Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have so often been treated in isolation from each other. Postcolonialism and Cold War studies have, as Monica Popescu tells us, followed “separate, largely non-intersecting paths” (6). Yet even a superficial summary of the key geopolitical developments of the postwar period suggests that the Cold War and decolonization are not just interconnected, but mutually determining. When you take into account the decolonizing world, in some places afflicted by devastating proxy wars in this period, it must be said (it has often been said) that the Cold War was cruelly misnamed. This dual history has shaped our political language. A term like the West, as it is used in academic debates as well as in political, journalistic, and policymaking fields, developed its particular set of associations by contrast with the communist Eastern bloc on the one hand and with the (post)colonial global south on the other. Yet these two versions of the non-Western don’t always line up: although anticolonial movements often sought to align themselves with the international communist movement, many proudly independent postcolonial nation-states were explicitly anti-communist (like the neoliberal regimes in Singapore and South Korea). Other postcolonies grappled with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China as a colonial power.
{"title":"Cold War Decolonization","authors":"Matthew Taunton","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.29","url":null,"abstract":"Literary culture after 1945 took shape in a context where a handful of colonial empires were replaced by (at present count) nearly two hundred sovereign nation-states whose domestic politics, foreign policy, and cultural life were profoundly shaped by their relationship to the Cold War superpowers. One of the striking features of the historiography of this post-1945 world is that its two most salient themes—the Cold War, and decolonization—have so often been treated in isolation from each other. Postcolonialism and Cold War studies have, as Monica Popescu tells us, followed “separate, largely non-intersecting paths” (6). Yet even a superficial summary of the key geopolitical developments of the postwar period suggests that the Cold War and decolonization are not just interconnected, but mutually determining. When you take into account the decolonizing world, in some places afflicted by devastating proxy wars in this period, it must be said (it has often been said) that the Cold War was cruelly misnamed. This dual history has shaped our political language. A term like the West, as it is used in academic debates as well as in political, journalistic, and policymaking fields, developed its particular set of associations by contrast with the communist Eastern bloc on the one hand and with the (post)colonial global south on the other. Yet these two versions of the non-Western don’t always line up: although anticolonial movements often sought to align themselves with the international communist movement, many proudly independent postcolonial nation-states were explicitly anti-communist (like the neoliberal regimes in Singapore and South Korea). Other postcolonies grappled with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China as a colonial power.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"128 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42279561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.
{"title":"The Creolizing Turn and Its Archipelagic Directions","authors":"A. Kabir","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.31","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"90 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48628459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“What took place in the Caribbean,” writes Édouard Glissant, “which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation as nearly as possible.”1 For Glissant, the word creolization condenses the history of the Caribbean. This is a history characterized by trans-border connections, culture flows, and the transregional movement of people and capital.2 As the first region to be colonized by Europe in the sixteenth century and the last one to be—incompletely—decolonized in the twentieth, the Caribbean has been shaped by the worldwide demand and supply of colonial labor. It was the destination of nearly half of all the enslaved Africans trafficked into the New World between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century; of significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period; as well as of indentured Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian workers after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century.3 Subsequently, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a circuit of intra-regional migration of a labor force to the larger Caribbean islands where US-led corporations operated. After World War II, when labor from the non-independent territories of the Caribbean was recruited to rebuild the postwar economies of western Europe and the United States, the region turned into a source of transcontinental emigration.4 On account of this history, the Caribbean has been theorized in terms of transculturation, creolization, and hybridity; concepts such as “remittance societies,” “circular migration,” or “diaspora,” widely used in transnational studies, have also been coined in relation to the Caribbean.5 More than these other terms, however, the concept of creolization has come to condense both the sedimentation and ramifications of this history.
{"title":"Creolization as Method","authors":"Anca Parvulescu, Manuela Boatcă","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.34","url":null,"abstract":"“What took place in the Caribbean,” writes Édouard Glissant, “which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation as nearly as possible.”1 For Glissant, the word creolization condenses the history of the Caribbean. This is a history characterized by trans-border connections, culture flows, and the transregional movement of people and capital.2 As the first region to be colonized by Europe in the sixteenth century and the last one to be—incompletely—decolonized in the twentieth, the Caribbean has been shaped by the worldwide demand and supply of colonial labor. It was the destination of nearly half of all the enslaved Africans trafficked into the New World between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century; of significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period; as well as of indentured Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian workers after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century.3 Subsequently, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a circuit of intra-regional migration of a labor force to the larger Caribbean islands where US-led corporations operated. After World War II, when labor from the non-independent territories of the Caribbean was recruited to rebuild the postwar economies of western Europe and the United States, the region turned into a source of transcontinental emigration.4 On account of this history, the Caribbean has been theorized in terms of transculturation, creolization, and hybridity; concepts such as “remittance societies,” “circular migration,” or “diaspora,” widely used in transnational studies, have also been coined in relation to the Caribbean.5 More than these other terms, however, the concept of creolization has come to condense both the sedimentation and ramifications of this history.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"121 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44461900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Situated within contemporary studies of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this article argues that existing discourse around Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian suffers from a lack of critical engagement with the novel’s racial and colonial politics. Using racial capitalism as a framework, the article posits that McCarthy’s novel can be read not only as a story about American storytelling traditions, but how these traditions are themselves contingent on the reproduction and reification of white supremacy. This rereading of Blood Meridian additionally takes into account how the novel’s narrativization of white supremacy and settler colonialism manifests in both the novel’s form and content, arguing that the novel stages encounters with blackness and Indigeneity to mimic the mechanisms through which white supremacy was (violently) produced.
{"title":"Cormac McCarthy’s Racial Fictions: Race in Blood Meridian’s Colonial Imagination","authors":"Kyle Wang","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.26","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Situated within contemporary studies of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this article argues that existing discourse around Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian suffers from a lack of critical engagement with the novel’s racial and colonial politics. Using racial capitalism as a framework, the article posits that McCarthy’s novel can be read not only as a story about American storytelling traditions, but how these traditions are themselves contingent on the reproduction and reification of white supremacy. This rereading of Blood Meridian additionally takes into account how the novel’s narrativization of white supremacy and settler colonialism manifests in both the novel’s form and content, arguing that the novel stages encounters with blackness and Indigeneity to mimic the mechanisms through which white supremacy was (violently) produced.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"21 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49080593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.
{"title":"“On Reading Mau Mau”","authors":"Christian Alvarado","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.25","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"37 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42980396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rochona Majumdar, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony. Columbia University Press, 2021, 320 pp.","authors":"O. Solovieva","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.27","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"135 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46922448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Most readers in the postcolonial field will know of Graham Pechey from his introduction to Njabulo Ndebele’s South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1994), but Pechey’s ownwriting on South African literature began a decade earlier with a pathbreaking 1983 essay on Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. Shedding the colonial habits of South African textual criticism, it focused on the discontinuities of an iconic colonial text as a way of fathoming its historical resonance and relevance. I remember reading it at the time and finding it inspiring because, apart from its sheer energy and verve, it modeled a formal criticism that reversed the standard polarities between literature and history, finding in the former an authority that both disrupted and revealed the inner dynamics of the latter. Both Pechey’s introduction to the Ndebele volume and his essay on Schreiner are included in this highly valuable collection of his writings on South Africa. Dense and demanding as well as engaging, it is a volume filled with insights and perspectives that will repay the kind of attention that clearly went into them. Pechey, who died in 2016, was something of an anomaly. He never completed his doctorate, yet read both broadly and deeply, liable to insert himself into the intricacies of Dante as much as he does into a miniaturist story of Schreiner’s, where he finds surprisingly large-scale resonances. Himself a colonial product who studied at the University of Natal, Pechey proceeded by way of liberalism to the radical Congress of Democrats, followed by a move to the United Kingdom in 1965. By the mid-1990s, as his daughter Laura Pechey informs us, he had found faith and was confirmed as an Anglican. Were these his own discontinuities, or were there deeper currents underlying them? The volume goes some way to answering the question through his recurrent themes and persistent view that literature has the capacity to deliver the numinous in the everyday, a representational excess that is at one and the same time radical, elusive, and potentially redemptive in both social and (in the broadest sense) spiritual modalities. The book is divided into three parts: “South African Literature in Transition (1990–1998),” “South African Literature Before and After Apartheid,” and “The Languages of South African Poetry.” Each section has its own constituent essays, and through them all one can see Pechey’s abiding preoccupations. At the core of them is something he finds in the work of Ndebele: “nothing less than the (re) composition of the whole social text of South Africa” (142). That idea of the “whole social text” is key because for Pechey South Africa itself is a kind of writing, a living and historicized discourse in response to which literature has an
{"title":"Graham Pechey, In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa. Liverpool University Press, 2022, 256 pp.","authors":"Stephen R. Clingman","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.28","url":null,"abstract":"Most readers in the postcolonial field will know of Graham Pechey from his introduction to Njabulo Ndebele’s South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1994), but Pechey’s ownwriting on South African literature began a decade earlier with a pathbreaking 1983 essay on Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. Shedding the colonial habits of South African textual criticism, it focused on the discontinuities of an iconic colonial text as a way of fathoming its historical resonance and relevance. I remember reading it at the time and finding it inspiring because, apart from its sheer energy and verve, it modeled a formal criticism that reversed the standard polarities between literature and history, finding in the former an authority that both disrupted and revealed the inner dynamics of the latter. Both Pechey’s introduction to the Ndebele volume and his essay on Schreiner are included in this highly valuable collection of his writings on South Africa. Dense and demanding as well as engaging, it is a volume filled with insights and perspectives that will repay the kind of attention that clearly went into them. Pechey, who died in 2016, was something of an anomaly. He never completed his doctorate, yet read both broadly and deeply, liable to insert himself into the intricacies of Dante as much as he does into a miniaturist story of Schreiner’s, where he finds surprisingly large-scale resonances. Himself a colonial product who studied at the University of Natal, Pechey proceeded by way of liberalism to the radical Congress of Democrats, followed by a move to the United Kingdom in 1965. By the mid-1990s, as his daughter Laura Pechey informs us, he had found faith and was confirmed as an Anglican. Were these his own discontinuities, or were there deeper currents underlying them? The volume goes some way to answering the question through his recurrent themes and persistent view that literature has the capacity to deliver the numinous in the everyday, a representational excess that is at one and the same time radical, elusive, and potentially redemptive in both social and (in the broadest sense) spiritual modalities. The book is divided into three parts: “South African Literature in Transition (1990–1998),” “South African Literature Before and After Apartheid,” and “The Languages of South African Poetry.” Each section has its own constituent essays, and through them all one can see Pechey’s abiding preoccupations. At the core of them is something he finds in the work of Ndebele: “nothing less than the (re) composition of the whole social text of South Africa” (142). That idea of the “whole social text” is key because for Pechey South Africa itself is a kind of writing, a living and historicized discourse in response to which literature has an","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"134 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45608687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The idea that (semi-)peripheral societies might follow developmental pathways distinct from those prescribed by globalization has been explored at length in the last twenty years by scholars such as G. G. Alcock, Rem Koolhaus, Jane Guyer, AbdouMaliq Simone, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall. For scholars who have celebrated these kinds of sociality, the informal economy—as Keith Hart has called it—represents Gordimer’s “space that lies between camps”: an alternative social velocity to both the corrupt or “can’t do” state and global capitalist modernization. But more and more South African writers are using their work to interrogate the idea that living in the interstices of institutions such as the state, traditional community, and capital is in fact liberatory or counter-hegemonic. In this article I argue that Masande Ntshanga’s 2014 novel The Reactive is the paradigm of the “disaffection” of present fiction—as Ivan Vladislavić describes it—with contemporary South Africa.
{"title":"The Informal Economy in Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive","authors":"Josh Jewell","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.30","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The idea that (semi-)peripheral societies might follow developmental pathways distinct from those prescribed by globalization has been explored at length in the last twenty years by scholars such as G. G. Alcock, Rem Koolhaus, Jane Guyer, AbdouMaliq Simone, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall. For scholars who have celebrated these kinds of sociality, the informal economy—as Keith Hart has called it—represents Gordimer’s “space that lies between camps”: an alternative social velocity to both the corrupt or “can’t do” state and global capitalist modernization. But more and more South African writers are using their work to interrogate the idea that living in the interstices of institutions such as the state, traditional community, and capital is in fact liberatory or counter-hegemonic. In this article I argue that Masande Ntshanga’s 2014 novel The Reactive is the paradigm of the “disaffection” of present fiction—as Ivan Vladislavić describes it—with contemporary South Africa.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"57 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46047154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this article I show how ubiquitous hybridity is in cultures. It is enabled by layers of population movements and contacts since the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. I demonstrate how hybridization has proceeded in the emergence of creole language varieties and show that the same process has also driven, for instance, the emergence and differential evolution of English and the speciation of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages. Differences in outcomes are determined by the specificities of the contact ecologies, including population structure, differences in the demographic proportions of the populations in contact and power relations between them, as well as patterns of population growth, among other factors. I argue that hybridity is not unique to languages. It is conspicuous in other domains of culture, including cuisine, music, clothing fashions, and technologies, for example. I submit a uniformitarian approach inspired by evolutionary biology to better understand how hybridization occurs.
{"title":"Linguistic Hybridization in the Emergence of Creoles","authors":"S. Mufwene","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.32","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article I show how ubiquitous hybridity is in cultures. It is enabled by layers of population movements and contacts since the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. I demonstrate how hybridization has proceeded in the emergence of creole language varieties and show that the same process has also driven, for instance, the emergence and differential evolution of English and the speciation of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages. Differences in outcomes are determined by the specificities of the contact ecologies, including population structure, differences in the demographic proportions of the populations in contact and power relations between them, as well as patterns of population growth, among other factors. I argue that hybridity is not unique to languages. It is conspicuous in other domains of culture, including cuisine, music, clothing fashions, and technologies, for example. I submit a uniformitarian approach inspired by evolutionary biology to better understand how hybridization occurs.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"74 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43926434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“This poem cannot find words / this poem repeats itself,” begins the Trinidadborn Canadian writer Dionne Brand in her poem titled “October 19th, 1983.” This self-reflexive opening is underwritten by shock, confusion, and even trauma. The poem goes on to list a series of names in a repetitive refrain that suggests disbelief: “Maurice is dead / Jackie is dead.” Laurie Lambert argues in Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution that Brand’s stuttering attempt to come to terms, through poetry, with the violence of what transpired in the Caribbean island country of Grenada on October 19, 1983, speaks to how writing functions as a “certain structure of healing” in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle and defeat (Lambert 139). In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel movement (NJM) under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of Grenada. While the anti-imperialist, social democratic vision of the NJM transformed Grenadian infrastructure, agriculture, and education for the better, “a thread of violence” too often ran through the everyday lives of those in whose name revolutionary change was being sought (Lambert 10). This culminated in the fratricidal outcome of which Brand writes—or rather, “cannot find words” to write—wherein a combination of internal party conflicts and external destabilization turned the revolution murderous of its own. The US military invasion that followed, which included aerial bombing and the deliberate erasure of evidence, was retraumatizing and further complicated the revolution’s legacy. Comrade Sister turns to women’s perspectives in order to grapple with the conflicting realities of this period of Grenadian history, itself part of a longue durée of radical political struggle in the Caribbean that dates back to the genocide of its indigenous peoples and plantation slavery. Lambert’s study rests on two productive and urgent (re-)conceptualizations. One is recognizing the “queer temporality” of revolution, wherein “ideas of revolution as a chronological project of achievement” must be disrupted in order to understand, in full, how the Grenadian Revolution is imagined and remembered (127). The second is an expansion of what constitutes everyday resistance, political struggle, and revolutionary history-making—even and especially where those engaged in these everyday struggles feel ambivalent toward the revolutionary state, even if they
{"title":"Aftermaths Without End","authors":"Sarah Jilani","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.21","url":null,"abstract":"“This poem cannot find words / this poem repeats itself,” begins the Trinidadborn Canadian writer Dionne Brand in her poem titled “October 19th, 1983.” This self-reflexive opening is underwritten by shock, confusion, and even trauma. The poem goes on to list a series of names in a repetitive refrain that suggests disbelief: “Maurice is dead / Jackie is dead.” Laurie Lambert argues in Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution that Brand’s stuttering attempt to come to terms, through poetry, with the violence of what transpired in the Caribbean island country of Grenada on October 19, 1983, speaks to how writing functions as a “certain structure of healing” in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle and defeat (Lambert 139). In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel movement (NJM) under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of Grenada. While the anti-imperialist, social democratic vision of the NJM transformed Grenadian infrastructure, agriculture, and education for the better, “a thread of violence” too often ran through the everyday lives of those in whose name revolutionary change was being sought (Lambert 10). This culminated in the fratricidal outcome of which Brand writes—or rather, “cannot find words” to write—wherein a combination of internal party conflicts and external destabilization turned the revolution murderous of its own. The US military invasion that followed, which included aerial bombing and the deliberate erasure of evidence, was retraumatizing and further complicated the revolution’s legacy. Comrade Sister turns to women’s perspectives in order to grapple with the conflicting realities of this period of Grenadian history, itself part of a longue durée of radical political struggle in the Caribbean that dates back to the genocide of its indigenous peoples and plantation slavery. Lambert’s study rests on two productive and urgent (re-)conceptualizations. One is recognizing the “queer temporality” of revolution, wherein “ideas of revolution as a chronological project of achievement” must be disrupted in order to understand, in full, how the Grenadian Revolution is imagined and remembered (127). The second is an expansion of what constitutes everyday resistance, political struggle, and revolutionary history-making—even and especially where those engaged in these everyday struggles feel ambivalent toward the revolutionary state, even if they","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"431 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42259698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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