A Circle of Circles (Jean-Patrick Manchette)

Beyond Return ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-131
Author(s):  
Lucas Hollister
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Radical Left

This chapter examines Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘father of the néo-polar,’ who is widely credited with bringing French crime fiction into step with the radical left politics of the 1970s. This chapter argues that an attention to questions of generic conventions and narrative shape allows us to reconsider the politics of noir as a literary form. This reconsideration of Manchette’s fictional politics begins with a close reading of Manchette’s essays on what he called the forme-polar or noir form. I then analyze two of Manchette’s late novels, Three to Kill (1976) and The Prone Gunman (1981), showing how issues of masculinity, gendered violence, and (post-)colonial violence are embedded in these fictions. Moving to questions of narrative shape and meta-aesthetic rhetoric, I show how Manchette’s work offers a radical and challenging view of the implications of working with and in cliché. Ultimately, this chapter lays out the case for a more expansive reading of Manchette’s work, one which goes beyond populist narratives about the noir novel in France, and which reads Manchette’s work as a politicized challenge to the ‘noir form’ itself.

Fragments Towards an Impossible (Domestic) Genre of the Human in Kenyan Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
International Media ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Extrajudicial executions and other forms of police violence in Kenya have always been an issue of significant concern in local and international media and human rights organisations. Reflective of this, scholarly interest in crime fiction in Kenya has grown significantly in recent years. However, the gendered implications of criminality – from sex work to errant motherhood to alternative modes of investigation – are still largely overlooked in postcolonial literary fiction and criticism. As part of a larger study on how women writers and characters shape crime fiction in Kenya, this paper critically engages with stories that the criminalised woman knows, tells, forgets,  incarnates, discards or hides about the city. It does so by examining the history of urban sex workers in Kenya, the representation of ‘urban women’ in postcolonial Kenyan novels and contemporary mainstream media, and the various (post) colonial laws that criminalise sex work. Through Justina, an elusive character in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, I consider how (post)colonial legislative frameworks and social life attempt to manage “impossible domesticity” (Saidiya Hartman) inside and against the geo-history of gendered and classed criminality in urban Kenyan spaces. My purpose is to interrogate hegemonic constructions of the citizen – and by extension, of the human  – in Kenyan law and public morality Keywords: crime fiction, feminism, sex work, human, homo narrans

scholarly journals Cults, Crosses, and Crescents: Religion and Healing from Colonial Violence in Tanzania

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 519
Author(s):  
Nancy Rushohora ◽  
Valence Silayo
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Colonial Government

More often than not, Africans employed local religion and the seemingly antagonistic faith of Christianity and Islam, to respond to colonial exploitation, cruelty, and violence. Southern Tanzanians’ reaction during the Majimaji resistance presents a case in point where the application of local religion, Christianity, and Islam for both individual and community spiritual solace were vivid. Kinjekitile Ngwale—the prominent war ritualist—prophesied that a concoction (Maji) would turn the German’s bullets to water, which in turn would be the defeat of the colonial government. Equally, Christian and Islamic doctrines were used to motivate the resistance. How religion is used in the post-colonial context as a cure for maladies of early 20th-century colonialism and how local religion can inspire political change is the focus of this paper. The paper suggests that religion, as propagated by the Majimaji people for the restoration of social justice to the descendant’s communities, is a form of cultural heritage playing a social role of remedying colonial violence.

scholarly journals Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (13) ◽  
pp. 1558-1577
Author(s):  
Júlia Garraio
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Victims Of Sexual Abuse ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Portuguese Colonialism

This essay examines two Portuguese novels about colonialism and its legacies: António Lobo Antunes’s Fado Alexandrino (1983) and Aida Gomes’s Os Pretos de Pousaflores ( The Blacks from Pousaflores) (2011). Fado Alexandrino perpetuates the use of Black women’s raped bodies as a plot device to represent colonial violence, while Gomes’s narrative empowers racialized victims of sexual abuse and challenges dominant public memories of the Colonial War. A close reading of these novels, contextualized against the background of scholarly debates about the representation of sexual violence, exposes both the perils and potential of cultural works to preserve the memory of rape in armed conflict.

Coloniality and Theological Method in Africa

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Robert S. Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Theological Method ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to approach the heuristic potency of coloniality illustrated by reference to the emergence of African theologies. Coloniality refers to subjugating strategies found in mission discourses which are not unrelated to wider colonial violence. It will be argued that such an analytic category, which arises from historical experiences of mission malpractice, has particular theological and methodological significance. Consequently, post-colonial Anglicanisms will affirm particularism, experiential interfaces and inductive theologizing.

scholarly journals Circle of Aunties Fostering Co-conspiratorship with Families of mmiwgt2s in the Resistance of Settler Colonial Violence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Heidenheim
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Educational Tools ◽  
Creation Process ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Racialized Gender

This paper details the co-research creation project “Circle of Aunties” outlining our processes, contributions and key learnings. The paper will begin by locating the author and the project’s approach and move to detailing our process - exploring the Circle of Aunties toolkit and the coresearch creation process. The paper will then outline the contribution this project makes to educational tools that create awareness around racialized gender-based violence in Canada and its relationship to existing literature regarding co-conspirator work. Co-conspirator/accomplice work are “alternative framework(s)” to allyship which call for “white scholars and activists to act as accomplices, working in solidarity with people of color within social justice and anti-racist movements” (Powell Kelly, 42). This paper explores our process of co-conspiratorship, bringing our project into conversation with contemporary anti-colonial efforts and calling for the prefacing of relationship in anti-colonial projects. Key Words: Co-conspiratorship, Accomplice, MMIWGT2S, Racialized Gendered Violence, Settler Colonial Violence, Settler Colonialism, Curriculum

Kṣētrayya: The making of a Telugu poet

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Village ◽  
Hindu Deity

Kṣētrayya is the attributed author of Telugu padams (short lyrical poems) dedicated to Muvva Gōpāla, a form of the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa. Kṣētrayya is commonly described as a peripatetic poet from the village of Muvva in Telugu-speaking South India who wandered south to the Nāyaka courts of Tanjavur in the seventeenth century. Contrary to popular and scholarly assumptions about this poet, this article argues that Kṣētrayya was not a historical figure, but rather, a literary persona constructed into a Telugu bhakti poet-saint through the course of three centuries of literary reform. A close reading of selected padams attributed to Kṣētrayya reveals the uniquely tangible world of female sexuality painted by the speakers of these poems. However, these padams became sanitized through the course of colonial and post-colonial anti-nautch and Telugu literary reform. In line with this transformation, the hagiography of the poet Kṣētrayya was carefully molded to fit a prefabricated typology of a Telugu bhakti poet-saint. Countering the longstanding narrative of solo male authorship, the article raises the possibility that these padams were composed by multiple authors, including vēśyas (courtesans).

Gendering Resistance, Domesticating Violence in Korean Prison Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
You-Me Park
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
State Power ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Prison Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Actions ◽  
Cultural Structures

This article explores how we may empower women in the context of state/prison/oppositional movements when women are categorically excluded from political actions, mass mobilisation, struggles against and for state power. Via a close reading of prison literature produced in post-colonial, post-Korean-War Korea, I rethink the relationship between resistance and revolution, unencumbered by the gendered understanding of each term. I argue that we need rigorously to read the gendered workings of state power and its economic, political and cultural structures as well as oppositional movements, with a view to fundamentally reconceptualising and redefining where power resides and what it means to have power. Only then will we be able to imagine resistance and revolution that are not contradictory to each other.

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

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Febin Vijay ◽  
Priyanka Tripathi
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Colonial Text

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.

‘We’ll Make Our Own Rules’: Postcolonial Cinematic Reclamations of Irish Revolutionary History'

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Bridget Shaffrey
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Film History ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Irish Film ◽  
Revolutionary History

This paper analyzes Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins’ (1996) functionality as a post-colonial national Irish enterprise and its establishment of a ‘sovereign’ cinematic identity through representations of the struggle for Home Rule. A film made “by Ireland, for Ireland,” Michael Collins exists within the canon of ‘ceasefire cinema’ and remains a landmark in Irish film history because of its historical content, international interest, and enormous Irish investment in its production. Notably, however, it was also immensely controversial; in the United Kingdom, for instance, many critics argued that Jordan’s work would incite nationalist violence in the midst of a fragile ceasefire. Additionally, because of the involvement of American production companies and American actors, many questioned the authenticity behind the aforementioned claim of Irish authenticity. Thus, these factors and responses beg the questions: ‘how can a film claim to be representative of a country’s identity, historical trauma, and struggles for autonomy if it is the result of another?’ and ‘does the depiction of colonial violence serve to redeem or abet?’ This paper will employ Michael Collins as a vehicle to explore these questions as well as the complex natures of Irish cultural and historical autonomy and post-colonial cinematic identities.

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