India's Revolutionary Spiritual Urge: Bhagat Singh and the Naxalites

Bhagat Singh is an iconic figure of the radical left tradition in India. If Singh, killed in the resistance to British colonialism, were to return from the dead, would he feel that the India of today, brought about by its ruling classes and their political representatives, was really worth his and his comrades' martyrdom?

Buried in the Red Dirt

Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Westernization and Colonization of the Mind in Chinua Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path”

British occupation in Nigeria has brought several impacts to the native land and also the indigenous people. Westernization and colonization of the mind are two inseparable effects of colonialism. These two issues are oftentimes depicted in literary works focusing on colonialism as their theme. The aim of this study is to analyze the issues of westernization and colonization of the mind raised in Chinua Achebe's "Dead Men's Path." The data were taken from quotes that prove the existence of these issues from a short story entitled “Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe and analyzed them using Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s theory of colonization of the mind. The results showed that westernization and colonization of the mind have affected Michael Obi, the main character in the story. Westernization influences Obi to adopt modern life and Western thoughts that show the process of mimicry, while colonization of the mind makes Obi downgrades Nigerian cultures. The issue of the management of land was also found in the story as a continuation of the previous problems. “Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe reveals that British colonialism has changed the perspectives of Nigerian elites, as seen in Michael Obi’s story.

Meat, Mercy, Morality

This book uses the lens of humanitarian debates to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. It demonstrates that with emergence of new notions of public health in late 19th-century Bengal, contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider debates surrounding environmental ethics, diet, sanitation, and a politics of race/class that reconfigured boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. Centered around three major stories – animals as diseased, eaten, and overworked – it explores how the colonial project of animal protection mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-too-benign reality where the state constantly sought to discipline its subjects – both human and nonhuman. It refreshes our understanding of environment, colonial science and British imperialism by arguing that colonial humanitarianism was not only an idiom of rule, but was also translated into Bengali dietetics, anxieties, vegetarianism and vigilantism which can be seen in India even today.

A Comparative Study of Postcolonial Aspects in T. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and C. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease

This study aims at investigating aspects of coloniality in both novels of the title. The two works expose a number of the evils of coloniality like masked colonisation, stereotyping and hybridity. The coloniser’s appointing of national agents to run the country in the coloniser’s stead, raising nonentities on the political hierarchy and sowing seeds of hatred among citizens of the same nation will be discussed under the first subtitle, masked colonisation. Under the second, stereotyping and misrepresenting Africans will be investigated. The paper will discuss ideas of language, culture and religion when dealing with hybridity, the third concept in such a trichotomy, to show how these have been affected by colonisation. The paper will respond to the following questions: how do Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North question the credibility of achieving independence? How (and why) did the (British) coloniser persistently stereotype African nations? How did the evil aftermaths of British colonialism reach and spoil the different aspects of the lives of the colonised nations, as shown in both?

Militarism and the Bedouin: Intersections of colonialism, gender, and race in the Arab Gulf

This article investigates the development of militarism in the Arab Gulf using the militarized representation of the Bedouin and their poetic tradition as a site for its analysis. The article traces the ways in which Bedouin ‘martial masculinities’ and Bedouin culture have been appropriated and transformed by British colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms to produce unusual patterns of militarism within the Gulf. It addresses a gap in international relations and security studies literature, in which militarism is examined through state-centric and methodologically nationalist framings that largely overlook transnational and colonial histories. The article argues that contemporary displays of militarism by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf region through the paradoxical representation of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’ whose martial-ness was also seen as a security ‘threat’ for the colonial/postcolonial state. Militarized responses and rationalities were normalized within Gulf society through the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype, which served as a timeless and fixed construct, connecting the Gulf’s disjointed past to its present-day context. Significantly, the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype helps foster the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin state-modernization processes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The article’s intervention seeks to disrupt this continuity by looking at how militarism and its martial constructs created ruptures in state trajectories, using the example of the 1996 coup attempt, citizen revocations, and the depoliticization of the poetic act as evidence for the claim that militarism engenders particular insecurities for Bedouin populations in the Arab Gulf.

FROM REGIONALISM TO KOSLI NATIONALISM AND BEYOND: THE DEMAND FOR A SEPARATE STATE IN WESTERN ODISHA

If we analyze the discourses on regionalism in India or even while trying to make sense of such a tendency, we may find that from a long time, even during the period of British colonialism, regional forces have had their impact at the level of organization of political system in their own ways. Needless to recall that when the Britishers entered India, they could sense the regional variations very well and therefore, established ‘divide and rule’ policy to suit their administration as well as to be fitted to the regional demands and peculiarities. It is, no wonder therefore, to find that the anti-colonial freedom struggle was not a process free of contradictions and variations over different regions. The fact of the matter was that the ‘national’ issue, namely, to establish a free independent and sovereign India superseded all the parochial claims of various regions and their demands. And it is, needless to say that these regional interests and demands, which were subdued during the freedom struggle found an expression and were articulated even within the first decade of India’s independence, which has, in fact, grown both in its number and its intensity with every passage of time, which are reflected in various regional movements, over the period. In this paper, we discuss such a movement taking its stride with every passage of day, in the western part of Odisha—both in its historical as well as contemporary contexts. We make an attempt to bring out what have been the historical causes which have given birth to such a tendency and the contours and trajectories that such a movement is going through over the period, including the current state of affairs as regards Kosal Movement, which is increasingly becoming so vociferous that we can hardly ignore it—either as an observer, as an analyst or as an activist—for or against the call for a separate state in Western Odisha.

College Journals, Educational Modernism and Palestinian Nationalism in Mandatory Palestine: Majallat al-Kulliyyah al-‘Arabiyyah

This article examines the role of Majallat al-Kulliyyah al-‘Arabiyyah, a ‘School Journal’ published by the Arab College in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period. This School Journal was a key agent of modernisation, enlightenment and national awareness among the Palestinian people. A period of intense national struggle, the Mandatory period was replete with political and military upheavals that decided the fate of the country and ended with the expulsion of more than half of the Palestinians and the Palestine Nakba of 1948. Among the most significant cultural changes during the Mandate, that had a major positive impact on Palestinians, was the expansion of the press, including the School Journals. These School Journals played a crucial role in widening the circle of education in Palestine, reducing illiteracy rates, advancing modernisation processes in Arab society and, importantly, promoting Palestinian Arab nationalist ideas as an instrument of national struggle against British colonialism and the Zionist settler movement in Palestine. The article focuses on Majallat al-Kulliyyah al-‘Arabiyyah as the most widespread and influential Arab School Journal during the Mandate period and analyses the key role played by this School Journal in Palestinian educational institutions and the Palestinian national-political struggles during the Mandatory period.

Colonizing Animals

Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.