Showing papers in "Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies in 2009"
Abstract: Aamir R. Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture is an extremely important and original contribution to contemporary debates on postcolonial culture and politics. At the same time, because of its remarkable mastery over a large and varied body of texts and histories, it should be an essential read for anyone interested in subjects as diverse as imperial culture, the ‘Jewish Question’ in modern Europe, modern Urdu literature, postcolonial novels and so on. Mufti’s book is a critical probing of what is described as the ‘crisis’ of modern, and more specifically postcolonial, secularism and the way this crisis is made visible by the ‘terrorized and terrifying figures of minority’ (2). The central problematic is explored through the contested figure of the Muslim minority in modern India indeed, the book is written under the long shadow of the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in December 1992 and how this minority figure forces one to rethink the liberal notions of secularism, nation-state, citizenship or even democracy. The argument he puts forward is manifold, but the fundamental claim is that the ‘crisis of Muslim identity must be understood in terms of the problematic of secularization and minority in post-Enlightenment liberal culture as a whole and therefore cannot be understood in isolation from the history of the so called Jewish Question in modern Europe’ (2). Drawing on a vast body of theoretical works from the Frankfurt School to subaltern studies, from Lukács to Said Mufti suggests
86 citations
TL;DR: The anthropological function of concepts has been examined in the writings of Talal Asad as discussed by the authors, and it has been shown that the idea of an anthropological anthropology of Christianity remains both urgent and elusive.
Abstract: The writings of Talal Asad offer a consistent and singular reflection on the anthropological function of concepts In a variety of manners, the use and mention of a concept identifies the practice of a collective speaker before it testifies to a designated object, real or imagined The Christian baggage of the concept of ‘religion’, indeed, the Christianity of the subject of religion, however, is at once affirmed and denied by Talal Asad Is Christianity a religion? Does the concept of religion teach us something about Christianity? This essay attends to Asad's body of work and seeks to show that the idea of an anthropology of Christianity – much more than an anthropology of religion (which Asad shows to be a reductive endeavour), and different from an anthropology of Islam – remains both urgent and elusive
53 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Chakrabarty argues that the subaltern who resists incorporation by dominant state forms is an ideal figure, a utopian concept designating the limits of hegemonic thought, and argues that such a utopian ideal may find its most convincing but problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern.
Abstract: Dipesh Chakrabarty admits that the subaltern who wholly resists incorporation by dominant state forms is ‘an ideal figure,’ a utopian concept designating the limits of hegemonic thought. I wish to argue that such a utopian ideal may find its most convincing but problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subaltern's non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. Through a reading of Ranajit Guha's essay ‘Chandra's Death’, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, I will show how the immortalization of the subaltern involves a troubling logic of sacrifice and necroidealization that replaces the messiness and ambiguity of struggle with the reassurance of an aestheticized political ideal.
39 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that such theories confront us with a post-colonial unease because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge production, universalizing, and demonstrates the need, particularly in the imperial moment today, for a vigilance against the global theoretical projects being generated at present.
Abstract: Since the 1990s there has been an impetus to develop paradigms of theory that are global and energize us with possibilities for resistance. This essay argues that such theories confront us with a postcolonial unease because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge production, universalizing. The essay begins by briefly analysing the West-centered basis of the idea of inevitability in Hardt and Negri's concept of empire and moves on to critiquing two universalizing concepts: Giorgio Agamben's ‘bare life’ and Judith Butler's ‘vulnerability’. Turning from theory to practice, the essay points out the problems of Eurocentrism in even so ostensibly radical and global an organization as the World Social Forum. The essay demonstrates the need, particularly in the imperial moment today, for a vigilance against the global theoretical projects being generated at present.
31 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia with a particular focus on contextualizing its final commuique, a key document of the early postcolonial period.
Abstract: This article examines the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia with a particular focus on contextualizing its final commuique, a key document of the early postcolonial period. Although the Bandung meeting became and important symbol of Third World solidarity by serving as a precursor or the Non-Aligned Movement, the escalating politics of the Cold War equally compromised its aims. Acknowledging this complexity provides insight the challenges faced by postcolonial countries in the aftermath of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, armid stated ideals of anti-imperialism, economic and cultural exchange, and world peace.
28 citations
TL;DR: The authors consider the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This essay considers the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Situating this travelling practice within the broader Zionist discourse of which it was a part, I will suggest that the tiyulim conducted by Jewish settlers were important technologies of settler nation-making which helped to rewrite Arab Palestine as a Jewish geography. Drawing on postcolonial arguments about imperial travel, this essay presents both a condensed history of such travelling practices and a close reading of some of the travelogues they spawned. I focus on two divergent itineraries: (a) accounts of travel within the borders of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) replete with classic colonial tropes of conquest, the empty landscape, and Palestinian-Arab culture qua ethnographic object; and (b) accounts of Jewish travel to neighbouring Arab countries (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon) from which colonial tropes are frequentl...
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that postcolonial narratives of urbanization represent important sites for exploring tensions between elite and popular visions of the city and of development, and that narratives of formation or bildung in the city such as the one that structures Chris Abani's novel Graceland offer allegories of postcolonial hopes for economic development and political reform.
Abstract: Postcolonial scholars have been slow to address issues relating to urban space and society. This essay argues for new forms of critical engagement with questions of urbanism and citizenship on a global scale. Postcolonial narratives of urbanization, I argue, represent important sites for exploring tensions between elite and popular visions of the city and of development. Moreover, narratives of formation or bildung in the city such as the one that structures Chris Abani's novel Graceland offer allegories of postcolonial hopes for economic development and political reform. In Abani's novel, set in Lagos during the era of structural adjustment in the 1980s, social and economic transformation on both an individual and collective level cannot be found within the fictional mega-city. Instead, spatial egress is substituted for temporal progress in a damning indictment of the combined forces of local corruption and global exploitation.
21 citations
TL;DR: The authors make a distinction between lay readers and professional readers of postcolonial fiction in order to examine both the specificity and limits of academic reading, and suggest that much of what currently passes for postcolonial reading might be regarded as a form of what Tony Bennett terms "really useless knowledge".
Abstract: This essay seeks to address and account for the central but paradoxically neglected role of reading and readers in postcolonial studies. Focusing closely on recorded book group discussions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it pursues a distinction between lay readers and professional readers of postcolonial fiction in order to examine both the specificity and limits of academic reading. Drawing on the work of John Guillory, David Carter, Rita Felski and others, it proposes that much of what currently passes for postcolonial reading might be regarded as a form of what Tony Bennett terms ‘really useless knowledge’. Reading here works to secure the political potential of writing in terms of the internal aesthetics of the text itself, rather than literature's conjunctural relations with and uses by different audiences. Finally, and without seeking to privilege lay over professional readings, it asks what professionial postcolonial readers might learn from taking the former more seriously. The paper emerge...
19 citations
TL;DR: The Ashok Hotel and Vigyan Bhavan as mentioned in this paper are two examples of modernist buildings in the context of a rewriting of Indian history to highlight particular moments of unity and religious harmony in the subcontinent's past.
Abstract: In 1959, a group of architects and policy makers gathered in Delhi to debate the direction for post-1947 architecture; they firmly chose modernist free expression over a state-driven revivalist style. Despite this prevailing modernist direction for India's architecture, revival buildings of the 1950s demonstrate India's negotiation with and construction of its past at a crucial time in the formation of a national identity. The Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi differ from earlier revivals; they exist within the context of Nehruvian rewriting of Indian history to highlight particular moments of unity and religious harmony in the subcontinent's past. These 1955 buildings proclaim an Indianness focused on two distinct periods of the region's history: the generalized, collapsed ancient Buddhist past and the specific, targeted Akbari Mughal past. They thereby demonstrate the machinations of the formation of national identity in India as worked out in history-writing, architecture, and public debate.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the possibility of formulating a much needed new direction for postcolonial studies by focusing on a certain thread of argument in Edward Said's Orientalism, one that suggests that Orientalism is more an account of how the West experienced the Orient than it is a description about a place in the world, viz. the Orient.
Abstract: This essay investigates the possibility of formulating a much needed new direction for postcolonial studies by focusing on a certain thread of argument in Edward Said's Orientalism, one that suggests that Orientalism is more an account of how the West experienced the Orient than it is a description about a place in the world, viz. the Orient. In this sense, ‘the Orient’ is both a place in the world and an entity that exists only in western experience. Orientalism is not only an experiential discourse but also a way of structuring this experience. The essay suggests that to dispute the truth status of this discourse and its descriptions is to stay within the framework of the colonial experience. Moreover, since Orientalism developed in continuous interaction with and as a part of the growth of social sciences, the latter cannot possibly offer an alternative to Orientalism. Both are expressions of the experience of one culture, the West. To understand the way western culture has described both itself and ot...
18 citations
TL;DR: The authors have approached each new writing by Gil with pleasurable anticipation, expecting to find in it a challenge to further thought, and this essay has not been disappointing. Besides, here he has dealt wi...
Abstract: I have approached each new writing by Gil with pleasurable anticipation, expecting to find in it a challenge to further thought. This essay has not been disappointing. Besides, here he has dealt wi...
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TL;DR: This article argued that the social and political contours of English in India have come to be about much more than "writing back to empire" or offering a "window to the world" for Indians looking 'out' or westerners looking 'in' for Indians.
Abstract: Since the early 1980s, novels by Indians in English have become the site of a transnational publishing ‘boom’ made possible by the opening of Anglo-American literary markets to non-white writing. This essay begins by illuminating the disconnect between the postcolonial versus transnational framings of Indian English fiction. It shows how this literature has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a de-territorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding it of its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production. In an effort to ‘re-territorialize’ the history of and the issues at the heart of Indian writing in English, the essay argues that the social and political contours of English in India have come to be about much more than ‘writing back to empire’ or offering a ‘window to the world’ for Indians looking ‘out’ or westerners looking ‘in’. Instead, through a reading of two canonical Indian English texts about the death of Urdu in Delhi, the e...
TL;DR: Things Fall Apart has been an important resource for the emergence as well as sustenance of postcolonial theory and practice as mentioned in this paper, largely because it is a confluence of a number of conceptual concepts.
Abstract: Things Fall Apart has been an important resource for the emergence as well as sustenance of postcolonial theory and practice. This is largely because it is a confluence of a number of conceptual te...
TL;DR: The fact that Bloom included Things Fall Apart in his list of canonical works of world literature (along with two of Achebe's later novels) is an indication of the continuous process as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The fact that Harold Bloom included Things Fall Apart in 1994 in his list of canonical works of world literature (along with two of Achebe's later novels) is an indication of the continuous process...
TL;DR: In the crop of novels that announced the arrival of what has been called the ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers, it has become de riguer to invoke Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the crop of novels that announced the arrival of what has been called the ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers, it has become de riguer to invoke Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart. Thi...
TL;DR: Achebe's "Go-Di-DiGo-GoDi-Go, 1 is how Things Fall Apart and its author Chinua Achebe have roared since the novel's publication in 1958" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Gome, gome, gome, gome; Go-Di-Di-Go-Go-Di-Go, 1 is how Things Fall Apart and its author Chinua Achebe have roared since the novel's publication in 1958. Author and book have since generated scholar...
TL;DR: Achebe's Things Fall Apart as discussed by the authors provides an image of an African society reconstituted as a living entity and, in its historic circumstances, a coherent social structure forming the institutional fabric of a universe of meaning and values.
Abstract: Discerning and eloquent critics have given us a vocabulary to describe the rhetorical achievement of Things Fall Apart. Distinguishing Achebe from other early anglophone African writers, critics locate his genius in his exploitation of the novel as a form for historicizing the Igbo past and writing ‘Africa’ into ‘world history’. Abiola Irele observes, for example, that Things Fall Apart provides ‘an image of an African society reconstituted as a living entity and in its historic circumstances, an image of a coherent social structure forming the institutional fabric of a universe of meaning and values’ (2001: 115). Simon Gikandi similarly underscores the novel's success in illustrating ‘a fundamental linkage between a mode of production, a system of beliefs and a kinship structure’ (1991: 29). These and other critical accounts attribute Achebe's status in the critical tradition as the founder of an anglophone canon of African writing to his provision of a materialist rationale for traditions hitherto unrecognized by an international audience as such. Surpassing the romanticism of Solomon Plaatje and the fabulism of Amos Tutuola, critics credit Achebe's Africanized realism with decisively addressing and refuting the European tradition of racist representation of the continent's peoples as ‘merely instinctual’ and, therefore, inhuman.
TL;DR: The Chagossian Islanders were expelled by the British government in the 1960s in order to satisfy a lease agreement with the United States government, which required the ‘uninhabited’ islands for the establishment of a military base as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The essay begins with an exploration of how Henry Neville's fictional Isle of Pines (1668) plays through ideas of Arcadia, utopia, British colonial ambition, and ideas of belonging towards a critical commentary on government accountability under a constitutional rule of law. It then more fully traces how, nearly three and a half centuries later, the real islands closest to Neville's fictional isle – the Chagos Archipelago – are still being traversed by a similar interaction of narratives, and remain the site of a highly fraught constitutional debate on the legality of British executive action. The Chagossian Islanders were expelled by the British government in the 1960s in order to satisfy a lease agreement with the United States government, which required the ‘uninhabited’ islands for the establishment of a military base. In their battle to have their expulsion declared illegal, exiled Chagossians challenged the scope of the government's prerogative powers when dealing with colonial lands and subjects. T...
TL;DR: In 1958, when Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, African literature could not be said to have existed as a discipline as mentioned in this paper, despite the fact that there had been hundreds of years of oral t...
Abstract: In 1958, when Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, African literature could not be said to have existed as a discipline. This, despite the fact that there had been hundreds of years of oral t...
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TL;DR: In this paper, a reading of C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melville's Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), is examined.
Abstract: Through a reading of C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melville's Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), this essay examines James's effort to rethink – through an anti-colonial and Marxist lens – the political limits of the novel form in general and the realist novel in particular as representational regimes. The essay begins by examining how James uses his own status as a political alien not merely to ‘reinterpret’ Moby Dick but more importantly to (re)tell what he claims was the novel's intended but ultimately ‘untold’ central story – i.e. that of the crew – a collectivity of stateless migrants and refugees labouring in the shadow of US Empire. That these stories remained untold, for James, was not merely a political choice but a formal one – that is, these experiences of migrant labour and collectivity haunt the ideological and representational limits of the realist novel. As such, I argue, ‘retelling’ these ...
TL;DR: Achebe's Things Fall Apart as mentioned in this paper is frequently received as an account of how things were in pre-colonial Africa and it is a staple text in history and anthropology courses.
Abstract: What if Achebe got it wrong? His classic novel Things Fall Apart is frequently received as an account of how things were in pre-colonial Africa. It is a staple text in history and anthropology cour...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that to uncover the construction of literary production, whereby the dominant group constructs its reality and its history, is to interrogate the "pure" text of traditional literary criticism in the context of the entire historical moment.
Abstract: In this essay, I suggest that to uncover the construction of literary production-whereby the dominant group constructs its reality and its history-is to interrogate the ‘pure’ text of traditional literary criticism in the context of the entire historical moment. The nineteenth-century literary sphere in Bengal witnessed a period of struggle between the popular indigenous inheritance in poetry and the formulation of a new modern poetry after English poetic convention; this period of give and take is read here through a study of the fluctuating fortunes of the reputation of the premier poet of the eighteenth century, Bharatchandra Ray, whose inheritance was a mixed one among the new Bengali readership that was created in this period. Reading against the grain of conventional literary critical approaches, it should be possible to acknowledge the enabling element in certain aspects of both the English and Bengali literary conventions in the formulation of a modern literature, and here I shall place the common...
TL;DR: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a quintessential man novel, and the first novel I read in primary school from my father's African Writers Series collection 10 years after its publica...
Abstract: Chinua Achebe's archetypal Things Fall Apart, a quintessential man novel, and the first novel I read in primary school from my father's African Writers Series collection ten years after its publica...
TL;DR: Jung's theories were premised on a polarization between the European and the other, where the dualisms of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ societies were mapped onto the conscious and unconscious, respectively as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Swiss psychologist, and erstwhile discipline of Freud, Carl Gustav Jung was excommunicated from the psychoanalytic movement in 1913 for delving into the occult and for challenging Freud's sexually based notion of the libido. He went on to develop his own psychological method – analytical psychology – in which ‘Africa’ was decisive. For Jung, Africa and its inhabitants represented the ‘primitive’, the unconscious, ‘the other’, which then enabled him to conjecture about the nature of the European psyche. Jung's visits to Tunisia and Algeria in 1920, and Kenya and Uganda in 1926, were, in effect, fact finding missions to enable him to consolidate his theories. These theories were premised on a polarization between the European and ‘the other’, where the dualisms of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ societies were mapped onto the conscious and unconscious, respectively. Nevertheless, his autobiographical ruminations in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (published just after Jung's death in 1961) and his theoretical wri...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on Residence Roma, a residential complex located at the outskirts of Rome, Italy, where over 2,000 immigrants, of which 800 citizens of Senegal, lived in the period 2001-2006 in rented studios.
Abstract: This essay is based on the author's fieldwork at Residence Roma, a residential complex located at the outskirts of Rome, Italy, where over 2,000 immigrants, of which 800 citizens of Senegal, lived in the period 2001–2006 in rented studios. It focuses on one of its buildings, occupied solely by Senegalese migrants, and on its daily spatial operations (such as the creation of open-air kitchen facilities in the studios’ balconies) and organization, emphasizing the establishment of networks of support based on internal communal rules and functional to the residents’ cultural ends. The author argues that the transnational grammar of Mourid ritual communities allowed the creation of a unique hybrid model of spatial dwelling, one able to counteract the often alienating legal discrimination which privileges Italian nationals over non-EU foreigners in housing and rental policies. In the process, the very concepts of hospitality and integration were critiqued from within. The essay also considers political actions ...
TL;DR: The authors explored the way in which three South Asian writers (Bapsi Sidhwa, Amrita Pritam and Saadat Hasan Manto) have chosen to represent st...
Abstract: During the 1947 Partition of India, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted by members of other religious communities – to be raped and murdered, sold into prostitution, or forced into marriage. In response to this crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan initiated a bilateral recovery programme whose objective it was to return ‘abducted persons’ to their natal or conjugal families. Over the last decade or so, however, criticism of this programme has become increasingly vociferous. For some writers, it merely replicated the ‘violence [of] rape, forcible abduction and marriage’; for others it was ‘propelled by the same sort of misogyny that had taken the shape of rape and torture at the hands of the enemy’. My intention in this essay is not to dispute the fact that the recovery programme involved an intolerable degree of coercion and abuse. Rather, I shall be exploring the way in which three South Asian writers (Bapsi Sidhwa, Amrita Pritam and Saadat Hasan Manto) have chosen to represent st...
TL;DR: In this paper, a postcolonial author chooses to write in the English language, the language of the colonizer, he or she must use original strategies in order to give the narrative a truly postcolonial spirit.
Abstract: If a postcolonial author chooses to write in the English language – the language of the colonizer – he or she must use original strategies in order to give the narrative a truly postcolonial spirit...
TL;DR: The influence of Chinua Achebe on African writing since 1958 when Things Fall Apart appeared is almost incalculable as mentioned in this paper, with that novel he bequeathed a whole new catalogue of cultural historical stori...
Abstract: The influence of Chinua Achebe on African writing since 1958 when Things Fall Apart appeared is almost incalculable. With that novel he bequeathed a whole new catalogue of cultural historical stori...
TL;DR: The authors make a case for the Arctic's underestimated significance in current social and cultural models of the global and the "planetary" and suggest that the circumpolar Arctic's unique reorientation of a planetary vision, combined with its pressing humanitarian and environmental difficulties, should be incorporated in current postcolonial cultural and social theory debates on the global.
Abstract: This essay situtates the intensifying scramble for the Arctic in a larger historical and disciplinary framework, in order to make a case for the Arctic's underestimated significance in current social and cultural models of the global and the “planetary.” Focusing on circumpolarity as configured in early modern exploration, Enlightement science, and twentieth-century indigenous and governmental institutions, the essay suggests that the circumpolar Arctic's unique reorientation of a planetary vision, combined with its pressing humanitarian and environmental difficulties, should be incorporated in current postcolonial cultural and social theory debates on the global.