The Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) once said that whoever is capable of performing qurbani (Muslim charitable giving) but does not should not come close to my Eidgah (a place of offering Eid prayers) (Khattab and Khattab 2123). The primary objective of qurbani should be to achieve attainment that is intended to satisfy and get nearer to Allah in the way He likes. Sacrifice in Islam, in a circuitous logic, underlies the act of submission of one’s will to Him, the act of spending one’s material possessions on the path of the Supreme, an act of true giving. We would begin with the question: Is the moment of infinite giving, the transcendent offering, in a way, self-preserving? This paper shall attempt to understand how the theo-ontological idea of “sacrifice” operates in Islamic philosophy and how a deeper understanding of the gesture of qurbani might help us reconfigure the major representational elements surrounding Islamic culture and ethos in the post-9/11 scenario. Taking a cue from Derrida’s understanding of ethical “sacrifice,” this article shall try to understand how the figural gesture of sacrifice in Islam vis-à-vis Abrahamic ethics is fundamental to the understanding of qurbani in the post-9/11 xenophobic climate that has reduced the idea to a mere signifier of fundamentalism and cultural monism.
{"title":"Islam and the Thanatoethics of Sacrifice","authors":"Sk Sagir Ali","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2024.1217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2024.1217","url":null,"abstract":"The Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) once said that whoever is capable of performing qurbani (Muslim charitable giving) but does not should not come close to my Eidgah (a place of offering Eid prayers) (Khattab and Khattab 2123). The primary objective of qurbani should be to achieve attainment that is intended to satisfy and get nearer to Allah in the way He likes. Sacrifice in Islam, in a circuitous logic, underlies the act of submission of one’s will to Him, the act of spending one’s material possessions on the path of the Supreme, an act of true giving. We would begin with the question: Is the moment of infinite giving, the transcendent offering, in a way, self-preserving? This paper shall attempt to understand how the theo-ontological idea of “sacrifice” operates in Islamic philosophy and how a deeper understanding of the gesture of qurbani might help us reconfigure the major representational elements surrounding Islamic culture and ethos in the post-9/11 scenario. Taking a cue from Derrida’s understanding of ethical “sacrifice,” this article shall try to understand how the figural gesture of sacrifice in Islam vis-à-vis Abrahamic ethics is fundamental to the understanding of qurbani in the post-9/11 xenophobic climate that has reduced the idea to a mere signifier of fundamentalism and cultural monism.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":" 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141831658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The placement of recipes in a food memoir serves the unique function of contextualising a life story against culture, tradition, and history. They serve as a form of self-expression that looks at life in its entirety through an amalgamation of the material and abstract aspects of existence. For women in the diaspora, recipes not only enable them to maintain a link to the homeland through the preservation and perpetuation of foodways but also serve as a medium to adapt to the new country. Bengali-American historian and writer Chitrita Banerji’s A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes (2021) is structured as a three-course meal and uses recipes to frame liminal moments of existence. The food memoir traces the arc of Banerji’s life over seven decades—from her childhood in India, to her student life in the US, followed by married life in Bangladesh and culminates with her mature years spent dividing her time between the US and India. Banerji reconstructs her life through the food that has defined her with the recipes providing a structure for her transnational life that spans years and continents; they provide unity and coherence across space and time. This paper argues that the inclusion of recipes helps Banerji in constructing an identity that takes the whole gamut of her experiences into account. The recipes show her journey from dislocation to relocation and provide the scaffolding for the construction of a self that is reconciled and empowered. Banerji’s recipes articulate the way in which food anchors her, provides the impetus for her growth and gives her the means to reflect on life with a certain resolve tempered with a hint of nostalgia. Through her narrative we see how a recipe borrows as well as adapts, preserves as well as modifies. There is replication as well as recreation in a recipe, which is similar to a diaspora individual balancing assimilation with adaptation. Every recipe reveals a new facet of her identity and is crucial in her understanding of the self in relation to others.
食谱在美食回忆录中的独特作用是将生活故事与文化、传统和历史联系起来。食谱是一种自我表达的形式，通过对存在的物质和抽象方面的综合考虑来全面审视生活。对于散居海外的妇女来说，食谱不仅使她们能够通过保存和延续饮食习惯来保持与故乡的联系，而且还是适应新国家的媒介。孟加拉裔美国历史学家和作家奇特里塔-班纳吉（Chitrita Banerji）的《我生活的味道》（A Taste of My Life：A Memoir in Essays and Recipes》（2021 年）以三道菜的形式呈现，用食谱勾勒出生存的边缘时刻。这本美食回忆录追溯了 Banerji 七十年的人生轨迹--从她在印度的童年，到在美国的学生生活，再到在孟加拉国的婚姻生活，最后是她在美国和印度两地奔波的成熟岁月。Banerji 通过食物重构了她的生活，食谱为她跨越岁月和大陆的跨国生活提供了结构；食谱提供了跨越时空的统一性和连贯性。本文认为，食谱的加入有助于 Banerji 构建一个考虑到她全部经历的身份。食谱展示了她从颠沛流离到重新安置的过程，并为构建一个和解与赋权的自我提供了脚手架。Banerji 的食谱表达了食物对她的锚定作用，为她的成长提供了动力，并使她能够以一种带着一丝怀旧的坚定态度反思生活。通过她的叙述，我们可以看到食谱是如何借鉴和改编、保留和修改的。食谱中既有复制，也有再创造，这与散居海外的个人如何在同化与适应之间取得平衡相似。每一份食谱都揭示了她身份的一个新层面，对于她理解自我与他人的关系至关重要。
{"title":"Recipe for Identity","authors":"Manisha Mohanty, Amrita Satapathy","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1106","url":null,"abstract":"The placement of recipes in a food memoir serves the unique function of contextualising a life story against culture, tradition, and history. They serve as a form of self-expression that looks at life in its entirety through an amalgamation of the material and abstract aspects of existence. For women in the diaspora, recipes not only enable them to maintain a link to the homeland through the preservation and perpetuation of foodways but also serve as a medium to adapt to the new country. Bengali-American historian and writer Chitrita Banerji’s A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes (2021) is structured as a three-course meal and uses recipes to frame liminal moments of existence. The food memoir traces the arc of Banerji’s life over seven decades—from her childhood in India, to her student life in the US, followed by married life in Bangladesh and culminates with her mature years spent dividing her time between the US and India. Banerji reconstructs her life through the food that has defined her with the recipes providing a structure for her transnational life that spans years and continents; they provide unity and coherence across space and time. This paper argues that the inclusion of recipes helps Banerji in constructing an identity that takes the whole gamut of her experiences into account. The recipes show her journey from dislocation to relocation and provide the scaffolding for the construction of a self that is reconciled and empowered. Banerji’s recipes articulate the way in which food anchors her, provides the impetus for her growth and gives her the means to reflect on life with a certain resolve tempered with a hint of nostalgia. Through her narrative we see how a recipe borrows as well as adapts, preserves as well as modifies. There is replication as well as recreation in a recipe, which is similar to a diaspora individual balancing assimilation with adaptation. Every recipe reveals a new facet of her identity and is crucial in her understanding of the self in relation to others.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"2 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper considers narratives of refugee experience in postcolonial scholarship. Investigating refugee experiences is indispensable to understanding how postcolonial theory applies to narratives that represent involuntary mobilization. It elucidates how the refugee experience casts an idiosyncratic outlook on the Western and Orientalist formulations, bringing to light a renegotiation of the dynamics of the distinction between the two. Looking at Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I argue that Hope challenges the naturalized authenticity of Western superiority by employing the refugee trope as a rhetorical counter-narrative of core paradigms of Eurocentrism, contesting the Western ideologies that consolidate this naturalized Western superiority by establishing a parallel paradigm of power between the two locales—West and East.
{"title":"(Re)negotiating Empire","authors":"Rasha Aljararwa","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.2354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.2354","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers narratives of refugee experience in postcolonial scholarship. Investigating refugee experiences is indispensable to understanding how postcolonial theory applies to narratives that represent involuntary mobilization. It elucidates how the refugee experience casts an idiosyncratic outlook on the Western and Orientalist formulations, bringing to light a renegotiation of the dynamics of the distinction between the two. Looking at Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I argue that Hope challenges the naturalized authenticity of Western superiority by employing the refugee trope as a rhetorical counter-narrative of core paradigms of Eurocentrism, contesting the Western ideologies that consolidate this naturalized Western superiority by establishing a parallel paradigm of power between the two locales—West and East.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"14 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By forcefully inserting itself within the landscape and history of California, “near the confluence of the Feather and Sacramento rivers” in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees (2009) moves beyond the common tropes of Asian American fictions in which memory is invoked primarily in terms of nostalgia or loss, to emplace itself within the very specific geographical locale and physical landscape of the small town of Oak Grove in northern California (48). The text adopts an emphatically regional frame as a strategic move to stake a claim to inclusion within the body politic of the nation through filiations to the land that have been forged by living in close proximity with it—working the soil, learning its many qualities, and becoming conversant with seasonal rhythms. In doing so, Under the Lemon Trees gestures to more-than-human kinship structures and a sense of place that transcends institutional taxonomies of “citizen” and “immigrant” alike.
{"title":"“A Western Outpost of the Punjab”","authors":"Rajender Kaur","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1108","url":null,"abstract":"By forcefully inserting itself within the landscape and history of California, “near the confluence of the Feather and Sacramento rivers” in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees (2009) moves beyond the common tropes of Asian American fictions in which memory is invoked primarily in terms of nostalgia or loss, to emplace itself within the very specific geographical locale and physical landscape of the small town of Oak Grove in northern California (48). The text adopts an emphatically regional frame as a strategic move to stake a claim to inclusion within the body politic of the nation through filiations to the land that have been forged by living in close proximity with it—working the soil, learning its many qualities, and becoming conversant with seasonal rhythms. In doing so, Under the Lemon Trees gestures to more-than-human kinship structures and a sense of place that transcends institutional taxonomies of “citizen” and “immigrant” alike.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"2 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 2017 images of demonstrations, riot police, and tanks filled social media worldwide. Most of the videos and media coverage reported on the first wave of #BlackLivesMatter uprisings were catalyzed by police brutality in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. In June of that year, similar footage came from Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. This predominantly Afro-descendantpo rt city is responsible for the transit of about 60 percent of the country’s commerce, while unemployment and inequality are rampant, and the infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. The affected local communities responded to these conditions of structural racism with a direct action named Paro Civico: a general strike planned for years by a coalition of grass-rootsAfro-Colombi an organizations demanding clean drinking water, health care, education, and policies to combat drug trafficking-related violence. Resisting police attacks while negotiating with a high-ranked delegation from the Colombian government, the months-long general strike achieved the majority of its goals and, most importantly, galvanized the momentum into the election of one of the movement’s leaders as mayor of Buenaventura. However, the leaders of the Paro Cívico’s Executive Committee have been emphatic in naming this a multiethnic movement and rejecting any specific racial discourses as organizing guiding principles for the direct action. In addition to contextualizing Paro Cívico, this article uses Tianna Paschel’s concept of “organizing while black,” to explain this omission in a racial context determined by the politics of mestizaje in Colombia. It also explains how Paro Cívico strategically exhibited the political power of the communities of the African diaspora without verbalizing it, becoming one of multiple factors that ushered in a new chapter of racial politics in the nation.
{"title":"People Don’t Give Up!","authors":"Fernando Esquivel-Suárez, Jackeline Victoria","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1105","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017 images of demonstrations, riot police, and tanks filled social media worldwide. Most of the videos and media coverage reported on the first wave of #BlackLivesMatter uprisings were catalyzed by police brutality in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. In June of that year, similar footage came from Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. This predominantly Afro-descendantpo rt city is responsible for the transit of about 60 percent of the country’s commerce, while unemployment and inequality are rampant, and the infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. The affected local communities responded to these conditions of structural racism with a direct action named Paro Civico: a general strike planned for years by a coalition of grass-rootsAfro-Colombi an organizations demanding clean drinking water, health care, education, and policies to combat drug trafficking-related violence. Resisting police attacks while negotiating with a high-ranked delegation from the Colombian government, the months-long general strike achieved the majority of its goals and, most importantly, galvanized the momentum into the election of one of the movement’s leaders as mayor of Buenaventura. However, the leaders of the Paro Cívico’s Executive Committee have been emphatic in naming this a multiethnic movement and rejecting any specific racial discourses as organizing guiding principles for the direct action. In addition to contextualizing Paro Cívico, this article uses Tianna Paschel’s concept of “organizing while black,” to explain this omission in a racial context determined by the politics of mestizaje in Colombia. It also explains how Paro Cívico strategically exhibited the political power of the communities of the African diaspora without verbalizing it, becoming one of multiple factors that ushered in a new chapter of racial politics in the nation.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"128 s1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For centuries, Africans migrated to India in different phases resulting in a significant presence of the African diaspora in this country. The term “African diaspora” gained currency only in the mid-nineteenth century in connection with the study of the people of African origin dispersed all over the world. But in countries like India, the African presence dates as far back as the period of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Historically, India and Africa have shared cordial political and economic relations. Their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, the mutual reverence for political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, and India’s support for postapartheid South Africa might indicate the peaceful coexistence of Indians and Africans in present-day India. But the on the ground reality hits differently, as depicted in “The Shade of You” by Anushree Majumdar, published in Eleven Ways to Love: Essays by Penguin India. Majumdar thinks herself a modern and enlightened woman until she gets into a relationship with Bryan Ochieng, a Kenyan studying in Delhi. As she gradually explores her relationship with Bryan, she comes to know about different aspects of racism that the African diaspora faces in Delhi in a more intimate way. Getting mocked and ridiculed for dating a black man in the public space makes her critique the racist attitude of her fellow Delhiites. She realizes that Indians have deeply internalized the colonial legacy of racism and colorism. She understands that, since our very childhood, we embrace a culture informed by racist ideology unconsciously. Indians are satisfied with the tokenist acceptance of black culture by celebrating black footballers and pop artists, but they would never let African diasporic people come closer as family and friends. This mindset has sufficiently exoticized and otherized Africans in India. Her proximity to Bryan reveals to her how ignorant she has been about Bryan’s culture despite her love of selective parts of Kenyan culture. The presence of Bryan and his Kenyan friends in her life offers her moments of self-reflexivity. She comes to question how much she has been able to unlearn her racial prejudices, and the answer forces her to confront an aspect of her race–intolerant subjectivity so far buried under her conscious race-sensitive self. Her self-realization makes her feel uncomfortable and apologetic. She feels that the self-realization that has dawned upon her is not enough to help her in the unlearning process overnight. She fails to maintain a long-term relationship with Bryan given their seemingly unbridgeable cultural gap at that point in time. But Bryan’s entry into her life marks the beginning of her anti-racism journey in the true sense of the term and it continues. Years later, she finds that she has become a better version of herself who is no longer troubled by the hidden guilt and shame associated with her relationship with an African.
几个世纪以来，非洲人分不同阶段移居印度，导致印度出现了大量非洲移民社群。散居国外的非洲人 "一词直到 19 世纪中叶才在研究散居在世界各地的非洲人时使用。但在印度这样的国家，非洲人的存在最早可以追溯到印度洋奴隶贸易时期。从历史上看，印度和非洲有着友好的政治和经济关系。他们共同的反殖民斗争历史，对圣雄甘地和纳尔逊-曼德拉等政治领袖的相互尊重，以及印度对种族隔离后的南非的支持，都可能表明印度人和非洲人在当今的印度和平共处。但是，正如阿努什里-马朱姆达尔（Anushree Majumdar）在《十一种爱的方式》（11 Ways to Love）一书中发表的《你的阴影》（The Shade of You）一文所描述的那样，现实情况却并非如此：由印度企鹅出版社出版。Majumdar 自认为是一个开明的现代女性，直到她与在德里学习的肯尼亚人 Bryan Ochieng 发生关系。在逐渐探索与布莱恩的关系的过程中，她对散居在德里的非洲人所面临的种族主义的各个方面有了更深入的了解。因为在公共场合与黑人约会而遭到嘲笑和讥讽，这让她开始批判德里人的种族主义态度。她意识到，印度人已经深深地将种族主义和肤色歧视的殖民遗产内化了。她明白，从童年开始，我们就在不知不觉中接受了种族主义意识形态的文化。印度人满足于象征性地接受黑人文化，为黑人足球运动员和流行艺术家喝彩，但他们绝不会让散居国外的非洲人像家人和朋友一样走得更近。这种思维定式充分异化了非洲人在印度的身份。她与布莱恩的接近向她揭示了她对布莱恩文化的无知，尽管她对肯尼亚文化的某些部分情有独钟。布莱恩和他的肯尼亚朋友出现在她的生活中，为她提供了自我反思的机会。她开始质疑自己到底在多大程度上摆脱了种族偏见，而答案迫使她正视自己种族宽容主观性的一个方面，这个方面一直被埋藏在她有意识的种族敏感自我之下。她的自我认识让她感到不安和歉意。她觉得，她所恍然大悟的自我认识不足以帮助她在一夜之间解除学习过程。鉴于布莱恩与她在文化上的差距似乎无法弥合，她未能与布莱恩保持长期关系。但是，布莱恩进入她的生活标志着她真正意义上的反种族主义之旅的开始，而且这一旅程还在继续。多年以后，她发现自己已经成为了一个更好的自己，不再为与非洲人的关系所带来的隐藏的内疚和羞耻感所困扰。
{"title":"Racism Learnt and Unlearnt","authors":"Damayanti Das","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1110","url":null,"abstract":"For centuries, Africans migrated to India in different phases resulting in a significant presence of the African diaspora in this country. The term “African diaspora” gained currency only in the mid-nineteenth century in connection with the study of the people of African origin dispersed all over the world. But in countries like India, the African presence dates as far back as the period of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Historically, India and Africa have shared cordial political and economic relations. Their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, the mutual reverence for political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, and India’s support for postapartheid South Africa might indicate the peaceful coexistence of Indians and Africans in present-day India. But the on the ground reality hits differently, as depicted in “The Shade of You” by Anushree Majumdar, published in Eleven Ways to Love: Essays by Penguin India. Majumdar thinks herself a modern and enlightened woman until she gets into a relationship with Bryan Ochieng, a Kenyan studying in Delhi. As she gradually explores her relationship with Bryan, she comes to know about different aspects of racism that the African diaspora faces in Delhi in a more intimate way. Getting mocked and ridiculed for dating a black man in the public space makes her critique the racist attitude of her fellow Delhiites. She realizes that Indians have deeply internalized the colonial legacy of racism and colorism. She understands that, since our very childhood, we embrace a culture informed by racist ideology unconsciously. Indians are satisfied with the tokenist acceptance of black culture by celebrating black footballers and pop artists, but they would never let African diasporic people come closer as family and friends. This mindset has sufficiently exoticized and otherized Africans in India. Her proximity to Bryan reveals to her how ignorant she has been about Bryan’s culture despite her love of selective parts of Kenyan culture. The presence of Bryan and his Kenyan friends in her life offers her moments of self-reflexivity. She comes to question how much she has been able to unlearn her racial prejudices, and the answer forces her to confront an aspect of her race–intolerant subjectivity so far buried under her conscious race-sensitive self. Her self-realization makes her feel uncomfortable and apologetic. She feels that the self-realization that has dawned upon her is not enough to help her in the unlearning process overnight. She fails to maintain a long-term relationship with Bryan given their seemingly unbridgeable cultural gap at that point in time. But Bryan’s entry into her life marks the beginning of her anti-racism journey in the true sense of the term and it continues. Years later, she finds that she has become a better version of herself who is no longer troubled by the hidden guilt and shame associated with her relationship with an African.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"122 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with differentinterlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.
{"title":"Dis/Connected in Diaspora","authors":"Radhika Natarajan","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1109","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with differentinterlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"8 4p2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine” is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women’s and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s–mid 1980s. In using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, as she defines it in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one’s understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building.
{"title":"Erotic Black Diaspora","authors":"Olivia Pearson","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1107","url":null,"abstract":"“The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine” is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women’s and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s–mid 1980s.\u0000In using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, as she defines it in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one’s understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"219 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141834239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay creates a heuristic homology between postcoloniality and strains of survivorship whose very contingency “de-humaniz[es] greed as the primum mobile . . . [and thereby composes] the dangerous supplement, one on one yet collective” (Spivak, “Marx” 281). Using Spivak’s attempt to globalize Marx by abjuring epistemological enterprises that privilege “a philosophically correct structural position” (281) at the expense of the subaltern’s “right to intellectual labor” (284), this essay reads the phantasms and afflictions of the Scottish diaspora in the 1940s coal-mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as represented by Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1996), for a postcoloniality that, in being attuned to what is left of communally viable forms of collective survival, especially as these remain inappropriable by capital, yields proliferativesubjectifications of traumatic experience that are capable of eluding the open “secret of the theft of surplus value” (279) by which global capitalism ruthlessly extracts the unraveling of the biosphere as normality.
{"title":"“Ye Be the Clear Morag Yourself”","authors":"Namita Goswami","doi":"10.5744/jgps/2024.1111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps/2024.1111","url":null,"abstract":"This essay creates a heuristic homology between postcoloniality and strains of survivorship whose very contingency “de-humaniz[es] greed as the primum mobile . . . [and thereby composes] the dangerous supplement, one on one yet collective” (Spivak, “Marx” 281). Using Spivak’s attempt to globalize Marx by abjuring epistemological enterprises that privilege “a philosophically correct structural position” (281) at the expense of the subaltern’s “right to intellectual labor” (284), this essay reads the phantasms and afflictions of the Scottish diaspora in the 1940s coal-mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as represented by Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1996), for a postcoloniality that, in being attuned to what is left of communally viable forms of collective survival, especially as these remain inappropriable by capital, yields proliferativesubjectifications of traumatic experience that are capable of eluding the open “secret of the theft of surplus value” (279) by which global capitalism ruthlessly extracts the unraveling of the biosphere as normality.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":" 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140382008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Le Voile de la Peur (Veil of Fear) by Samia Shariff (2006) is the French autobiography of an abused Algerian wife who describes her forced “illegal” migration to Canada in search of asylum. Shariff’s testimony has so far been seen as the life narrative of an oppressed female fugitive fleeing Islamic “misogyny.” In this article, I offer a more complex assessment that sees Veil of Fear as a border text that unveils the paradoxes of a globalized and yet heavily policed world. My exploration of Shariff’s autobiography emphasizes the contradictions of globalization, which call for borderlessness while policing the mobility of citizens of poor countries. My transnational feminist reading of Shariff’s clandestine journey highlights the intersectional nature of the oppressive forces that torment Algerian women and the wrongness of reducing the problems of Muslim female asylum seekers to patriarchy. My investigation of the difficulties which Shariff faced in migrating to Canada generates a reading of the unauthorized crossing as a bodily act through which paperless women challenge local gendered and global spatial hierarchies.
{"title":"Beyond Patriarchy","authors":"Jyhene Kebsi","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2021.2003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2021.2003","url":null,"abstract":"Le Voile de la Peur (Veil of Fear) by Samia Shariff (2006) is the French autobiography of an abused Algerian wife who describes her forced “illegal” migration to Canada in search of asylum. Shariff’s testimony has so far been seen as the life narrative of an oppressed female fugitive fleeing Islamic “misogyny.” In this article, I offer a more complex assessment that sees Veil of Fear as a border text that unveils the paradoxes of a globalized and yet heavily policed world. My exploration of Shariff’s autobiography emphasizes the contradictions of globalization, which call for borderlessness while policing the mobility of citizens of poor countries. My transnational feminist reading of Shariff’s clandestine journey highlights the intersectional nature of the oppressive forces that torment Algerian women and the wrongness of reducing the problems of Muslim female asylum seekers to patriarchy. My investigation of the difficulties which Shariff faced in migrating to Canada generates a reading of the unauthorized crossing as a bodily act through which paperless women challenge local gendered and global spatial hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":246308,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129770803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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