The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
History Of

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...

scholarly journals Conscientization in the Indian Classroom: An Experiment in the Critical Learning of Postcolonial Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-257
Author(s):  
Nilanjana Deb
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Collaborative Teaching ◽  
Master's Students ◽  
College Teacher ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Degree

The article tells the story of a pedagogical experiment that the author conducted in collaboration with final year master’s students in Kolkata, India. The aim was to “open up the classroom,” adapting Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy to an Indian context. The diverse group of students who participated in this experiment had a high degree of political consciousness regarding issues of gender, caste, sexuality, disability, and class due to the university’s history of student activism. Most students had already read a fair amount of postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature syllabus as it had conventionally been taught would not be able to engage these restive students or be relevant to their lived experiences. The experiment on classroom democratization and collaborative teaching would demonstrate to the future college teacher one kind of interventionist approach for raising student awareness in the Indian classroom.

scholarly journals Challenging Binaries and Unfencing Fields

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Vince ◽  
Hanna Teichler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Social History ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Diasporic Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Memory Group ◽  
The University ◽  
With Memory

Bryan Cheyette is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, where he directs the Identities and Minorities research group. His comparative research focuses on critical ‘race’ theory, postcolonial literature and theory, diasporic literature, Holocaust testimony, and, more recently, the social history of the ghetto. In January 2019, the Warwick Memory Group invited Bryan Cheyette to give a public lecture on ‘The Ghetto as Travelling Concept’, in the light of his forthcoming A Very Short Introduction to the Ghetto (2020), and a workshop on ‘Unfenced Fields in Academia and Beyond’. In a wide-ranging interview, Bryan Cheyette speaks of the interconnections between Jewish studies and postcolonial studies, bringing these into dialogue with memory discourses and our contemporary moment. Image of Prof Cheyette, photo credit Cesar Rodriguez

Colonial Politics and Problem of Language in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
◽  
Bandana Nirala ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
David Malouf ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

Language plays a critical role in postcolonial literature. English has been the dominant language of European imperialism that carried the European culture to the different colonies across the world. Australia is the settled countries where English has become not only the official and mainstream language of the country but has also put the indigenous languages on the verge of extinction. David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is a postcolonial text that re-imagines the colonial history of Australian settlement presenting the early socio- cultural and linguistic clashes between the settlers and the Aboriginals. The present paper tries to analyze the various dimensions of language envisioning its micro to macro impacts on the individual, community and nation as well. British used English language as the weapon of spreading European culture in Australia causing the systematic replacement of local dialects and other vernacular languages; hence the issues of linguistic and cultural identities would also be among the focal points of the discussion. The paper also attempts to examine how David Malouf provides a solution by preferring and appropriating native languages and culture for the future ofs Australia.

SCIENTISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: THE INDO-MUSLIM “FASCISM” OF INAYATULLAH KHAN AL-MASHRIQI

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARKUS DAECHSEL
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
History Of

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.

scholarly journals Decolonising Subalternity through Effective History in Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat

IJOHMN ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Dr. Naeema Abdelgawad
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
The One ◽  
Effective History

In Section One of Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, formulating a comprehensive theory of history, contend:   The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight. (91)   Marx and Engels believe that in any society, history marks a conflict between two struggling opposites; noting that the one in the privileged position oppresses the one who is not. Regretfully, that type of struggle never subsides; it seems to be perpetual as it is, sometimes, ‘open’ and, other times, hidden. The same is applied to colonised and ex-colonised countries. However, theirs is not a 'history of class struggles' but of a Master-Subaltern struggle. In this struggle, resisting subalternity is achieved through legitimating the existence of the Subalterns, a process that is realised by urging the colonisers or the colonisers' surrogates to recognise the subalterns' Being, which necessitates admitting not only the existence of the Subalterns, but also being conscious of them as individuals1. This is brought about by occupying a powerful position that is attained through heightening the Subaltern's sense of identity in the course of history. The result is, the paper argues, an active process of decolonising the Self, especially when an 'effective history' comes into existence to pave the way for the Subaltern to achieve self-realisation; as revealed in the Foucauldian thought and, also, the Hegelian and Heideggerian philosophy. The paper aims at analysing the empowerment process of the Subaltern in both Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat (1992) by comparing and contrasting different types of Subalterns as well as colonisers and colonisers' surrogates. The paper also sets out to explore the Subaltern's means of self-projection to acquire a position of power based upon history so as to examine the discourse of history in both African American and  Egyptian postcolonial literature.

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