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Subject Area: Postcolonial Studies
ZÁHOÍK, JAN2015 0-7734-0087-7 204 pages
The first in a series of joint venture scholarly explorations into the Czech-African relationship. The monograph brings together several aspects of Czechoslovak-African relations mainly in historical perspective covering major events and views on Africa dealing with different periods and different regions of Africa and the various roles Czechs or Slovaks had in these places.
Hargreaves, Alec G.
2003 0-7734-6650-9 436 pages
The contribution of this collection to scholarship is fourfold: it contributes to the expansion of knowledge about the African continent through a critic’s response to its many forms of representation by writers outside as well as inside Africa; the range of writings provides intertextual evidence supportive of Dorsinville’s own complex representation of Africa in his fiction and memoirs; it is a documented record of a broad paradigm concerned with a postcolonial representation of the dialectic of home and exile, memory and identity, and selfhood and otherness; and it provides a fascinating display of a postcolonial writer-critic’s intellectual journey enlivened by his use of voice in the African tradition of oral exchange whereby he positions himself as the one speaking to and for the many. The volumes follow the original chronology of the publication of the individual texts. The contents range from books on (or by) Doris Lessing to David Halberstam, Idi Amin, and Muhammad Ali. The pieces are in French.
Dorsinville, Max
2003 0-7734-6652-5 492 pages
The contribution of this collection to scholarship is fourfold: it contributes to the expansion of knowledge about the African continent through a critic’s response to its many forms of representation by writers outside as well as inside Africa; the range of writings provides intertextual evidence supportive of Dorsinville’s own complex representation of Africa in his fiction and memoirs; it is a documented record of a broad paradigm concerned with a postcolonial representation of the dialectic of home and exile, memory and identity, and selfhood and otherness; and it provides a fascinating display of a postcolonial writer-critic’s intellectual journey enlivened by his use of voice in the African tradition of oral exchange whereby he positions himself as the one speaking to and for the many. The volumes follow the original chronology of the publication of the individual texts. The contents range from books on (or by) Doris Lessing to David Halberstam, Idi Amin, and Muhammad Ali. The pieces are in French.
Daramy, Sheikh Batu
1993 0-7734-9290-9 328 pages
A study of how the constitution and judiciary were perverted, elections rigged, and democratic processes subverted in an emergent African state.
Mbaku, John Mukum
1998 0-7734-8351-9 360 pages
This study contains a rich mixture of analytical ideas and views, and recommends reconstruction of the neo-colonial state as an effective way to deal with this pervasive institution. It examines corruption from a public choice perspective, providing policy-makers with more effective ways to deal with this important development obstacle. Part of the book deals with corruption in colonial Africa (specific emphasis on Nigeria), a neglected area in the literature.
Archer-Lean, Clare
2006 0-7734-5864-6 376 pages
Much has been written on the similarities between Canada, Australia and other Westernised English colonies in terms of the representation of Indigenous identity in fiction by white writers. This study addresses some very specific textual responses to this use of the ‘indigene’ by authors who are not from mainstream Anglo culture. The work makes an original contribution to knowledge and culture by comparing not only authors on far sides of the world, but also by comparing authors who do not easily fit into neat categories of identity themselves.
Chikeka, Charles O.
1998 0-7734-8471-X 332 pages
Examines the efforts of African states to complete the decolonization process, focussing on the divergent postures of Botswana, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zaire as representative examples. Examines in depth the factors that explain the divergent policies.
Kuchinsky, Michael
2015 1-4955-0323-2 224 pages
This unique multidisciplinary case study targets the importance of higher education in facilitating and helping to produce social capital that empowered the people of Namibia to expand the necessary set of civic and political responsibilities to individuals chosen by church leaders to promote a new and transformed society in a once apartheid-like developing country.
Villar-Argáiz, Pilar
2007 0-7734-5383-0 448 pages
This study re-evaluates Boland’s work in the dual light of two important ideologies within modern Irish writing: feminism and postcolonialism. Its main objective is to analyze Boland’s evolution as an Irish woman poet in her attempt to overcome marginalization as a postcolonial gendered subject. By bringing together postcolonial and feminist theorizations of identity, this study demonstrates how Boland gradually undermines the (presumably authentic) representations of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ she has inherited. By describing ‘Irishness’ and ‘womanhood’ in terms of fluidity and hybridity, Boland’s poetry exposes the constructedness of identity itself and allows the speaker to find a place freed from authoritative ideologies. In so doing, Boland manages to present a background where new decolonizing identities can emerge. In other words, it is here where she finds her way out as an outsider within an outsider’s culture.
Cousins, Mel
2005 0-7734-6036-5 404 pages
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Irish welfare system in comparative perspective. It examines key issues which have shaped the development of the Irish welfare state including the impact of Ireland’s post-colonial position, the role of globalisation and Ireland’s integration into the world-economy, and the respective roles of Irish state and societal institutions. The book places the Irish welfare state in a comparative European context and examines the extent to which Ireland fits into existing welfare typologies. It looks at the key policy areas of welfare support for those of working age, pensioners and children. It outlines the development of welfare systems in each area, describes the current level of coverage in a comparative context and outlines key debates. It also examines key policy issues including public opinion on the Irish welfare state, proposals for a basic income and debates on the privatization of welfare. The book concludes by discussing the possible future directions of welfare policy in Ireland.
O'Riley, Michael
2005 0-7734-6118-3 248 pages
This study examines the frequently overlooked problem of how colonial-era memories often become haunting, obsessive points of reference for contemporary culture. Examining the widespread use of haunting as a theoretical mode of recovery of occulted colonial history as part of its larger study of colonial memories circulating between France and the Maghreb, this book demonstrates the postcolonial imperative of moving beyond the categories of victim and torturer that frequently characterize the recovery of colonial history. The work demonstrates how in both postcolonial France and the Maghreb cultural identity and memory are structured in large part through a dialogue with colonial history that impedes a confrontation with contemporary issues important to the present and future of those geographical territories. Through a study of how popular postcolonial figures such as Zinedine Zidane, Assia Djebar, Lei1a Sebbar, Azouz Begag, and Tahar Ben Jelloun point to the necessity of transgressing the mutually shared history of colonial defeat, victimization, and culpabilty uniting France and the Maghreb, this work suggests the emergence of a nuaced form of postcolonial memory. The necessity of reconsidering the unique place that colonial history holds in these cultures as a mythical and haunting point of identification is borne out through analyses of how these postcolonial subjects confront contemporary and potential future forms of cultural identity. The work contributes a unique perspective to postcolonial studies in that it demonstrates how the colonial era continues to structure cultural memory. In this regard, this work offers a fresh perspective to debates on revisionist history and demonstrates how formerly colonized subjects and their children contribute actively to dialogue on the relevance of the colonial past in contemporary contexts where postcolonial identity is being forged.
Simms, Rupe
2010 0-7734-3754-1 324 pages
Gramscian theory is examined as an interpretive grid in examining the use of Christianity by European colonizers to facilitate their oppression of Africans on the continent and in diaspora. The work clarifies how the western powers utilized their religion in North America, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya to justify their exploitation of Blacks and how many Africans, as Christian converts, assisted them to accomplish their imperialist goals. In addition, this research explains how other Blacks, in these same locations, interpreted their own religious tradition or revised western Christianity to form liberatory ideologies that legitimated their struggle for freedom and inspired their communities to oppose subordination.
Dorsinville, Max
2005 0-7734-6053-5 252 pages
This first-person narrative, in both French and English, by a sixteen-year-old Haitian told in diary form in 1959 parallels the coming to power of Castro in Cuba and contrasts the continued role of François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier in Haiti. Both historical figures hover over the narrative and represent the hope and despair the narrator identifies as rite of passage away from his native Haiti, torn between his upbringing in a French Canadian boarding school and an apartment in Queens, New York, with his expatriate parents. This experimental book mixes languages in giving form to the process of individual growth. It uses Canada’s two official languages as formal references to the poles of cultural integration the narrator is called upon by upbringing to recognize and accept. Thus the narrative begins in French and subsequently shifts to English, symbolically characterizing the narrator’s growing up as a process embedded in the changing form of language.
Baptiste, Espelencia Marie
2013 0-7734-3598-0 228 pages
This book examines how an education system can provide mechanisms for nation building This work exposes how these mechanisms influence imagining, building, and enacting nation in a country with no native population It also examines how its colonially introduced ethnic groups proudly proclaim their differences in language and history.
Madureira, Luis
2007 0-7734-5483-7 316 pages
This study interrogates a series of utopian projections that have informed Portuguese and Luso-African letters and culture since the Renaissance. Concentrating on the three crucial historical moments – Portugal’s tenuous hegemony in the Asian seas in the sixteenth century, the collapse of its colonial empire in the mid-1970s, and the post-independence period of re-evaluating nationalisms in Africa – the study examines the familiar “long narrative” which casts the Portuguese Discoveries as an inaugural and enabling event in Europe’s conquest of the world. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, a sense of belatedness and danger in the face of a vast commercial network which preceded by several centuries Portugal’s arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa negate the Salazarist project to restore the mythologized age of discoveries and seek simultaneously to converge with anti-colonial guerrilla movements. The work of António Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugal’s April Revolution. Concomitantly, recent Lusophone African literature pictures the struggle of liberation as a cancellation of historicity, and underscores the “differend” between official constructions of nationhood and the future imagined from below.
Mbah, Emmanuel M.
2008 0-7734-5053-X 288 pages
This work analyzes every aspect of the land and boundary dispute, tracing the conflict from pre-colonial times to the period of decolonization. The manuscript’s interdisciplinary approach combines elements of political science, anthropology and economics.
Poulton, Robin Edward
2016 1-4955-0475-1 408 pages
This book analyzes international politics in the Sahara, describing the Mali crisis and the coup d’état of March 2012 that lead to the collapse of the State. Themes include the weaknesses of African States, democratic governance, decentralization and political legitimacy: terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism; corporate competition for cocaine, hashish, weapons, oil, gas, and uranium; droughts and demography; and poverty of Mali’s vulnerable women, children and refugees - victims of political instability.
Tonegutti, Raffaella Greco
2016 1-4955-0475-1 408 pages
This book analyzes international politics in the Sahara, describing the Mali crisis and the coup d’état of March 2012 that lead to the collapse of the State. Themes include the weaknesses of African States, democratic governance, decentralization and political legitimacy: terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism; corporate competition for cocaine, hashish, weapons, oil, gas, and uranium; droughts and demography; and poverty of Mali’s vulnerable women, children and refugees - victims of political instability.
Morrow, Patrick D.
1998 0-7734-8474-4 200 pages
This collection of essays embraces a variety of genres and areas of cncentration, including not only major figures of the South Pacific, but some of the newly-emergent voices as well. The book covers a vast expanse of territories, islands and states of mind where borders - social as well as geographic - are more permeable, more mobile than those we are used to in Europe and the United States.
Dorsinville, Max
2001 0-7734-7516-8 296 pages
This volume contains a critical edition of interconnected stories by the Haitian writer Roger Dorsinville. They unfold in the form of a journey from childhood in the Caribbean to old age in Africa, and in the circular form of initiation retrospectively understood as a key to masculine and feminine behavior in the Caribbean and Africa. The Introduction argues that these stories draw the reader’s attention to a Conradian link between narrative form and power tactics. A number of creative and critical texts are appended along with a selected bibliography.
Duncan, Dawn
2004 0-7734-6498-0 272 pages
This study demonstrates the practical application of postcolonial theory to Irish drama. It argues that postcolonial tactics must evolve to suit temporal needs, calling for a re-evaluation of writers too easily dismissed or overlooked in earlier generations. Starting with Sheridan’s sister, Alicia LeFanu, around the Act of Union, moving to Dion Boucicault’s comedic melodramas post-famine, then to W.B. Yeats’ romantic Celt mythology plays, on to Brian Friel’s interrogation of nationalisms, and finally to contemporary voices now emerging, analyses of the focus plays and their public reception illustrates why drama, as a communally received literate work, may more powerfully voice postcolonial concerns than the previously privileged novel form.
Alfaisal, Haifa Saud
2006 0-7734-5686-4 332 pages
No other study explores the topic of religious discourse from within the context of postcolonial studies. This book uniquely analyzes two novels from very different contexts, Guatemala and Sudan, to illustrate that there is a profoundly problematic area within the ‘ethical purchase’ of postcolonial studies. It relates this problem to the ‘magical realism’ label that is applied to various postcolonial fiction. The book demonstrates this problem within postcolonial studies by critiquing the works of some of the foremost postcolonial critics. The study ends by bringing theory down to reality when it asserts that because of the differences between societies and cultures as they stand today, and with postcolonial studies lacking the necessary theoretical apparatus to deal with these differences, cultural contact is bound to elicit violence in one sense or another.
Harrington-Austin, Eleanor J.
1999 0-7734-7932-5 364 pages
This postcolonialist work locates Shelley in the context of England’s colonial venture in British India. It also ties together several major, seemingly disparate – and even competing - late-18th/early 19th-century discourses on British India, and illustrates how those discourses were later enlisted to serve the Imperialism of the English Raj. Shelley’s A Philosophical View of Reform, the guiding document of this study, demonstrates his knowledge of these debates and his own internalized contradictions concerning both English workers at home and Indian subjects abroad. Chapters include surveys of period issues of class, gender, race, and nationalism, their relationship to British India, and Shelley’s personal and literary treatment of them; English Orientalism concerning India and Indic elements in Shelley’s poetry; Utilitarian projects in India and England and Shelley’s reaction; Evangelical projects in India and England; Victorian imperialism.
Distiller, Natasha
2005 0-7734-6076-4 316 pages
This book works within the frameworks of post-colonial studies and cultural studies in order to theorise, and then to illustrate, the possibilities for cultural creation in the context of oppression. It re-works the concept of hybridity, and the philosophies of liberalism and humanism, in order to suggest that these important and much-contested terrains within critical theory have specific potential in a South African context. This book applies these theoretical points to a specific trajectory of writing in English in the region, which it finds embodied in the writing of Solomon Plaatje, Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, and Can Themba. By seeking to unlock the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which Shakespeare is useful to these writers, the book addresses the traditional imbalance of knowledges in Shakespeare Studies by conceptualizing the presence of Shakespeare in these texts as indicative of an act of cultural appropriation and political resistance. Ultimately, the book makes a contribution to post-colonial and cultural studies’ engagements with how culture works, how resistance is inscribed, and what role theory can play in the neo-colonial world.
Chakrabarti, Sumit
2011 0-7734-1457-6 380 pages
Fobanjong, John
2006 0-7734-5898-0 208 pages
For most liberation movements, the primary vehicle has historically been an armed struggle. This was true for the American Revolution, and is true for the various independent movements that campaigned against foreign rule in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Seldom has a liberation movement given primacy to theory over military confrontation. Amilcar Cabral was, however, an exception to this rule. While Cabral did not totally eschew armed insurgency, he campaigned fervently to hinge the liberation of Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau on philosophical underpinnings. Arguing for what he describes as the “weapon of theory,” Amilcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde and Guinea (PAIGC) and a major figure in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, highlights the pivotal role of culture in national liberation and nation building. This book is the product of a collection of scholars who have come together to interpret, synthesize and give new meaning to the life and philosophy of Amilcar Cabral. While the focus here is on Cabral and his thoughts, the lesson, like all philosophical lessons, is universal and immortal. For any people victimized by oppression, there is an alternative to armed conflict. Cabral informs us that that alternative is “the weapon of theory.”
Tayeb, Lamia
2006 0-7734-5700-3 340 pages
This book is a study of the current debates about identitarian thought in relation to contexts of postcolonial resistance and reconstruction. How is identity theorized, constructed and claimed in the context of postcolonial political and cultural struggles against imperial hegemony? How is our understanding of identity inflected by the strengthening alliance between postcolonial theory, on the one hand, and the postmodern pull towards ‘de-hegemonization’ on the other? This study assesses different postcolonial ‘relocations’ in cultural and political discourse and highlights the political uncertainties and theoretical fractures that the persistent appeal to Western frameworks of knowledge engenders. This book aligns three white settler nations, namely, Canada, Australia and South Africa, from a socio-political and cultural point of view. It proposes a study of their twin positions as distinctive avatars of postcolonial experience and as illustrative models of a general postcolonial condition. Furthermore, it raises issues of identity and identity politics on the level of literary discourse as well as in terms of national context. The novels of Canadian Michael Ondaatje, Australian David Malouf, and South African Nadine Gordimer present rich thematic parallels; they engage with particular white settler national issues as well as more general postcolonial questions.
Daniels, Patsy J.
2011 0-7734-1435-5 180 pages
This book asserts that American literature is a postcolonial literature and that the values inherent in American literature reflect the mother culture, England. The author constructs an all-encompassing theory to support her assertion.