Pub Date : 2021-10-15DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1989816
Madhumita Sengupta, Jahnu Bharadwaj
ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex intertwining of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in the making of memories about the colonial past. The essay uses literature and cinema as archive and intersubjectivity as the lens to argue that memories of the Empire are culled in the complex intersection of the subjective experiences of the individual and a community's collective perceptions of the past and the present. Accordingly, the essay calls for due diligence to the immediate postcolonial context in which the colonial memory project is ordained. At a more elementary level, the essay argues that the reduction of colonial experiences to a conflictual negation of the imperialist project impairs our understanding of the myriad factors mediating the colonial encounter. The polysemy of colonial memories reflects the multiplicity of intersubjective exchanges within a community. In this case, the Assamese short story, ‘Chameli Memsaab', written by Nirode Choudhury, and describing the affection of a benign planter sahib for Chameli, a coolie woman, becomes our focal point for entry into the neglected domain of Assamese literary representations of the European planter, that put a gloss on the dark side of Plantation abuses in Assam, to project the plantation economy as a desirable addendum to the Raj. Our survey of short stories written in Assamese, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, reveal a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the unequal sexual exchange between the European sahib and the coolie woman, which we call ‘the intimate economy of tea’ in Assam, and which, as the coercive underside of the economy, denuded the production relations on the plantations of their putatively capitalist character.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-13DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1986949
E. Stratford
In Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking , Paul Carter 1 explores how to approach regional governance afresh. He does so on the understanding that well-inten-tioned methods to address certain matters that concern him perpetuate ‘ neo-colonialist assumptions about authority, vesting them in the language of administrative prose and the cartography of territory ’ (p 1)
{"title":"Reading Paul Carter’s decolonising governance: archipelagic thinking","authors":"E. Stratford","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2021.1986949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1986949","url":null,"abstract":"In Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking , Paul Carter 1 explores how to approach regional governance afresh. He does so on the understanding that well-inten-tioned methods to address certain matters that concern him perpetuate ‘ neo-colonialist assumptions about authority, vesting them in the language of administrative prose and the cartography of territory ’ (p 1)","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"329 - 335"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83348261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1986945
P. Steinberg
Thinking with non-solid geographic forms to undermine the conceits and closures of the static, bounded territorial state is all the rage in decolonization studies. The table of contents of the book Territory Beyond Terra – Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Mudflats, Floodplains, Cities, Ice, Bodies, Boats, Shores, Seabeds – suggests just some of the spatial forms that can be used to rethink the space of the sovereign state. Indeed, as the editors of that volume note, even that list could be stretched further, to cover mediated, manufactured or extra-planetary spaces. Paul Carter places Decolonising Governance squarely within this literature, identifying the book as ‘a contribution to the evolving field of island studies, ocean studies and, in general, the turn away from nation-state territorialisations of the Earth’s surface’. In particular, he focuses on the decolonizing potential of the archipelago, which a succession of critical island scholars has highlighted as a spatial form that, paraphrasing Stratford et al., is ‘topologically sophisticated, inscribes difference into the heart of communication and which models perhaps radically re-thought forms of federalism and cosmopolitanism [... ] a creative region unlike the nation state, defined relationally around shared responsibility for the ocean, resisting the simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary, [and] reconceptualising the connections between islands’. Even as Carter lauds the archipelago’s potential to undermine static ontologies that underpin statist power, he is critical of how these island scholars have deployed the concept. Part of the problem is simply empirical. Not all archipelagos are the same and, depending on their size, the relative equivalence of their islands, their contextual position in a world of states, one archipelago may suggest a very different liberatory (or non-liberatory) politics than another. Another problem is that recognizing the ‘difference’ of an archipelago hardly guarantees that this ‘difference’ will be used to rethink the modes of understanding that conventionally guide social institutions and processes. A good example here, referenced by Carter, is Part IV of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which permits archipelagic states to designate the water between islands as ‘internal waters’, thereby reconfiguring a portion of ocean as within the bounds of state territory. This incorporation of the ocean as internal waters does force planners to reconsider assumed divisions between islands and oceans as well as the related privileging of the former (land, territory) as the domain of development and the latter (water, non-territory) as the external space of the in-between. Arguably, it also dislocates ‘static island tropes of particularity’, foregrounding ‘fluid inter-
{"title":"Oceans, islands, closets and smells: decolonization through spatial metaphors","authors":"P. Steinberg","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2021.1986945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1986945","url":null,"abstract":"Thinking with non-solid geographic forms to undermine the conceits and closures of the static, bounded territorial state is all the rage in decolonization studies. The table of contents of the book Territory Beyond Terra – Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Mudflats, Floodplains, Cities, Ice, Bodies, Boats, Shores, Seabeds – suggests just some of the spatial forms that can be used to rethink the space of the sovereign state. Indeed, as the editors of that volume note, even that list could be stretched further, to cover mediated, manufactured or extra-planetary spaces. Paul Carter places Decolonising Governance squarely within this literature, identifying the book as ‘a contribution to the evolving field of island studies, ocean studies and, in general, the turn away from nation-state territorialisations of the Earth’s surface’. In particular, he focuses on the decolonizing potential of the archipelago, which a succession of critical island scholars has highlighted as a spatial form that, paraphrasing Stratford et al., is ‘topologically sophisticated, inscribes difference into the heart of communication and which models perhaps radically re-thought forms of federalism and cosmopolitanism [... ] a creative region unlike the nation state, defined relationally around shared responsibility for the ocean, resisting the simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary, [and] reconceptualising the connections between islands’. Even as Carter lauds the archipelago’s potential to undermine static ontologies that underpin statist power, he is critical of how these island scholars have deployed the concept. Part of the problem is simply empirical. Not all archipelagos are the same and, depending on their size, the relative equivalence of their islands, their contextual position in a world of states, one archipelago may suggest a very different liberatory (or non-liberatory) politics than another. Another problem is that recognizing the ‘difference’ of an archipelago hardly guarantees that this ‘difference’ will be used to rethink the modes of understanding that conventionally guide social institutions and processes. A good example here, referenced by Carter, is Part IV of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which permits archipelagic states to designate the water between islands as ‘internal waters’, thereby reconfiguring a portion of ocean as within the bounds of state territory. This incorporation of the ocean as internal waters does force planners to reconsider assumed divisions between islands and oceans as well as the related privileging of the former (land, territory) as the domain of development and the latter (water, non-territory) as the external space of the in-between. Arguably, it also dislocates ‘static island tropes of particularity’, foregrounding ‘fluid inter-","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"323 - 328"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80122595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1986947
Johannes Riquet
Then we were there, on the top, under the highest trees. And the ocean was before and behind us, slipping away into nothing at the ends of the world. Below us the ridges and valleys and the plains lay blue and still, as peaceful as our forefathers must have been when they fi rst settled here. [ … ] Then we saw the rock platform under the highest tree [ … ]. You know what we found, eh? … Two conch shells cracked and brown with age. [ … ] He had exaggerated as usual, Tauilopepe thought: they had probably never been up on the range, had never endured that trek, the whole story was a product of Toasa ’ s imagination. As for the lions and aitu, that was just too much. Toasa was becoming senile. So he had stopped listening, catching only bits of the story and nodding his head. (Albert Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree , pp 67 – 70)
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Pub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1979297
Mikki Stelder
ABSTRACT (Post)colonial Dutch historiography remains saturated with the myth of the Dutch as benevolent and sometimes even reluctant imperialists geared toward trade rather than settlement. In this article, I seek to unsettle some common presumptions made on the basis of this myth through a re-reading of the work of Dutch lawyer, humanist and state ideologue Hugo Grotius. In particular, I hone in on his writings on slavery and Indigenous (dis)possession to show how colonial and racial violence structure his construction of the free sovereign subject. In doing so, I seek to intervene in existing critical scholarship on Grotius that continues to position the undifferentiated sovereign subject at the heart of his legal thought and positions him as a friend of Indigenous peoples. Applying colonial difference as a lens for reading Grotius’s work, I argue that his legal framework set up the very conditions of possibility for colonial conquest by constructing a Dutch propertied subject as universal.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1985235
Neelam Srivastava
ABSTRACT This article examines the feminist, communist and antifascist campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst as a postcolonial intellectual for our times. A forgotten figure in the history of anticolonialism, Pankhurst was active in the suffragette movement and then the communist movement, before devoting her political energies to supporting Ethiopia against the Italian invasion led by Mussolini in 1935. Pankhurst’s broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News published articles denouncing the Italian occupation as well as writing by prominent African and Asian anticolonial voices. Through the analysis of Pankhurst, this article argues for an understanding of the postcolonial intellectual as a partisan who cuts across civilizational divides, bringing together metropolitan and colonial networks of resistance. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan in which he describes the partisan, exemplified in the political combatant of the wars of decolonization, as the emblematic figure of twentieth-century warfare. I adapt Schmitt’s theory to read Pankhurst’s militancy in favour of Ethiopia in order to argue that the partisan is not only an insurgent fighter but an individual who takes sides in the interconnected struggles against colonialism and fascism. I thus gesture to the possibility of a global theory of resistance.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1985264
Pinar Tuzçu
ABSTRACT In this article, I look at how the modes of knowledge production in the digital age construct new colonial relations. I argue that these cybercolonial hierarchies are defined by a new elite: an artificial intelligentsia. In this regard, I discuss how the epistemic shifts in cybercolonialism redefine the role of postcolonial intellectuals in the digital age. In order to trace these shifts, I analyse the 2018 data scandal concerning Cambridge Analytica, a now defunct British political consulting firm allegedly involved in electioneering in 68 countries, to show that the power held by this artificial intelligentsia is encoded within a largely inaccessible field of computing, producing information that looks rhetorically neutral but is artificial in nature. My analysis demonstrates that this kind of knowledge production deepens the geopolitical hierarchies between the Global North and South as it bears new mechanisms of silencing. For the silenced subjects in cybercolonialism I coin the term cybaltern. The cybaltern refers to a group of people whose voices are muted and rendered unheard, paradoxically despite and because of the digital tools available to them. With this in mind, postcolonial intellectuals are given the task of decoding the discursive gaps and traps that (re)produce a condition of cybalternity.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1985237
Kaiama L. Glover
ABSTRACT By the mid-1930s, migration from the French colonies had brought Afro-intellectuals into the heart of political and artistic conversations in the metropoles of Europe and had created imbricated spaces of heated debate. Coming from various nations in Africa and the Americas, the interlocutors in these debates grappled with their fraught relationship to imperial centres while addressing questions specific to their diverse national contexts and racialized realities. The declarations they made and conclusions they drew were scrutinized by multiple, and at times antagonistic publics. This article chronicles a fascinating instance of such networked literary polemics: the 1955–1956 Présence Africaine ‘Debate on National Poetry’. It offers a close look at the intellectual and political underpinnings of this fraught exchange between celebrated Martinican poet-statesman Aimé Césaire and then-militant socialist Haitian poet René Depestre as a means of understanding how twentieth-century intellectual and artistic movements in Europe presented real challenges to prominent figures in the (imminently post-)colonial francophone world. Depestre’s uncomfortable positioning reflects the larger quandary facing Afro-diasporic intellectuals and artists called on to navigate identities that reflected their political commitments and the expectations of their white allies, on the one hand, and their racial identifications, on the other.
{"title":"‘The francophone world was set ablaze’: Pan-African intellectuals, European interlocutors and the global Cold War","authors":"Kaiama L. Glover","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2021.1985237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1985237","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT By the mid-1930s, migration from the French colonies had brought Afro-intellectuals into the heart of political and artistic conversations in the metropoles of Europe and had created imbricated spaces of heated debate. Coming from various nations in Africa and the Americas, the interlocutors in these debates grappled with their fraught relationship to imperial centres while addressing questions specific to their diverse national contexts and racialized realities. The declarations they made and conclusions they drew were scrutinized by multiple, and at times antagonistic publics. This article chronicles a fascinating instance of such networked literary polemics: the 1955–1956 Présence Africaine ‘Debate on National Poetry’. It offers a close look at the intellectual and political underpinnings of this fraught exchange between celebrated Martinican poet-statesman Aimé Césaire and then-militant socialist Haitian poet René Depestre as a means of understanding how twentieth-century intellectual and artistic movements in Europe presented real challenges to prominent figures in the (imminently post-)colonial francophone world. Depestre’s uncomfortable positioning reflects the larger quandary facing Afro-diasporic intellectuals and artists called on to navigate identities that reflected their political commitments and the expectations of their white allies, on the one hand, and their racial identifications, on the other.","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"91 1","pages":"464 - 483"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77899286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1985266
Rosi Braidotti
This special issue is a timely intervention that both illustrates and assesses the relevance of the class of intellectuals as a class and as a social institution in the contemporary world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept most inhabitants of the world in lockdown for the past year, while this issue of Postcolonial Studies was drafted, has driven home some hard truths. These concern not only enduring patterns of social and economic inequalities and discrimination, as well as the uneven distribution of public health provisions, vaccines and biomedical services, but also intellectual matters. Isolated from the customary social contacts and information flow, many people rediscovered the power of knowledge and ideas as they attempted to grapple with their new virus-stricken global predicament. The primary role of the imagination was highlighted as reading books, playing music and the performing arts became means of daily survival and were taken up on an unprecedented scale. The range and impact of the cultural representations of the pandemic, its origins and effects. moved centre stage in the public debate, showing also their vulnerability to manipulation by panic-mongers and opportunistic politicians. Amateur social and cultural analysts sprouted like much rooms after the rain, spreading intellectual work across a multitude of different and often unexpected locations. Citizens science went global.
{"title":"Postface","authors":"Rosi Braidotti","doi":"10.1080/13688790.2021.1985266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1985266","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue is a timely intervention that both illustrates and assesses the relevance of the class of intellectuals as a class and as a social institution in the contemporary world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept most inhabitants of the world in lockdown for the past year, while this issue of Postcolonial Studies was drafted, has driven home some hard truths. These concern not only enduring patterns of social and economic inequalities and discrimination, as well as the uneven distribution of public health provisions, vaccines and biomedical services, but also intellectual matters. Isolated from the customary social contacts and information flow, many people rediscovered the power of knowledge and ideas as they attempted to grapple with their new virus-stricken global predicament. The primary role of the imagination was highlighted as reading books, playing music and the performing arts became means of daily survival and were taken up on an unprecedented scale. The range and impact of the cultural representations of the pandemic, its origins and effects. moved centre stage in the public debate, showing also their vulnerability to manipulation by panic-mongers and opportunistic politicians. Amateur social and cultural analysts sprouted like much rooms after the rain, spreading intellectual work across a multitude of different and often unexpected locations. Citizens science went global.","PeriodicalId":46334,"journal":{"name":"Postcolonial Studies","volume":"102 1","pages":"528 - 533"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88776602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1985248
A. Habed
ABSTRACT The article confronts postcolonial criticism with postcritique, a proposal by Rita Felski for a hermeneutic strategy aiming to overcome the limits of critique. Because of its self-reflexivity, its liaison with poststructuralism, and the societal categories it mobilizes, postcritics often see postcolonial criticism as a quintessential example of critique. However, postcolonial authors share similar concerns as postcritics, particularly when warning against any hasty conflation between intellectual work and political commitment. This article argues that the postcritical understanding of critique eschews the connection between critique and the realm of culture, thereby running the risk of doing away with context altogether. In order to account for the frameworks or contexts in which cultural objects are produced, without falling into some of the pitfalls of critique that postcritique aims to counter, the article proposes to look at the figure of the author as a bridge between the individual and the collective, as Edward Said suggests. The article closes with an analysis of several (critical and postcritical) readings of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus to provide an example of how authorship can enter the interpretive scene through the figure of ‘late style’.
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