On the Postcolony


Book Description

Refreshing a stale debate about power in the postcolonial state, this book addresses a topic debated across the humanities and social sciences: how to define, discuss, and address power and the subjective experience of ordinary people in the face of power?




Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony


Book Description

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.




Liberalism and the Postcolony


Book Description

Extricating liberalism from the haze of anti-modernist and anti-European caricature, this book traces the role of liberal philosophy in the building of a new nation. It examines the role of toleration, rights, and mediation in the postcolony. Through the biographies of four Filipino scholar-bureaucrats—Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez—Lisandro E. Claudio argues that liberal thought served as the grammar of Filipino democracy in the 20th century. By looking at various articulations of liberalism in pedagogy, international affairs, economics, and literature, Claudio not only narrates an obscured history of the Philippine state, he also argues for a new liberalism rooted in the postcolonial experience, a timely intervention considering current developments in politics in Southeast Asia.




Law and Disorder in the Postcolony


Book Description

Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth—an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while postcolonies live in states of endemic disorder, many of them fetishize the law, its ways and itsmeans. How is the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities to be explained? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Benjamin, Agamben, and Bayart. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.




Rogues in the Postcolony


Book Description

An environmental humanist's study of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation in Indian fiction.




Out of the Dark Night


Book Description

Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.




Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony


Book Description

Offers a progressive Christian approach to soteriology and missiology in a global, postcolonial context. This book proposes an integration of gospel and culture. It aims to steer a third course towards an integration of the knowledge and treasures, the losses and laments of Christianities forged in colonizing and colonized societies.




Return to the Postcolony


Book Description

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness. With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.




On Private Indirect Government


Book Description

Two hypothesis form the basis of this study. First, that development in African countries follows many models, on many time-scales; and secondly that private indirect government is taking the place of the state in controlling individual conduct. The author concludes that a new form of the organisation of power is emerging based on the control of the means of coercion - in effect, privatisation of public violence.




The Postcolonial Challenge


Book Description

`Couze Venn's book makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of postcolonial theory and its engagement with significant changes within the contemporary world. Couze Venn forces us to rethink the very parameters of the post-colonial and suggests a new political economy for post-modern times. This critical engagement opens up the possibility to reimagine the world from its current narrow European strictures to a world full of alternative possibilities and modernities. Venn's book adds a new dimension to the scholarly literature on postcolonial studies with the suggestion that such a rethinking is transmodern - properly postcolonial and postoccidental. As such, it is an extended meditation and development of his Occidentalism. This is a timely and ground breaking book that contributes to a much needed reconceptualisation of the postcolony' - Professor Pal Ahluwalia, Goldsmiths College, University of London What is postcolonial studies? What are its achievements, strengths and weaknesses? This ground breaking book offers an essential guide to one of the most important issues of our time, with special emphasis on neo-liberalism within world poverty and the `third world'. It clarifies: · the territory of postcolonial studies; · how identity and postcolonialism relate; · the ties between postcolonialism and Modernity; · new perspectives in the light of recent geo-political events; · potential future developments in the subject. Lucid, comprehensive and accessible the book offers students and scholars a one-stop guide to one of the most important issues of our time.