When innocence is no protection: governance failure of digitization and its impact on local level implementation

Purpose Governance of e-government is rarely discussed in the initial digitization stage, especially in developing countries where the government’s focus is mainly to pursue rapid proliferation of digital adoption rather than to implement governance. This study aims to explore the consequences of this absence of governance at local level conditions. Design/methodology/approach An in-depth exploratory case study is conducted at a municipal health government in a southern city in Kalimantan Island, Indonesia, examining the conditions of local actors in response to various nationwide health digitization imperatives. The postcolonial theory with the critical paradigm is used to interpret and conceptualize the empirical findings. Findings This study identifies two critical failures of digitization governance that represent the mainstream condition: horizontal sectoral ego and vertical asymmetry and misalignment. These failures have resulted in undesirable consequences at the subalterns indicated by diverse ambivalence and de-voiced constructs displayed by the local actors. Practical implications This paper suggests that various issues that emerge from local level implementation in nationwide digitization agenda might not always be issues of local technology adoption, but rather negative impacts due to the absence of governance practice at the strategic level. Originality/value Through a critical perspective, this study unearths the underlying power and structural inequity responsible for generating the various issues and undesirable consequences that emerge at local levels related to the nationwide digitization agenda.

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: A Tragedy of Cultural Conflicts and Distorted Interracial Relationships

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, hereafter (API), offers us an opportunity to realize the mentality of the white imperialist and the grotesque picture of the colonizer-colonized relationship; this picture implies multiple facets of racial vituperations, brutality, and prejudice perpetrated on Indians in the colonial period. In the novel, Forster explores the colonizers’ racist attitudes, and he brings out the racial and interracial conflicts as well as the cultural and ethnic traumas between the colonizer and the colonized. This study is primarily concerned with exploring the cultural clashes and the problematic, deformed interracial relationships, established between the Indians and the Anglo-Indians in a colonial context. The analytical approach and the Postcolonial Theory will be adopted throughout the paper as a framework. A postcolonial reading of the novel debunks the colonizer’s racist ideology and reveals various motifs of partitions, fences, interracial conflicts and gulfs. The article reveals that the different racial, cultural, and social backgrounds of the English and Indian communities create bitter differences and significant gaps that cannot be bridged. The study concludes that the ramifications of the interracial clashes and racial intolerance have a vehement impact on both the colonized and the colonizer alike; however, mutual and interracial love, respect, and understanding are robust solutions that can relatively open the ideological closure of racism, lessen the racial tensions and thus bring people of different racial backgrounds together.

Oroonoko: Post-colonialism, Kant and Todorov

Postcolonial theory looks at history, and it links to culture, sociology, psychology, and even politics and law. This study aims to analyze Aphra Behn Oroonoko with respect to post-colonialism, in particular, investigation of the extent colonialism, slavery, and being other. Oroonoko displays literary fiction and reality at the same time; thus, Immanuel Kant’s concepts of the noumenal world and phenomenal world have significant meaning. It draws on these theories and worlds: while the phenomenal world is day-to-day life conditions, the noumenal world is impossible to experience. On the other hand, Tzvetan Todorov’s perspectives on stories and novels are different, and he puts them in scales such as fantastic, uncanny and marvelous. For Oroonoko, readers can decide the scales only if they are willing to understand Todorov’s aims. The aim of this study is to examine Kant's concepts of the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, and Todorov's scales, as well as colonialism, slavery and being other.

Postcolonial vision of Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”

The relevance of the article lies in the study of the problem of the lost generation in modern Ukrainian literature, which remains insufficiently studied in literary criticism. The subject of the research is Yaroslav Pavlyuk’s postmodern novel “The Garden of Drunk Cherries”, to which the methods of postcolonial theory are applied. In the analysis, a literary character with a bifurcated consciousness stands out. This is the type of person in whom the traditional Ukrainian self-consciousness is combined with the Soviet one. The main result of the study is to identify the specifics of Ukrainian national identity in the Soviet Union, which was hidden and not exposed to the public, and Soviet identity became a social mask that people wore so as not to differ from generally accepted social standards. The novelty of the results of the study helps to reveal the social mask, which in Soviet-era Ukraine was the Russian language, which people had to use at the official level. The dramatic conflict between the novel main character, who is the author’s alter ego, and the librarian Oresta, is accompanied by letters from the artist Borys Zhdanyuk and famous directors Andriy Tarkovsky and Sergiy Parajanov, whose emotions and thoughts reveal the real picture of the absence of individual and national freedom in the USSR. Using the examples of people of art, it is shown how the Soviet system destroyed dissent and traumatized creative personalities. The bifurcation of the creative personality in Soviet-era Ukraine often led vulnerable people to their degradation. Censorship, control of dissent, the imposition of socialist realism in art, and the threat of arrest have forced writers, artists, and directors to adapt to the system or become dissidents. The novel depicts characters who do not accept the official ideology, trying to save their private world from state interference. The results of the study have the prospect for further analysis of the work of individual writers and generations who have become a lost force and have not used the creative potential inherent in them.

Difference, Intersectionality, and Organizing

In organizational scholarship, difference is broadly conceptualized as the ways in which individuals differ from each other along the lines of socially significant identities and characteristics. As such, difference encompasses social identities related to gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and national origin. In addition to social identities, difference also encompasses individual characteristics, such as education level, family type, and health conditions. Organizational scholarship increasingly considers difference to be a constitutive feature of organizing. As such, difference is not merely one aspect of organizing that is only relevant in some circumstances, but a defining feature of organizing processes to which it is always important to attend because dominant discourses and value systems privilege certain differences over others. Central to difference scholarship is the concept of intersectionality, which holds that various identities intersect with each other to shape social and organizational experiences in ways that are intertwined with privilege and/or disadvantage. Scholarship on difference, intersectionality, and organizing has drawn from multiple critical theoretical frameworks, such as critical race theory, standpoint feminism, postmodern feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. A growing amount of scholarship on difference, intersectionality, and organizing is also empirical and sheds light on how overlapping, intersectional identities matter in organizational settings and how they are embedded in power relations.

The Transition from Yorùbá Metaphysics to Islamic Aesthetics in Ọláńrewájú Adépọ̀jù’s Poetry

This paper explores the poetry of Ọlánrewájú Ade ́ ṕ ọ̀jù, a major contemporary Yorùbá poet, based in Ibadan, southwestern Nigeria. Much of the scholarship on the poet focuses purely on his sociopolitical interest, but the development of his craft has been largely ignored. This paper examines peculiar features of Adépọ̀jù’s poetry based on its fusion of Yorùbá cultural and Islamic religious values with the view to theoretically characterizing his practice. It draws on purposefully selected, recorded audio poetic compositions of Adeṕ ọ̀jù produced between 1974 and 2012 in order to yield a comprehensive view of his poetics. It employs hybridity, an aspect of postcolonial theory advanced by Homi Bhabha, as a theoretical framework to analyze the texts. The essay reveals that Adépọ̀jù’s poetry grows from the simple narration of the Yorùba traditional worldview, identity, and ́ òri ̀ṣa pantheon to become an instrument of radical Islamic ideology. It concludes that the integration of the indigenous and the Islamic cultural values in the work of Adeṕ ọ̀jù results in a unique poetic idiom in Yorùbá poetry.

Postcolonial Gothic Elements in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Nick Joaquin (Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín, (1917-2004) is known for his unique style of writing, tropical Gothic, and applying gothic elements in his stories and novels. This paper examines his first novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels through the lens of postcolonial theory. The paper also investigates gothic narratives in his novel by applying David Punter’s literary-historical approach. Punter (2000), in his book Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, examines the metamorphoses of the Gothic as a genre in some selected novels and poems. The book depicts new manifestations of the Gothic during 20th century literature. This paper attempts to investigate how the elements of postcolonial Gothic as discussed by Punter are manifested in Joaquin’s novel. In doing so, the contrapuntal method of reading, introduced by Edward Said (1993), is also applied to explore the hidden parts of history in the novel.

Rethinking Ecological Subalterns in Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist

This study explores the concept of subaltern and how its meaning has evolved over the years within the broader scope of postcolonial theory. The study shall trace the concept of subaltern from its anthropocentric meaning in Antonio Gramsci’s writings to Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s ideological perspectives. We shall also trace its inroad into the ecocritical study in the works of Michael Egan and Sergio Ruiz Cayuela while maintaining its anthropocentric leaning. The study shall further attempt a redefinition of the subaltern concept to accommodate non-humans in the class of the subordinated social group. Bearing in mind the anthropocentric leaning of the concept of the subaltern, which excludes non-human members of the ecology, we shall redefine the term from its previous usage in environmental literary studies and expand it to include non-humans as a subordinated group. The study shall analyse the relationship between humans and non-humans to determine if non-humans are treated as subordinates or worse than subordinated humans. The study shall draw instances from Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist (2006) to justify the classification of non-humans as the ultimate ecological subalterns of the Niger Delta Environment. We shall consider human relationships with non-humans (land, air, water, animals, vegetation, sea lives) to determine their status as subalterns. The crux of the study is basically to expand the scope of the subaltern theory by analysing the environmental despoliation prevalent in the oil-rich Niger Delta environments of Nigeria.