Rhetoric of Post-Colonial Mindset in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

This paper examines the rhetoric of post-colonial mentality, mindset and attitude in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea and looks at how the writer is not aloof from the colonial mindset. Drawing on insights and postulations from Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialism and Lee Erwin’s new-historicism, this article analyzes the imperial discourse in the novel. Although the writer shows her narrator being close to black people as a Creole woman, the writer’s closeness to the imperial mindset is evident throughout the novel. This paper concludes that by creating a certain distance from the ex-slaves, the writer is not able to fully liberate herself from her imperial mindset. Although the writer tries to affiliate herself with the ex-slaves, she however remains within her own culture, that is, culture of Creole.

The emergence and evolution of International Relations studies in postcolonial South Korea

This study investigates how International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline emerged and evolved in South Korea, focusing on the country's peculiar colonial and postcolonial experiences. In the process, it examines why South Korean IR has been so state-centric and positivist (American-centric), while also disclosing the ways in which international history has shaped the current state of IR in South Korea, institutionally and intellectually. It is argued that IR intellectuals in South Korea have largely reflected the political arrangement of their time, rather than demonstrate academic independence or leadership for its government and/or civil society, as they have navigated difficult power structures in world politics. Related to this, it reveals South Korean IR's twisted postcoloniality, which is the absence – or weakness – of non-Western Japanese colonial legacies in its knowledge production/system, while its embracing the West/America as an ideal and better model of modernity for South Korea's security and development. It also reveals that South Korean IR's recent quest for building a Korean School of IR to overcome its Western dependency appears to be in operation within a colonial mentality towards mainstream American IR.

From prison induction into the sentence. Analysing prison officer support and assistance in a small island state.

This paper sheds light on male Maltese prisoners and their perception of help and support when incarcerated at Corradino Correctional Facility (CCF), Malta’s only prison. Through thematic analysis, the viewpoints, thoughts, and feelings of 39 males were explored. This was done in relation to programmes aimed to help prisoners in their desistance journey. Thought-provokingly, many prisoners spoke to the lack of support they felt within this prison. Even though there was only one question in the interview schedule which focused on how the prisoners felt in terms of support, this talk of support systems, or lack thereof, featured in many instances, frequently enough to warrant an analysis of its own. Themes emerging from this paper suggest that relationships between prisoners and prison officers are not supportive to any rehabilitative ideal. Prisoners speak of the lack of induction, information, and support, and of being mocked when requesting information or assistance. They state that support is conditional on who they knew, not withholding direct references to corruption, and even though some officers do attempt to provide proper care, they are limited by the institution, and by the colonial mentality of such a small island state.

Alcohol and Sexual Violence

This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish women, in the occupied eastern territories. The issue of sexual violence offers one of the clearest expressions of the ways in which geography, war, and the colonial mentality of the perpetrators allowed for the transgression of Nazi racial strictures in the East. It assesses how the acts of sexual violence by SS and police forces were commonplace in spite of the Nazi regime's own prohibition against racial defilement (Rassenschande), an act punishable by death or imprisonment. The chapter unveils numerous examples of drunken SS personnel and local auxiliaries operating in the concentration camps, the ghettos of the East, and the killing fields who sexually brutalized women, both Jews and Slavs, on a large scale. Ultimately, the chapter explains how the intersection between alcohol consumption, aggression, and male bravado found repeated expression in crimes of sexual violence in the East.

Alcohol and the German Army

This chapter examines the idea of a comradeship that was established by sharing in intoxicating acts of obliteration that encompassed the most atrocious manifestations of human behavior. It analyses the linkage between intoxication, fury, and destruction that existed in the German army prior to the rise of National Socialism. The Wehrmacht, like its SS and police counterparts, also had a distinct organizational culture, and this culture was defined by specific beliefs, norms, and rituals, including hard drinking, that reinforced group identity and established expectations of its members. For such distinguished organizational culture, the chapter presents how this military culture established a “cult of violence” and created a trajectory for the armies of the Third Reich leading to genocide in World War II. Ultimately, the chapter investigates the racial superiority and a colonial mentality created following the maelstrom of violence inflicted on the peoples of the occupied East.

The Yugoslav Wars 1990–1999 in contemporary literature in Germany and Austria

In this article, the literature on the wars in the former Yugoslavia is critically examined. The inter-pretive patterns of these wars aim at the authors’ confrontation with the “West that has gone wild” (Handke) and its colonial mentality, which manifests itself in the politically determined friend-enemy ascriptions. The writing about the wars also expresses a presumption whether or not we are in a state before “the war” (Monika Maron) and preparing for a new European tragedy through the language of hatred. On the whole, the article attests a responsible attitude by all authors, regardless of their position on the sides of the conflicts that are manifested in this high-quality literature.

The Historic and Contemporary Permanence of the Doctrine of Discovery in Canada

In the Truth and Reconciliation’s Final Report, four of the 94 calls to action referred to the repudiation of concepts which have justified claims of European sovereignty while implicitly refuting claims that dismiss the legitimacy of Indigenous land ownership prior to European contact. This paper demonstrates how the concepts of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery have prevented the recognition and affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty in Canada historically and presently. This article will first introduce the concepts of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius as religious constructs and demonstrate how these concepts became integrated into the colonial mentality of European countries by drawing from Andrew Crosby and Jeffery Monaghan’s concept of “settler governmentality.” These two concepts, in particular, justified the false pretensions of European countries to assume they could occupy, ‘discover’ and take the land from Indigenous peoples. By acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty is inherently connected to their relationship with the land, this article will conclude by analyzing the work of contemporary academics and reports that argue Indigenous laws cannot be adequately acknowledged under the current Canadian legislation.

Indigenous in Jackie French’s Perspective as a White Author: Unsettling Narratives in Australian Children’s Book

How Australian children perceived the image of Indigenous from their readings is highly influenced by the authors. As many Australian children’s books are written by White authors, it is important to reveal whether their past and cultural background manifest in the image they built for Indigeneity. This study aims to reveal how Jackie French, a white Australian children’s book author, portrayed Indigenous characters and environment in her novels and to find out whether French creates a shift of the images as a form of her tendency to the major culture in Australia. The data were significant textual units from Nanberry Black Brother White novel and were analyzed using Bradford's post-colonial theory of unsettling narrative. The result of this study shows that French deliver a varying degree of Eurocentric mindset in portraying indigenous characters and characterization. It implies that French, as a White-Australian writer still possibly has a colonial mentality who, deliberately or not, positions the Indigenous characters as Others through the focalization of both Non-Indigenous and Indigenous characters themselves. For instance, in Nanberry Black Brother White, it appears that French try to justify whiteness as more civilized and a better race through Nanberry’s point of view as an Indigenous child character. It implies that the process of depicting Nanberry, the representation of Aborigines, in the novel is actually a justification for establishing an Eurocentric mindset through the character’s narratives, and therefore creates unsettling narratives.