What Is the Postcolonial? Robert J.C
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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. -
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. -
Marx and History: the Russian Road and the Myth of Historical Determinism
Ciências Sociais Unisinos 57(1):78-86, janeiro/abril 2021 Unisinos - doi: 10.4013/csu.2021.57.1.07 Marx and history: the Russian road and the myth of historical determinism Marx e a história: a via russa e o mito do determinismo histórico Guilherme Nunes Pires1 [email protected] Abstract This paper aims to point out the limits of the historical determinism thesis in Marx’s thought by analyzing his writings on the Russian issue and the possibility of a “Russian road” to socialism. The perspective of historical determinism implies that Marx’s thought is supported by a unilinear view of social evolution, i.e. history is understood as a succes- sion of modes of production and their internal relations inexorably leading to a classless society. We argue that in letters and drafts on the Russian issue, Marx opposes to any attempt associate his thought with a deterministic conception of history. It is pointed out that Marx’s contact with the Russian populists in the 1880s provides textual ele- ments allowing to impose limits on the idea of historical determinism and the unilinear perspective in the historical process. Keywords: Marx. Historical Determinism. Unilinearity. Russian Road. Resumo O objetivo do presente artigo é apontar os limites da tese do determinismo histórico no pensamento de Marx, através da análise dos escritos sobre a questão russa e a possibilidade da “via russa” para o socialismo. A perspectiva do determinismo histórico compreende que o pensamento de Marx estaria amparado por uma visão unilinear da evolução social, ou seja, a história seria compreendida por uma sucessão de modos de produção e suas relações internas que inexoravelmente rumaria a uma sociedade sem classes sociais. -
Why (Post)Colonialism and (De)Coloniality Are Not Enough: a Post- Imperialist Perspective Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Available Online: 07 Oct 2011
This article was downloaded by: [Gustavo Lins Ribeiro] On: 21 October 2011, At: 17:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Postcolonial Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20 Why (post)colonialism and (de)coloniality are not enough: a post- imperialist perspective Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Available online: 07 Oct 2011 To cite this article: Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2011): Why (post)colonialism and (de)coloniality are not enough: a post-imperialist perspective, Postcolonial Studies, 14:3, 285-297 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2011.613107 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 285Á297, 2011 Why (post)colonialism and (de)coloniality are not enough: a post-imperialist perspective GUSTAVO LINS RIBEIRO The need to examine knowledge production in relation to location and subject position is a consolidated trend in several theoretical approaches. -
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. -
Angus Taylor Perhaps the Most Influential Critique of Marx's Theory
Angus Taylor Flogging a Straw Man: Popper's Critique of Marx's "Historicism" Perhaps the most influential critique of Marx's theory of history has been that by Karl Popper, considered by some to be the foremost philosopher of science. It is Popper's contention that while Marx's stress on economic and technological factors in the evolution of socie ties has been salutary, Marx's theory of history is fatally flawed by being based on the idea of historical determinism. In opposition, Popper wishes to assert the vital role of human creativity and rational agency in history. But is his critique well founded? It is my contention that while Popper may be correct in denouncing historical determin ism as fundamentally erroneous, his belief that Marx's theory of history embodies this concept is itself erroneous. Popper maintains that the course of human history cannot be the subject of scientific investigation, at least insofar as such investigation involves prediction. He thus sets about to refute what he calls the doctrine of historicism, by which he means "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history."t Historicism, as he conceives it, teaches that the course of history is, at least in broad outlines, predetermined. Popper argues that the course of history is strongly influenced by the growth of knowledge, and that it is impossible to predict our future states of knowledge (for we cannot know today what we shall only discover tomorrow). -
Beyond the “Postmodern University”*
Beyond the “Postmodern University”* Claire Donovan Abstract As an institution, the “postmodern university” is central to the canon of today’s research on higher education policy. Yet in this essay I argue that the postmodern university is a fiction that frames and inhibits our thinking about the future university. To understand why the postmodern university is a fiction, I first turn to grand theory and ask whether we can make sense of the notion of “post”-postmodernity. Second, I turn to the UK higher education sector and show that the postmodern university is a chimera, a modern artefact of competing instrumentalist, gothic, and postmodernist discourses. Third, I discuss competing visions of the future university and find that the progressive (yet modernist) agendas that re-imagine the public value of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation, are those that can move us beyond the palliative and panacea of the postmodern university. * Health Economics Research Group, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK. Email: [email protected]. 1 In this essay I investigate the idea of the postmodern university, an institution that is central to research on, and debate about, higher education policy.1 I contend that the postmodern university does not actually exist, yet this fiction casts a shadow over discussions of higher education policy that inhibits more lateral and creative thinking about the future university. In order to properly investigate the concept of the postmodern, it is first necessary to explain the difference between postmodernism and postmodernity. I then ask if we can make sense of being “beyond” postmodernity to prove that postmodernity has never, in fact, existed. -
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. -
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. -
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). -
Parameters of a Postcolonial Sociology of the Ottoman Empire
PARAMETERS OF A POSTCOLONIAL SOCIOLOGY OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Fatma Mu¨ge Go¨c-ek ABSTRACT The traditional postcolonial focus on the modernPublishing and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, theGroup Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determi- nation of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticismsEmerald concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies(C) criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such Decentering Social Theory Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 25, 73–104 Copyright r 2013 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2013)0000025009 73 74 FATMA MU¨GE GO¨C- EK a clear-cut divide does not hold in the case of the Ottoman Empire where the lines were much more nuanced and identities much more fluid. Still, I argue that contemporary studies on the Ottoman Empire productively intersect with the postcolonial approach in three research areas: the exploration of the agency of imperial subjects; the deconstruction of the imperial center; and the articulation of bases of imperial domination other than the conventional European ‘‘rule of colonial difference’’ strictly predicated on race. -
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).