Cultural Colonialism Research Articles

The Rise and Fall of the Kikuyu Karing' a Education Association of Kenya, 1929-1952

This study of the Kikuyu Karing'a Education Association (KKEA) has as an underlying theme the successful resistance of an African society to cultural and political colonialism. The KKEA persevered for two decades because it helped meet the educational needs of the Kikuyu people of central Kenya. Furthermore, it was an expression of cultural identity and acted as a vehicle for anti-colonial protest. It emerged in the early 1930s after thousands of Kikuyu boycotted mission schools when the latter decided to ban the practice of female circumcision. Although most returned to the missions, many remained in the newly-formed independent schools. These schools politicized a portion of the Kikuyu population which became, at the very least, sympathetic to indigenous political movements. Hence with the Mau Mau rebellion, in the 1950s, the KKEA was outlawed.

The Rise and Fall of the Kikuyu Karing' a Education Association of Kenya, 1929-1952

This study of the Kikuyu Karing'a Education Association (KKEA) has as an underlying theme the successful resistance of an African society to cultural and political colonialism. The KKEA persevered for two decades because it helped meet the educational needs of the Kikuyu people of central Kenya. Furthermore, it was an expression of cultural identity and acted as a vehicle for anti-colonial protest. It emerged in the early 1930s after thousands of Kikuyu boycotted mission schools when the latter decided to ban the practice of female circumcision. Although most returned to the missions, many remained in the newly-formed independent schools. These schools politicized a portion of the Kikuyu population which became, at the very least, sympathetic to indigenous political movements. Hence with the Mau Mau rebellion, in the 1950s, the KKEA was outlawed.

Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939

Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939

State, Civil Society and National Development: The Scottish Problem

Capitalist sodeties in the post-war period have been characterised by nationalist revivals, regionalism, movements for ethnic minorities and subculturalism. Movements for political autonomy are responses to the uneven development of the capitalist economy in which spatial coali tions take shape under the banner of linquistic, religious and cultural persistence. These theories of cultural nationalism and internal colonialism are critically reviewed with reference to Scotland. The conventional argument is that the political union of Scotland and England conserved the autonomy of Scottish civil society, fostering the political alliance of the Scottish and English bourgeoisie in the context of British imperial expansion. The global economic decline of Britain undermined this alliance and decimated the Scottish working class. Cultural nationalism thus arose on the back of a distinctive civil society as an effect of regional imbalances. These theories exaggerated the ideological unity of "civil society", treating the working class as incor porated. The appeal of nationalism had a very different significance for both class and intra-class formations. Scotland has in fact two cultures — Highland and Lowland — which limited the integrative role of any common culture.

Modern African literature and the legacy of cultural colonialism

Modern African literature and the legacy of cultural colonialism

Captain Cook Chased a Chook

How can we write the contemporary 'histories' of Captain Cook when they include such textual and material diversity? When that diversity ranges from children's rhymes to convenience stores as well as journals now claimed as iconic documents of the enlightenment? How might the insights of Bruno Latour into how the 'experimental' is produced in the laboratory be helpful in showing how Cook is produced in a settler culture? How does revealing the 'experimental' (the material and textual ethnography) of history show us new ways of 'doing' history that engages with its textual as well as its material diversity.

Group 13: Is the Zombie Apocalypse Trying to Tell Us Something More?

In Vodou tradition, the concept of zombism was connected to fears about unnatural death and the vulnerability of the soul. It acted as a spiritual metaphor for hard lives that lacked agency or social acknowledgement. Though not a central belief in Vodou, it gained pertinence as the European slave trade that decimated African populations spread stories about “voodoo” among settler culture. Later, American entertainment culture sunk its teeth in: early cinema and pop literature created the grotesque figure of the Zombie, a violent, racially coded sub-human that reflected white fears of “reverse colonization”1 (think films like White Zombie [1932] or Voodoo Man [1944]). This poster will explore how the sociopolitical connotations of zombies changed in the latter part of the 20th century, when fears about racial Others were matched by fears about what we could create ourselves. Zombies became vehicles for speculative fiction about disease, overpopulation, and human interference in genetic science - and how it would lead to our downfall.2 Movies like 28 Days Later and World War Z present zombism as a pandemic, and the actions taken by the imaginary government are akin to those in real-life crises such as H1N1 or the ‘bird flu’ of the early 2000’s. This poster will show that the modern zombie apocalypse is less about flesh‐eating monsters and more about late modern fears over how long and how well we can sustain globalization.