandem with liberal democratic reforms.

Performing Peace: Gandhi's assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state

AbstractThe consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

“Sociopathetic Abscess” or “Yawning Chasm”? The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who

This paper explores discourses of colonialism, cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism in the television series Doctor Who. Doctor Who has frequently allegorized past colonial scenarios and has depicted cosmopolitan futures as harmoniously multi-racial, constructing a teleological model of human history. Yet postcolonial transition stages between the overthrow of colonialism and the instatement of cosmopolitanism have received little attention within the programme. This “yawning chasm” — this inability to acknowledge the material realities of an inequitable postcolonial world shaped by exploitative trade practices, diasporic trauma and racist discrimination — is whitewashed by the representation of past, present and future humanity as unchangingly diverse. Harmonious cosmopolitanism is thus presented as a non-negotiable fact of human inevitability, casting instances of racist oppression as unnatural blips. Under this construction, the postcolonial transition needs no explication, because to throw off colonialism’s chains is merely to revert to a more natural state of humanness, that is, cosmopolitanism. Only a few Doctor Who stories break with this model to deal with the “sociopathetic abscess” that is real life postcolonial modernity.

Postcolonial Transitions in Africa: Decolonization in West Africa and Present Day South Africa

abstractBlack Economic Empowerment is a highly debated issue in contemporary South Africa. Yet few South Africans realize that they are following a postcolonial trajectory already experienced by other countries. This paper presents a case study of British firms during decolonization in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, which saw a parallel development in business and society to that which occurred in South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s. Despite fundamental differences between these states, all have had to empower a majority of black citizens who had previously suffered discrimination on the basis of race. The paper employs concepts from social capital theory to show that the process of postcolonial transition in African economies has been more politically and socially disruptive than empowerment in Western countries. Historical research contributes to our understanding of the nature of institutional shocks in emerging economies.

Democratic Socialism, the New International Economic Order, and Globalization: Jamaica's Sugar Cooperatives in the Post-Colonial Transition

British colonialism in the English-speaking Caribbean has often been characterized as an early version of globalization inasmuch as it turned Jamaica and other British colonies into production sites in a worldwide colonial empire. For this reason, it is often argued that the transition to a modern global economy had already begun during colonialism. But two of the major steps that moved British colonialism closer to a modern global economy—the end of mercantilism and the emancipation of the slaves—also created conditions for the development of an internally oriented and self-reliant peasant and small farming class whose interests were not those of international capital and the managers of a more global economy. This duality and the ten sions it created characterized Jamaican history and national experience well into the twentieth century and the post-colonial period. The country’s experiment with worker-owned sugar cooperatives during the 1970s and early 1980s represented an attempt to reconcile this duality and retain aspects of locality and self-reliance within a modern global economy, and offers a case study of the ambivalence and contradictions that characterized life in transition between the old colonialism and the new globalization.

Bare life as a development/postcolonial problematic

Development studies and postcolonial studies conceptualize and examine the Third World in different ways, yet works associated with the two fields can usefully be combined to illuminate key issues in our time. This article focuses on postcolonial transitions in parts of Africa where the state actively injures or kills a local citizenry, sometimes in the name of development. Using Zimbabwe and Rwanda as very different examples of such transitions, and drawing on selected development and postcolonial writings – fact and ‘fiction’– I argue for framing such cases as examples of the ‘bare life’, ‘camp’ biopolitics articulated by Georgio Agamben. These concepts enable us to see the widening spaces of exception to law that a postcolonial state can create in periods of crisis and defend on the grounds of post‐coloniality, that is, as states always already injured by colonialism and its biopolitical development project. The terrain such states enter might be termed ‘fascism’– a location of political economy that development studies has generally neglected in recent years but that novels depicting postcolonial contexts can make vivid.

Postcolonial Transitions on the Southern Borders of the Former Soviet Union

As the Soviet Union dissolved into a new territorial reality, it released the doubly repressed histories of Tsarist and Soviet imperium. In the states to the south of the new Russian Federation, the post-soviet jostled with the postcolonial as nations were reinvented across a vast swathe from the Caucuses through Central Asia. In the process, the old Russian linguistic duality between Russki (the ethnic Russian) and Rossiiskii (the citizen of Russia) founds its echo in Russia itself — which encompasses over 20 million Muslims — and in the newly sovereign states — all with large Russian minorities and even larger Russian-speaking populations. For the Azeris, Uzbeks and Kazaks, the repositioning of nation against a recent past of Russian dominance was significantly more problematic. In Chechnya, formally in the Russian Federation, it has reached a cathartic war. The argument here uses international human rights instruments as a litmus test of this troubled recent history. The controversial concept of Eurasia — now resurgent in Russian politics — may not necessarily mean the reinscription of Russian domination, but seeks to offer an alternative to the Atlantic Empire.

Corrupción, burocracia colonial y veteranos separatistas en Cuba, 1868-1910

Administrative corruption in Cuba during the nineteenth century was a serious problem addressed both by Spanish authorities and the critics of the colonial system in Cuba. In the long run the fiscal, financial, institutional, and ideological costs of corruption undermined Spanish colonial control in Cuba. While the state and Cuban taxpayers had to pay for the increased costs of corruption, corrupt public officials and private contractors and financiers benefited. This study uses both archival manuscript administrative sources and published sources to assess the impact of corruption and its institutional bases during the final phase of Spanish colonialism in Cuba and the early period of post-colonial transition.

Water Management in the Indus Basin of Pakistan: A Half-century Perspective

This paper surveys the past half-century of water management experiments and experience in the Indus River basin in Pakistan as a way to identify principles for long-term water planning. The survey focuses on three variables: (1) spatial scales of water management; (2) geographic regions of water management; and (3) substantive water problems. These variables help assess changes during the post-colonial transition (1947-60); Indus basin development (1960-75); and management and environmental movements (1975-2000). Taken together, these periods point toward a model of Articulated Adaptive Management, which stresses planning for economic, political and environmental crises; dynamic changes in governance; multiple scales of water management; regional diversity and innovation; and broader scientific experimentation and monitoring of water management alternatives .

Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture

Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture

Education and National Personae in Portugal's Colonial and Postcolonial Transition

Previous articleNext article No AccessEducation and National Personae in Portugal's Colonial and Postcolonial TransitionAntoinette ErranteAntoinette Errante Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 42, Number 3Aug., 1998 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447509 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1998 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Iris van Huis Contesting Cultural Heritage: Decolonizing the Tropenmuseum as an Intervention in the Dutch/European Memory Complex, (Aug 2019): 215–248.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11464-0_8Alistair Ross, Ian Davies Europe and Global Citizenship, (Jan 2018): 21–36.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59733-5_2Christoph Kohl Limitations and Ambiguities of Colonialism in Guinea-Bissau. Examining the Creole and “Civilized” Space in Colonial Society, History in Africa 43 (Dec 2015): 169–203.https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2015.27Rolf Straubhaar The Multiple Influences on Nonformal Instructional Practices in Rural Mozambique: Exploring the Limits of World Culture Theory, Comparative Education Review 58, no.22 (Jul 2015): 215–240.https://doi.org/10.1086/674418Derek Pardue Cape Verdean Kriolu as an Epistemology of Contact, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos , no.2424 (Dec 2012): 73–94.https://doi.org/10.4000/cea.696Kamal Abouchedid, Ramzi Nasser ATTRIBUTIONS OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR POVERTY AMONG LEBANESE AND PORTUGUESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON, Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal 30, no.11 (Jan 2002): 25–36.https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2002.30.1.25K.C. Tse Society and citizenship education in transition: the case of Macau, International Journal of Educational Development 21, no.44 (Jul 2001): 305–314.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0738-0593(00)00004-3

Colonialism and the Poisoning of Europe: Towards an Anthropology of Colonists

Previous articleNext article No AccessColonialism and the Poisoning of Europe: Towards an Anthropology of ColonistsAndrea L. SmithAndrea L. Smith Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 50, Number 4Winter, 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/jar.50.4.3630560 Views: 30Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The University of New MexicoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Kristín Loftsdóttir Going to Eden: Nordic exceptionalism and the image of blackness in Iceland, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 7, no.11 (Nov 2013): 27–41.https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2013.858920P. Ballinger Entangled or 'Extruded' Histories? Displacement, National Refugees, and Repatriation after the Second World War, Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no.33 (Jun 2012): 366–386.https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fes022C. R. Pennell Treaty law: the extent of consular jurisdiction in North Africa from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, The Journal of North African Studies 14, no.22 (Jun 2009): 235–256.https://doi.org/10.1080/13629380802517136 Antoinette Errante Education and National Personae in Portugal's Colonial and Postcolonial Transition, Comparative Education Review 42, no.33 (Oct 2015): 267–308.https://doi.org/10.1086/447509

The structuring of ethnicity in Hong Kong: Entering the transition phase

This paper analyzes the ethnic dimension of Hong Kong's emerging reintegration with China. The implications of the “one country, two system” policy for ethnic intergroup processes are examined in terms of the potential of the current mechanisms that submerge interethnic conflict to be adapted to suit the changing conditions. A theory of ethnic intergroup power relations during the colonial to post-colonial transition phase is used to structure a discussion of the transition process. Ethnic group relations are viewed in the context of the already shifting social, economic, political, and cultural processes in Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong's transition period is seen to diverge from that which has characterized other colonial societies. Hong Kong people are viewed as being in a good position to adapt themselves to meet the challenges of interethnic relations in the approaching period. Lack of certainty concerning the degree of localization and democratization in the coming decade places limits on the analysis.