Contemporary Postcolonial Theory A Reader Pdf
Nhyiraba Valentin
There is a crisis in contemporary postcolonial theory: while an enormous body of challenging research has been produced under its auspices, severely critical questions about the validity and usefulness of this theory have also been raised. This Reader is positioned at the juncture where it can address these contestations. It makes available some of the 'classics' of the field; engages with the issues raised by contemporary practitioners; but also offers several of the arguments that strongly critique postcolonial theory. Although postcolonial theory purports to be inter-disciplinary and frequently anti-foundationalist, traces of disciplinary formations and linearity have continued to haunt its articulations. This Reader, on the other hand, offers a uniquely inter-disciplinary mapping. It is concerned with three main areas: definitional problems and contests including the current challenges to postcolonial theory; the 'disciplining of knowledge', where the multiple resonances of the word 'disciplining' are all engaged; and the location of practice where the relations between intellectual practice and historical conditions are explored. Finally, since the guiding principle of this Reader is simultaneous attention to the enabling and constraining mechanisms of historical realities and institutional practices, the commentary problematizes the writing of histories, the formations of canons, and indeed the production of Readers.
There is a crisis in contemporary postcolonial theory: while an enormous body of challenging research has been produced under its auspices, severely critical questions about the validity and usefulness of this theory have also been raised. This Reader is positioned at the juncture where it can address these contestations. It makes available some of the 'classics' of the field; engages with the issues raised by contemporary practitioners; but also offers several of the arguments that strongly critique postcolonial theory. Although postcolonial theory purports to be inter-disciplinary and frequently anti-foundationalist, traces of disciplinary formations and linearity have continued to haunt its articulations. This Reader, on the other hand, offers a uniquely inter-disciplinary mapping. It is concerned with three main areas: definitional problems and contests including the current challenges to postcolonial theory; the 'disciplining of knowledge', where the multiple resonances of the word 'disciplining' are all engaged; and the location of practice where the relations between intellectual practice and historical conditions are explored. Finally, since the guiding principle of this Reader is simultaneous attention to the enabling and constraining mechanisms of historical realities and institutional practices, the commentary problematizes the writing of histories, the formations of canons, and indeed the production of Readers.
This critical engagement with some of the most prominent contemporary theorists of postcolonial studies reevaluates recent theories of hybridity and agency. Challenging the claim that hybridity provides a site of resistance to hegemonic and homogenizing forces in an increasingly globalized world, Anjali Prabhu pursues the ways in which hybridity plays out in the Creole, postcolonial societies of Mauritius and La Runion, two small islands in the Indian Ocean, and offers an introduction to the literature and culture of this lesser-known region of Francophonie. She also reconsiders two major theorists from the Francophone context, Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, through a provocatively Marxian framing that reveals these two writers shared more in common about agency and society than has previously been recognized.
Ph.D. Cornell University. Zahid R. Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture, and critical theory. His first book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. He is currently at work on two books: Unruly Truth: Libidinal Politics and Crises of Authority analyzes contemporary shifts in the collective de-prioritizing of evidence and truth that attends a simultaneously increasing cultural emphasis on a politics of exposure; Impunity: Notes on a Global Tendency analyzes juridical, economic, political, and aesthetic aspects of the practices of impunity from the Cold War to the present, from postcolonial states to the United States. The book considers documentary film, contemporary art, development projects, and architecture. He has also published articles in differences, Boundary 2, October, Social Text, Cultural Critique, South Asia, and Camera Obscura. Some of his course titles include Difficult Art, Bollywood Cinema, Revolution (grad), Psychoanalysis and Postcolonialism (grad), Mimesis (grad) Introduction to Theory, Reading Literature: Fiction, Urban Fictions, Magical Realism, and Violence and the Modern.
Most of my scholarly career has been directed towards the study of postcolonial literatures and theory, with a special focus on global englishes and the literature of imperial management. My essays on postcolonialism and its troubles have appeared in the usual discipline-specific journals, and in collections such as Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology (Blackwell), The Post-colonial Studies Reader (Routledge), Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (E. Arnold), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, and A Postmodern Reader (SUNY).
In recent years I've focused increasingly on mountaineering and its representations, from colonial beginnings through to the global present. My essays on mountaineering history, co-written with Zac Robinson (Physical Education and Recreation), have appeared in the Canadian Alpine Journal, Alpinist, and The Canadian Rockies Annual. Many of these articles are posted on my personal website.
I'm working now on the ways in which mountaineering has been represented in literature, in national histories, and in film and image. The goal is to imagine what a postcolonial mountaineering future grounded in environmental sustainability, gender equity and cross-cultural mutuality might have to look like. With co-author Zac Robinson, I'm currently at work on a book that examines the history of early mountaineering in the Rockies and Columbia Mountains of Western Canada. Our SSHRC Insight Grant in support of this project runs through to 2018.
I'm a member of a ten-person research cluster entitled "Sustaining Mountain Cultures in the Canadian West," funded through the U of A's Kule Institute of Advanced Studies (KIAS). I talk about that project here. I'm also a member of the Canadian Mountain Network: a cross-sector, multi-disciplinary research network that takes as its first principle the co-design and co-production of "knowledge," in conjunction with our mountain-community partners, including First Nations communities. This network brings natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, community participants, and government agents together to address community concerns about Canadian mountain ecosystems and cultures, and to find ways of combining academic research methods with traditional ways of knowing,
This course examines the role women in the transatlantic literary cultures of Britain and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as its starting point the rise of the rights of women debate, we will focus on the complex ways in which women generated and expanded transatlantic conversations about such monumental issues as slavery and the slave trade, revolution, empire, cosmopolitanism, science, and theology, all of which emerged as integral features of transatlantic political cultures. In addition to British and US American authors, we will consider the writings of writers living in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean (e.g., Flora Tristan, Maria Graham, and Frances Calderon de la Barca). In doing so, we will develop a better understanding of the international relationships and intercultural contacts between women in Britain and all of the Americas that helped establish a transatlantic literary culture that was able to cross national borders, languages, and ethnic groups.
During the nineteenth-century, the novel became one of the world's most influential cultural forms due to its mass popularity and tendency for social commentary. Within a national and properly British or US American context, the novel soon emerged as the privileged genre for exploring the increasingly complex structures of British and American societies, including social forms such as inheritance, marriage, and crime, middle-class subjectivity, and imagined communities. Yet, the study of the novel as a global literary phenomenon operating and circulating across the Atlantic offers new possibilities for thinking about the novel's role in producing and/or critiquing the structures of an emerging Atlantic world order. Taking as our starting point Margaret Cohen's argument that novels travel due to their ability to be appropriated by diverse societies, this course will consider the complex ways in which the novel was able to engage with the cultural, political, and ideological issues being reworked and reinscribed by the transatlantic movement of people, ideas, and cultural artifacts between the 16th and 19th centuries. In addition to canonical British and American novels, such as Daniel Defoe's Robin Crusoe, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, we will consider novels of the Spanish Atlantic, including Cervantes's Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento, widely considered the first Latin American novel.
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