DOCSLIB.ORG

Postcolonialism

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Postcolonialism 1 Postcolonialism however, recounted an account of 1857 that differed significantly from both British imper- SUGATA RAY ial and Indian nationalist histories of the University of California, Berkeley, USA event. Foregrounding subaltern participation in the legendary uprising, the performance The last 20 years have seen the publication of meditated on the silences in history writing numerous readers, general introductions, and to unsettle the totalizing claims of Enlighten- volumes of essays dedicated to defining the ment rationality as a product and effect of concept-term “postcolonialism.” Yet, as a Empire. key critical term in the social sciences and While the diversity of articulations in the humanities today, postcolonialism resists name of such a postcolonialism would be dif- easy definitions. At one level, postcolonialism ficult to enumerate, it is in the writings of the suggests a temporal relationship with a colo- anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon that nialism that came before. It is after/post colo- we find an early elaboration of postcolonial- nialism. While the use of the term in this ism’s imperatives (Fanon 1952). Although particular configuration has gained signifi- Edward Said’s Orientalism is usually regarded cant circulation, it nevertheless fails to recog- as the contrapuntal force that marked the nize that we are yet to be after colonialism. arrival of postcolonial theory in the Anglo- New empires of multinational corporations American academy, it was in 1952, in an and their global financial markets still hold era of massive global decolonization, that the world under their sway. At another level, Fanon made a powerful assertion for the dis- the term signifies an amorphous array of het- location of subjectivities under colonialism erogeneous practices that attempt to uncover (Said 1978). Yet, even as Fanon eloquently the fissures in Empire’s idealization of its own critiqued the violence of colonialism’s appar- universalism while excavating diverse ways of atuses, he continued to invoke the (Western) being-in-the-world. Postcolonialism can, Enlightenment through Hegel’s master–slave then, be read as a commitment to a possibility dialectic. of politics that attempts to readdress history In certain ways, Fanon’s concurrent from the perspectives of the marginalized. denunciation of both Western colonialism Take, for instance, a recent performance by and Europe’s civilizational conceit through the artist Inder Salim. On June 19, 2008, the a rereading of Hegel became a leitmotif in artist recited a poem titled “The Other the new postcolonialism that emerged in 1857,” facing the sculpture of Major General the decades following the 1980s. Homi Henry Havelock in Trafalgar Square in Lon- Bhabha, for instance, returned to Fanon to don. Celebrated in British annals as the vali- suggest that ambivalence and hybridity were ant officer who seized Kanpur from the products of the colonial condition (Bhabha “rebels” during the Indian uprising of 1857, 1994). Building on Fanon’s thesis that colon- Havelock’s sculpture had been installed in ized subjectivity was constitutively shaped by 1861 to commemorate the British Empire’s Europe, Bhabha recognized in this shaping a claim of stability and permanence. Facing possibility of resistance on the part of the the bronze statue of Havelock, Salim, colonized. Even as the colonizer compelled The Encyclopedia of Empire, First Edition. Edited by John M. MacKenzie. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe098 2 the colonized into replicating a European self, One also sees traces of postcolonialism’s the incompleteness of this mimicry made vis- long genealogy in Bhabha’s ambivalence ible the failure and instability of colonial dis- (discussed above) and Gayatri Chakravorty course. For Bhabha, this space of failure, the Spivak’s provocative iteration of Enlighten- space of flux and ambivalence, was the site ment from below (Spivak 2004). Rather of resistance, produced both within and than abandoning the Enlightenment, Spi- beyond dominant discourse. vak urges the postcolonial to use (in her However, along with early and mid-20th- words, “ab-use”)theEnlightenmentasa century anti-colonial political thinkers such way of both accessing Europe and trans- as Fanon, Mohandas Gandhi, and Aimé gressing its limits. Elsewhere, Spivak Césaire, it was the Subaltern Studies collective responded to Guha by suggesting that the under the guidance of Ranajit Guha that gendered subaltern never speaks about her- played an equally crucial role in framing self (Spivak 1985). The subject can only be the intellectual contours of post-1980s post- spoken for and spoken of. Spivak’s1985 colonialism (Guha 1982). A new method of interlocution led to a new turn in postcolo- history from below, enunciated in the collect- nialism that made difficult projects that ive’s early volumes, aimed to address the attempted to recuperate subaltern subjec- elitist prejudices – both colonial and bour- tivities at the margins of the nation, empire, geois-nationalist – in accounts of 19th- and and history. 20th-century Indian history. Although, by Even a fleeting glance at these multiple the late 1980s, the Subaltern Studies volumes formulations thus makes evident the impos- included more heterogeneous approaches sibility of conclusively defining postcolonial- that paid equal attention to the textuality of ism’s intellectual field. At best, one reads colonialism and resistance, the collective postcolonialism as palimpsests of open- effectively inserted the term “subaltern” into ended fragmentary practices that continue a global intellectual field (see Bhadra, to coalesce around questions of inclusion, Prakash, and Tharu 1999). difference, equity, and social justice. It is pre- By the 1990s, postcolonialism had surfaced cisely this imperative that led Inder Salim to as a recognizable form of writing and think- stand at the heart of the erstwhile British ing. Its genealogies, however, could be traced Empire and speak of/for the Indian sepoy back to the anti-colonialism of Fanon and the (soldier) whose fingers would be severed if revisionism of Guha, among others. One sees he did not trim his nails, and the non- traces of this genealogy modulating Dipesh caste/“untouchable” woman who was “born Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe non-existent” (Salim 2008). It was also this (Chakrabarty 2000). Considering how a imperative that had led the author Chinua hyperreal Europe fabricated by imperialism Achebe to deterritorialize both English and and nationalism had assumed the privileged the form of the novel in the 1950s to desta- habitus of both modernity and history, bilize Europe’s production of Africa as a Chakrabarty delineated the epistemic vio- space of nostalgic lack (Achebe 1958). This, lence inherent in perpetually banishing then, is the theory and practice of postcolo- non-Europe to a site of derivativeness and nialism/s. belatedness. Rather than an atavistic denial of European thought, Chakrabarty, however, presented the project of provincializing SEE ALSO: Anti-imperialism and anti- Europe as a mode of rethinking the Enlight- colonialism; Decolonization; Enlightenment enment from and for the margins. and empire; Nationalism and imperialism 3 REFERENCES Salim, I. 2008. In Trafalgar Square: The Other 1857. Performance at Trafalgar Square, London. Achebe, C. 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Spivak, G. C. 1985. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Heinemann. Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge,7 Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. Lon- (8): 120–130. don: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. 2004. “Righting Wrongs.” The South Bhadra, G., G. Prakash, and S. Tharu (Eds.) 1999. Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3): 523–581. Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford Univer- sity Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: FURTHER READING Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chaturvedi, V. (Ed.) 2000. Mapping Subaltern Fanon, F. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso. Paris: Seuil. Gandhi, L. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Guha, R. (Ed.) 1982. Subaltern Studies I: Writings Introduction. New York: Columbia Univer- on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: sity Press. Oxford University Press. Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism/Post-Colonialism. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. London: Routledge..
Load more

Recommended publications
  • History, Postcolonialism and Postmodernism in Toni Morrison's
    History, Postcolonialism and Postmodernism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Mariangela Palladino This paper examines Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, which, together with Jazz and Paradise, constitute Morrison’s contribution to the process of re-writing black American history. Postcolonial thought has offered one of the most potent challenges to the notion of the ‘end of history’ posited by postmodernists of both left and right. Focusing principally on Beloved (1987), my paper explores how Toni Morrison insists upon the necessity of a conscious and inevitably painful engagement with the past. Uncovering a dense series of correspondences, drawing upon Christological symbols, nu- merology, and flower imagery, I argue that the principal character is closely identified with Christ throughout the novel, which in its final part refigures the Passion narrative. As a sacrificed black, female Christ, Beloved becomes a focus for Morrison’s concern with redemption through memory. I wish to briefly explore the debate on history between postmodernism and postcolonialism as it constitutes the framework to Toni Morrison’s de- ployment of Christological imagery in order to engage with history. If the dawn of postmodernism marked the beginning of a ‘posthistoric’ era which ‘stipulated that the segment of human life had ended for which history had claimed to offer explanation and understanding’ (Breisach 2003 10), this has been uncompromisingly contested by postcolonialism. The postcolonial claim for the unacknowledged role of the non-Western world in the constitu- tion of modernity is emphasized by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993) as follows: In the West, post-modernism has seized upon the ahistorical weightlessness, consumerism, and spectacle of the new order.
    [Show full text]
  • Edward Said: the Postcolonial Theory and the Literature of Decolonization
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by European Scientific Journal (European Scientific Institute) European Scientific Journal June 2014 /SPECIAL/ edition vol.2 ISSN: 1857 – 7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857- 7431 EDWARD SAID: THE POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE LITERATURE OF DECOLONIZATION Lutfi Hamadi, PhD Lebanese International University, Lebanon Abstract This paper attempts an exploration of the literary theory of postcolonialism, which traces European colonialism of many regions all over the world, its effects on various aspects of the lives of the colonized people and its manifestations in the Western literary and philosophical heritage. Shedding light on the impact of this theory in the field of literary criticism, the paper focuses on Edward Said's views for the simple reason that he is considered the one who laid the cornerstone of this theory, despite the undeniable role of other leading figures. This theory is mainly based on what Said considers the false image of the Orient fabricated by Western thinkers as the primitive "other" in contrast with the civilized West. He believes that the consequences of colonialism are still persisting in the form of chaos, coups, corruption, civil wars, and bloodshed, which permeates many ex-colonies. The powerful colonizer has imposed a language and a culture, whereas those of the Oriental peoples have been ignored or distorted. Referring to some works of colonial and postcolonial novelists, the paper shows how being free from the repression of imperialism, the natives could, eventually, produce their own culture of opposition, build their own image, and write their history outside the frame they have for long been put into.
    [Show full text]
  • History 594: Methods and Theory in the Historical Study of Religion (Women, War, and Religion in Early Medieval Europe) Dr
    History 594: Methods and Theory in the Historical Study of Religion (Women, War, and Religion in Early Medieval Europe) Dr. Katherine E. Milco FALL 2020 ONLINE COURSE on Canvas Email: [email protected] Course Description: This course focuses on the topics of women, war, and religion in late antiquity and early medieval Europe. The emphasis is placed on the critical analysis of ancient texts, which is the essence of historical methodology that professional historians use today. The final third of the course will examine and evaluate different contemporary methodologies – postmodernism, Marxism, feminism, psychohistory, postcolonialism – that some professional historians use in the study of history. Course Objectives: 1. To learn how to use and analyze primary sources. 2. To learn the role of secondary sources in historical research: positive and negative. 3. To understand and utilize contemporary methodologies utilized in the discipline of history. Required Textbook: There is no required textbook for you to purchase. All readings will be provided to you free of charge via Canvas. Grading Scale: 95-100 A 80-82 B- 67-69 D+ 90-94 A- 77-79 C+ 63-66 D 87-89 B+ 73-76 C 60-62 D- 83-86 B 70-72 C- Lower than 60 F Evaluation: Reading Responses 80% Final Paper 20% Course Components: 1. Reading Responses: There are a total of 18 reading responses assigned over the course of the semester. These are responses that you give to questions that I pose about the text. For the first 7 weeks of the course, all the reading responses will answer questions that I pose about ancient source material.
    [Show full text]
  • Colonialism Postcolonialism
    SECOND EDITION Colonialism/Postcolonialism is both a crystal-clear and authoritative introduction to the field and a cogently-argued defence of the field’s radical potential. It’s exactly the sort of book teachers want their stu- dents to read. Peter Hulme, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex Loomba is a keen and canny critic of ever-shifting geopolitical reali- ties, and Colonialism/Postcolonialism remains a primer for the aca- demic and common reader alike. Antoinette Burton, Department of History, University of Illinois It is rare to come across a book that can engage both student and specialist. Loomba simultaneously maps a field and contributes provocatively to key debates within it. Situated comparatively across disciplines and cultural contexts, this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial studies. Priyamvada Gopal, Faculty of English, Cambridge University Colonialism/Postcolonialism moves adroitly between the general and the particular, the conceptual and the contextual, the local and the global, and between texts and material processes. Distrustful of established and self-perpetuating assumptions, foci and canonical texts which threaten to fossilize postcolonial studies as a discipline, Loomba’s magisterial study raises many crucial issues pertaining to social structure and identity; engaging with different modes of theory and social explanation in the process. There is no doubt that this book remains the best general introduction to the field. Kelwyn Sole, English Department, University of Cape Town Lucid and incisive this is a wonderful introduction to the contentious yet vibrant field of post-colonial studies. With consummate ease Loomba maps the field, unravels the many strands of the debate and provides a considered critique.
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism
    10 Postcolonialism The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination. Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations, December 11, 1964 he 1960s saw a revolutionary change in literary theory. Until this dec- Tade, New Criticism dominated literary theory and criticism, with its insistence that “the” one correct interpretation of a text could be discovered if critical readers follow the prescribed methodology asserted by the New Critics. Positing an autonomous text, New Critics paid little attention to a text’s historical context or to the feelings, beliefs, and ideas of a text’s read- ers. For New Critics, a text’s meaning is inextricably bound to ambiguity, irony, and paradox found within the structure of the text itself. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an astute critic can identify a text’s central paradox and explain how the text ultimately resolves that paradox while also supporting the text’s overarching theme. Into this seemingly self-assured system of hermeneutics marches philos- opher and literary critic Jacques Derrida along with similar-thinking scholar- critics in the late 1960s. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida, the chief spokesperson for deconstruction, disputes a text’s objective existence. Denying that a text is an autotelic artifact, he challenges the accepted definitions and assump- tions of both the reading and the writing processes. In addition, he insists on questioning what parts not only the text but also the reader and the author play in the interpretive process.
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism Rahul Rao
    Postcolonialism Rahul Rao [Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, eds. Michael Freeden, Marc Stears, Lyman Tower Sargent (Oxford University Press, 2012)] Writing in 1992 about the ‘pitfalls of the term “post-colonialism”’, Anne McClintock places it in the cacophonous company of other ‘post’ words in the culture of the time—‘post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-cold war, post- marxism, post-apartheid, post-Soviet, post-Ford, post-feminism, post-national, post- historic, even post-contemporary’—the enthusiasm for which she reads as a symptom of ‘a global crisis in ideologies of the future, particularly in the ideology of “progress”’ (McClintock 1992: 93). The collapse of both capitalist and communist teleologies of development in the debt-wracked Third World seemed to conspire with postmodernist critiques of metanarrative to discredit not only particular articulations of ‘progress’ but also the very enterprise of charting a ‘progressive’ politics. Setting themselves resolutely against a past that they are determined to transcend, ‘post’ words drift in a present that seems allergic to thinking about the future. Writing in 2004 and looking back on nearly three decades of ‘postcolonial studies’ in the academy, Neil Lazarus traces a significant shift in the meaning of the term ‘postcolonial’. Originally used in a strictly temporal sense to refer to the period immediately after decolonization (‘post’ as ‘after’), Lazarus cites a markedly different usage in the work of Homi Bhabha for whom ‘“postcolonial” is a fighting term’, invoked in polemics against colonialism but also against anti-colonial discourses such as Marxism and nationalism that are disavowed on account of their essentialism and deconstructed in the vocabulary of poststructuralism (Lazarus 2004: 4).
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism, Sociology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production 1
    Notes Introduction: Postcolonialism, Sociology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production 1. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, Europe is frequently understood as Christian and the historical presence of Jewish and Muslim populations within its borders is generally ignored. 2. In the sense that Marx’s standpoint of the proletariat depends upon his percep- tion of their potential agency as the solution to the problems of capitalism and not a statement about the understanding of those deemed to be proletariat. 1 Modernity, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial Critique 1. It must also be noted here that the solutions to colonialism as put forward by Nandy and Said on the one hand and Fanon on the other are radically opposed even if their diagnosis of the condition is similar. While Fanon (1968 [1961]) advocated a central role to violence in struggles for liberation, Nandy (1987) argues that this espousal of violence only bound one more closely to the culture of the oppressor rather than enabling any overcoming of it. 2. In the case of New Zealand/Aotorea, During (1998) suggests that scholars have demonstrated that white invasions were legitimately and productively resisted and in the process the colonizers and colonized, together, contributed to the creation of the contemporary society. The recovery of the colonial subject in history can be seen as analogous to the efforts of feminist historians, such as Joan Kelly (1986 [1984, 1976]), to restore women to history. 3. Burke’s critique is admitted, albeit in attenuated form, in Eric Stokes’ study, The English Utilitarians and India, where he argues that India played no cen- tral part in fashioning the qualities of English civilization and, in many ways, ‘acted as a disturbing force, a magnetic power placed at the periphery tending to distort the natural development of Britain’s character’ (1959: xi).
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism: Edward Said & Gayatri Spivak
    Research Journal of Recent Sciences ________________________________________________E-ISSN 2277-2502 Vol. 5(8), 47-50, August (2016) Res. J. Recent Sci. Review Paper Postcolonialism: Edward Said & Gayatri Spivak Ambesange Praveen V. PG Department of English, Maharashtra Udayagiri Mahavidyalaya, Udgir, Dist. Latur Pin-413517, Maharashtra, India [email protected] Available online at: www.isca.in, www.isca.me Received 9th November 2015, revised 7th July 2016, accepted 14 th July 2016 Abstract Postcolonialism is a term largely used to refer to all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the time of Colonization to our own time. Postcolonialism means ongoing issues and debates between East and West since the colonial process started. It attempts to examine and analyse the aftermath of colonization ; that of restoring the identity of the Independent oriental nations by removing misconceptions about the orientals. It includes literature of the nations such as – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Jamaica and more countries which were once colonized by British. These countries are also called Third World Countries. Marxism and Poststructuralism have been a major influence on the thinkers from Fanon to Gayatri Spivak. Postcolonialsm tries to decenter/deconstruct the Eurocentrism or Eurocentric beliefs. Keywords: Postcolonialism, Orientalism, Subaltern, Hegemony, Power, Discourse, Identity, Race,. Colonizer/colonized, White/black, Europe/Third world countries. Introduction discourse by the West about the East, in all fields, such as, literary, sociological, and so on, which have no counter point in This paper will focus towards Edward Said’s concept the east. This discourse aggregates to a “textual universe”. It ‘Orientalism’ and Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘subaltern’.
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Bibliography of Theory and Criticism in Postcolonial Studies
    UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University The Library Series of the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access quarterly in the humanities and the social sciences CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture publishes scholarship in the humanities and social sciences following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the CLCWeb Library Series are 1) articles, 2) books, 3) bibliographies, 4) resources, and 5) documents. Contact: <[email protected]> Selected Bibliography of Theory and Criticism in Postcolonial Studies <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/postcolonialbibliography> Steven TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEK and Slaney Chadwick ROSS version 2016.09.14. This Bibliography of book-length publications in postcolonial studies includes—in addition to mainstream fields—also work on (ethnic) minority writing, ecocriticism, feminist criticism, travel studies, and post- Soviet Central and East Europe. For further scholarship in postcolonial studies see CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/clcwebindex> and bibliographies in its Library Series <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary>. Aaron, Jane, and Chris Williams. Postcolonial Wales. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2005. Abodunrin, Femi. Black African Literature in English 1991-2001: Critical Appreciation and Reception. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2007. Acheraïou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Acquarone, Cecilia Rosa. Barriers, Borders and Crossings in British Postcolonial Fiction: A Gender Perspective. Newcas- tle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2013. Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds.
    [Show full text]
  • Theories of Ethics in World Politics POS 6933 SECTION 8943 Department of Political Science – University of Florida SPRING 2011 Place: and 101 Time: T 8-10 Periods
    UF– POS 6933 Section 8943 – Spring 2011 – Theories of Ethics in World Politics Theories of Ethics in World Politics POS 6933 SECTION 8943 Department of Political Science – University of Florida SPRING 2011 Place: AND 101 Time: T 8-10 periods Office: 221 Anderson Hall Phone: (352) 273-2357 Email: [email protected] Office hours: Tuesday 12:00-2:00 pm. Friday 9:00 am-12:00 pm. DESCRIPTION How to approach the study of ethics in the world today? This is not easy task given the world that we live in today. This course is designed as a focused introduction to various theories and approaches to the study of ethics in world politics. The course thus seeks to explicate key theoretical assumptions, arguments, and methodologies underpinning these approaches as well as exploring just how and to what extent they are useful/successful in helping us grapple with the very difficult issue of ethics in a world that is very divided and extremely diverse on almost any aspect of human collective and individual lives. Although the course is quite comprehensive in its coverage of the variety of schools of IR no single course can ever be comprehensive enough in its scope. Yet despite the large number of approaches that seek to understand ethics in world politics, there are many overlaps that will enable us to at least attempt more or less acquire an integrated understanding of the important questions and tentative answers thereto. Because the study of ethics has more or less been quite neglected in the study of IR there is ample room for genuinely innovative work in this area of IR knowledge and many scholars are precisely engaging themselves in such very productive endeavors.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Postcolonialism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Indian Literature
    Reading Postcolonialism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Indian Literature By Melanie Wattenbarger A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In Liberal Studies at Ohio Dominican University May 2012 ____________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Ann C. Hall, First Reader Dr. Ronald W. Carstens, Second Reader Wattenbarger 2 Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Study of Indian Literature Vikram Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain contains an Indian fable about Alexander the Great—who is known as “Sikandar the Madman to Indians” (Red 129). In the fable, Sikandar discovers a huge knot which had resisted unraveling for hundreds of years. In a fit of fury and pure brawn, he struck the knot, slicing it in two with one blow. In Chandra’s tale, two Brahmin brothers― scholarly members of the highest ranking class in Hindu society, the priestly class— decided to create such a knot and strike at it to test the truth of the tale. As one of the brothers, Ram Mohan, describes: I made the knot…I made it of twine, string, leather thongs, strands of fibrous materials from plants, pieces of cloth, the guts of animals, lengths of steel and copper, fine meshes of gold, silver beaten into filament, cords from distant cities, women’s hair, goat’s beards; I used butter and oil, I slid things around each other so intimately that they forgot they were ever separate, and I tightened them against each other until they squealed and groaned in agony…after a while, it took no effort—I’d bring something close to it, and it would attach itself, suck it up it seemed.
    [Show full text]
  • The Troubled Encounter Between Postcolonialism and African History Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
    Document généré le 1 oct. 2021 22:15 Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Revue de la Société historique du Canada The Troubled Encounter Between Postcolonialism and African History Paul Tiyambe Zeleza Volume 17, numéro 2, 2006 Résumé de l'article Cet article traite de la complexité de la dissension entre ce que l’on nomme les URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/016592ar « après- » – le poststructuralisme, le postmodernisme et le postcolonialisme – et DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/016592ar les études africaines. Précisément, il explore les rapports analytiques et les contestations entre la théorie postcoloniale et l’historiographie africaine. Aller au sommaire du numéro L’article scrute certaines des idées-clés et des préoccupations du postcolonialisme et de l’historiographie, et approfondit les points où ils se rencontrent. On soutient que l’ambivalence et parfois l’opposition au Éditeur(s) postcolonialisme exprimées par plusieurs universitaires africains reposent en grande partie sur des impératifs idéologiques et ethniques. Quant à la The Canadian Historical Association/La Société historique du Canada rencontre hostile entre l’histoire africaine et le postcolonialisme, elle est ancrée dans d’apparentes incongruités intellectuelles et épistémiques. Le contrôle ISSN puissant de ce que j’appelle l’humanisme nationaliste de l’imaginaire africain, les préoccupations nationalistes des intellectuels africains et les tendances 0847-4478 (imprimé) nationalistes de l’historiographie africaine peut réunir les deux. Une rencontre 1712-6274 (numérique) productive entre l’histoire africaine et le postcolonialisme reste certainement possible, mais cela demande des concessions mutuelles, l’intégration des idées Découvrir la revue élaborées à l’intérieur de l’historiographie africaine dans les études postcoloniales, et celle de certaines interventions constructives de la théorie postcoloniale dans l’historiographie africaine.
    [Show full text]