Christian Mission in the Contemporary World: A Dialogue between 1 Peter and Postcolonial Critics

The modern missions movement’s relationship with colonialism has brought to light many problems with contemporary conceptions of Christian mission. For many, the Bible often becomes, in the words of Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, the “colonial text par excellence.” This paper seeks to highlight – in dialogue with postcolonial critics – how 1 Pet 2:9–17 can instead provide the foundation for a theology of mission relevant to the contemporary context. First Peter distinctively anchors Christian mission in one’s Christian identity and clarifies how that identity transforms one’s relationship to one’s culture as well as to power structures in that culture. In doing so, 1 Peter eschews a triumphalist attitude and instead embodies values shared by theorists of postcolonial mission, namely narrativity, mutuality, and humility.

Interrogating Strategies of Justice and Racial Politics: A Post-colonial Reading of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man

The present article begins with a brief historical account of the exclusionary politics of Western crime fiction, with most of the works representing the East as ‘exotic other’ while assuming the subject position themselves. A post-colonial analysis of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (2016) is conducted to study how the novel deals with questions of justice and racial politics, and further encompasses a brief inquiry into it can be positioned as an anti-colonial text which advocates a move towards decolonization. The text can be seen as representing the body of work by writers who give voice to the oppressed within colonial contexts and vehemently refuse the idea of being inferior.

Pidgin Poetics in Oceania

English is the main language of writing among Indigenous writers of Oceania for a number of reasons. The various textual appropriations and ways in which language of writing and language of the culture have been infused together to produce texts do reveal a dialogic process at work. It is impossible to avoid the linguistic features of written texts as they are constructed in Oceania. Writers in Oceania are free to choose the language of their texts without any interference. In this way, they make readers aware of the cultural truth that these writers are representing in their writings. Metonymy as a poetic device and cultural truth as a thematic in Indigenous writings capture the interests of many of the older and younger generations of Pacific writers. Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. Some of the best poetry published across Oceania by generations of Pacific writers reveals extensive use of metonymy as a device to convey cultural truth. Poetry is written from the intimate knowledge of poets, embedded in the society in which they find inspiration. Bill Ashcroft and coauthors state: “the tropes of the post-colonial text may be fruitfully read as metonymy, language variance itself in such a text is far more profoundly metonym” because nuances in language can represent a whole cultural text. Syntactic fusion is one among different strategies of appropriation in postcolonial writing such as glossing, untranslated words, interlanguage, code-switching, and vernacular transcription.

Politics and Social Consciousness in Bankim Literature in the context of Lokrahasya: A Post-Colonial Reading of a ‘Colonial’ Text

The very title of the article suggests a journey back in not only time but politico-socio-cultural situation as well. The ‘Text’ taken for consideration is a piece of colonial literature in terms of the period of its creation; the ideas within it, however, can be seen from a ‘postcolonial’ perspective, in a period which is again ‘post-colonial’. The author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay continuously juxtaposes the ‘colonialist’ and the ‘colonized’ in a series of metaphors, comparing one with the other. In the context, at one level creates a critique of colonialism; at a deeper level he shows how the processes of colonialism have been appropriated by the ‘colonized’ through both acceptance of, and, resistance to colonialism. Subversion of the ‘superior’ by the ‘inferior’ is a recurrent theme. Finally, his project was cultural regeneration of a colonized society—his own—by imbibing the best elements of both the Orient and the Occident.

On the 10-year anniversary of minecraft: two interventions in extractive colonialism

In light of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Minecraft, the wildly popular survival/building game, this retrospective considers the game as a vastly impactful digital text of settler colonialism. The ways in which the game’s ‘survival mode’ approaches the extraction of resources from land is fundamentally entangled in colonial fictions of indigeneity, gendered systems of property, and a Euro-humanist sense of entitlement and ownership. Considering Minecraft as a colonial text allows for two theoretical and aesthetic interventions: first, the visual art of Peruvian-American Eamon Ore-Giron, who challenges colonial extractivism in the two-channel piece, Morococha, and second, the 2006 flash game released by XGen Studies, Motherload, which approaches mining-based gameplay with key differences. These two interventions highlight the importance of digital realms as a terrain of colonial space-making and thus a site of analysis for cultural geographers. Moreover, they may help to chart useful paths to the production and realization of anti-colonial digital textuality.

A Feminist Critique of “Voice” and the “Other” in J.M. Coetzee’s Post-colonial Novel “Foe”

This paper seeks to analyze the techniques and effects of voice and silence in the life of a female character in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. The analysis shows how the character of Susan Barton in Foe gives readers a feminine perspective on the famous tale of Robinson Crusoe. The method of investigation is a critical examination of the characterization of the female character; the research analyzes the events, actions and the interactions of Susan Barton, with a sight to identify how the character of Susan is portrayed in the novel. The analysis shows that while Susan is able to find a “voice” in some parts of this post-colonial text, her constant submission to strong male characters in the novel ends up showing a picture of a frail woman who defines her existence and individuality relative to men in her life. It strengthens the fact that women were still struggling to free themselves from the patriarchal domination of the post-colonial era.

Representações de Macau após a Guerra do Ópio no Poema “Militar” The Fair Chinese Maid; a Tale of Macao (1842)

In 1842, a British official anonymously published the first canto of poem The Fair Chinese Maid; a Tale of Macao (1842), written in Hong Kong, short after the end of the Opium War. The section of the ‘colonial’ text depicts Macau as an historical space of political tension(s) where East meets and confronts West. This paper analyses the imagery and cultural elements associated with the Portuguese and Chinese dimensions of Macau as a frontier-city throughout the poem.

Hybridity in the Vernacular: Nineteenth-Century Muslim Reform and Resistance

[W]hat attracted Nussooh's immediate attention was a cabinet of books. There was a large collection of volumes; but whether Persian or Urdu, all were of the same kind, equally indecent and irreligious. Looking to the beauty of the binding, the excellence of the lithography, the fineness of the paper, the elegance of the style, and the propriety of the diction, Kulleem's books made a valuable library, but their contents were mischievous and degrading; and after Nussooh had examined them one by one, he resolved to commit them also to the flames.—Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of NussoohIn the past twenty-five years, no theoretical conception has summed up the complexity of the colonial experience, and the possibilities of its interpretation, as well as Homi K. Bhabha's “hybridity.” “he sign of the productivity of colonial power,” but also the “name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity exposes the uncomfortable state in which colonial culture settled and expanded and, today, continues to beleaguer the state of being “postcolonial” (Bhabha 112). Signiied by the “discovery of the book,” hegemony was marked by the miracle of an object that was at once authoritative and unknowable, one that the supposedly unlettered native could hold in reverent hands (102). In the dark space of the native's hands and narrated within a native register, however, the “colonial text emerges uncertainly” (107). he intent to civilize and anglicize a body of social, religious, and aesthetic practices in the colony, then, is adulterated, perhaps even unconsciously resisted, once it is disseminated by way of the seemingly irrefutable book.