Postcolonialism

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by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Review of Un/Common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Difference

by Shui-yin Sharon Yam

Co-authored with Zachary Marshall. Published in Intervention, 2011

A hapless attempt at swimming': Representations of Eric Moussambani

by John Nauright

published in Critical Arts 17:1/2 (2003), 106-122, co-authored with Tara Magdalinski

One of the most powerful images to emerge from the pool at the Sydney 2000 Olympics was that of Eric Moussambani from... more One of the most powerful images to emerge from the pool at the Sydney 2000 Olympics was that of Eric Moussambani from Equatorial Guinea who swam his heat of the 100-meter freestyle alone after the other two swimmers in his heat were disqualified. Moussambani completed the distance over one minute slower than eventual gold medallist Pieter van den Hoogenband. The media coverage of Moussambani's performance illustrates that the discourses of colonialism, paternalism, and racial stereotyping remain central in the modern Olympic movement. This paper analyses media reports of Moussambani and identifies three main frames used to contextualize his performance at the Olympics. We situate Moussambani's swim within a broader framework that reveals the mechanisms used to display African bodies for the European gaze as well as the paternalist Olympic discourse that seeks to universalize Western sporting practices within a global culture that privileges Western cultural and economic practices.

Talking among Themselves? Weberian and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogues without 'Others'

by Gurminder K Bhambra

Sociology’s orientation to history is based around agreement on the importance of key substantive issues concerning... more Sociology’s orientation to history is based around agreement on the importance of key substantive issues concerning the emergence of modernity and the related ‘rise of the West’, as well as agreement around a stadial idea of progressive development and the privileging of Eurocentred histories in the construction of such a framework. Within these areas of broad agreement, however, there are also key points of contestation between the strong forms of macro-sociology as embodied, in particular, by Marxist and Weberian approaches, for example, Brenner, Anderson, and Wallerstein on the one hand, and Runciman, Giddens and Mann, on the other. The sites of contestation include addressing the precise nature of the origins of capitalism, the importance of the commercial versus the agrarian mode of production in the transition to capitalism, or arguments about how later developing countries might accommodate forms of modernity already established, for example, as in the multiple modernities debates. What these debates all have in common is that they can be carried out in the context of a standard framework of comparative sociology, a framework that I will argue is unable to address the issues raised by the turn to postcolonial studies and global history.

Postcoloniality, Orientalism, and the Question of Québec

by Matthew Chung

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Dalhousie Undergraduate Arts and Social Science Conference (Halifax, 2012)

Published in Canadian Content: The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Canadian Studies

Examines the ways in which postcolonial theory may inform a fundamental re-reading of some of the major primary... more Examines the ways in which postcolonial theory may inform a fundamental re-reading of some of the major primary sources in the field of Canadian history

Biopolítica borbónica en Chile: el discurso antropológico sobre la ociosidad y el vagabundaje

by Patricio Lepe-Carrión

En editorial para ser publicado en el libro colectivo "Revisando el presente. Ensayos críticos desde el sur". CEAPEDI. Universidad Nacional del Comahue - Argentina.

The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies.

by Matthew Liebmann

2008. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by M. Liebmann and U. Rizvi, pp. 1-20. Altamira Press, Lanham, MD.

12.1 (Con)figuring Sport Flyer

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

(Con)figuring Sports explores the ways in which sporting endeavours offer writers and artists an opportunity to... more (Con)figuring Sports explores the ways in which sporting endeavours offer writers and artists an opportunity to reflect upon the conflicts, tensions and cultural transformations which sport configures. This issue is edited by Shirley Chew and John McLeod.

A love letter to the Other: Xenophily and radical politics

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Forthcoming. Draft available for viewing.

Opening paragraphs:

"What better way to get myself in the mood to write an essay on love, I figured,... more Opening paragraphs:

"What better way to get myself in the mood to write an essay on love, I figured, than to listen to some of my favourite love songs? The smooth and sensual vocals of Cody Chestnutt’s ‘No One Will’ seem to be doing the trick right now. However, my wish here is not to write of romantic love (at least not exclusively), but of love in a political and ethical, though I would hope no less erotic, sense.

I begin by posing the question of love in relation to the under-examined concept of community. Beyond the ‘community of two’ that is the romantic couple or pair of friends are communities of interest, political persuasion, class, gender, culture, nation, and so on. Implicit in each kind of self-identified community are particular values concerning who it is admissible to associate with, to become friends with, to love.

‘Some of them might be nice people’, conceded the xenophobe to her more immigrant-friendly colleague one evening on my television screen, ‘but it’s not as if I’m going to become friends with them. That’s not how the world works’.

It is scarcely questioned that we should so often be drawn to people in whom we find something of ourselves. Communities have become a veritable extension of the self. Love, meanwhile, becomes reduced to the love of Same."

Ecology and the art of the possible

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Forthcoming. Due for publication in mid-2012. Draft available for viewing.

First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial... more First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial era mental asylum turned art gallery. In their glow, an odd array of objects: Time-worn furniture, an antique French stereoscope, a bouquet of native flowers, jars of assorted bush tucker. Binding them are the invisible threads of stories, gathered up and re-woven by artists Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe of the Sydney-based collective, Makeshift, during their two sojourns in Esperance in the autumn and spring of 2011. The black and white projection at the focal point of the installation conveys an eighteenth century dining scene, seemingly plucked out of Europe and parachuted into the dry salt lake where it was filmed, save for the bloodroot, wattleseed, and other edible native plants comprising the spread. Adding to its curiousness is the artists’ unusual choice to film it as a tableau vivant or ‘living picture’. This now-quaint convention, once popular as a form of entertainment at the soirees of aristocratic elites, involves the presentation of a scene by a silent and motionless cast of characters as if imitating a painting or photograph. The effect achieved by Makeshift is a film reel resembling a slideshow of images from the colonial frontier, eerily still but for the tablecloth flapping in the breeze..."

Abstract of my PhD dissertation

by Natali Bogosyan Esayan

Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. Forthcoming. Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia. Journal of Agrarian Change.

The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of... more The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that have swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas ‘possession’ is a well-understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as ‘orality’, coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi-nomadic lifestyles, barter economies, and–until recently–widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of ‘property’ are vague among the country’s majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this article examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.

TartariaMag_issue1-2012

by Nikolay Tsyrempilov

Race moves: following global manifestations of new racisms in intimate space

by Aparna Mishra Tarc

Race, Ethnicity and Education

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in... more This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital. The article argues that as national borders become destabilized under globalization, existing significations of race and racism give way to reattach to migrating, vulnerable and displaced bodies. The article argues that teachers and educators in multicultural nations can begin to follow and intervene in race moves by collectively thinking through narrative histories of migration that structure national belonging and non-belonging and our relationships to each other at home and in the world.

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An Exodus Scripted in Blood: A Gendered Reading of Partition

by Rohit K Dasgupta

Dr Kavita Punjabi and Dr Debra Castillo edited Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and Americas, (New Delhi: Worldview, 2011)

“Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry”.

by Safdar Ahmed

Published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, January 2012, 1-22.

In the nineteenth century, Muslim modernist reformers sought to ground an agenda for social and political rejuvenation... more In the nineteenth century, Muslim modernist reformers sought to ground an agenda for social and political rejuvenation in a return to the spirit of the early Muslim community. However, the influence of this quest for communal regeneration on theological discourses was, in some cases, less notable than its influence upon projects for cultural and social reform. One area of focus for Indian modernists of the nineteenth century was literature and the literary arts, including poetry, which were now deemed relevant to notions of cultural health, authenticity and decline. Under the dictum that a people's condition is reflected in their language, the themes of moral degeneration and reform came to have a strong bearing on the indigenous valuation of poetry and the literary arts, challenging the criteria upon which such literature was judged. In this paper, I will analyse how the modernist agenda for social reform led to the birth of a new literary romanticism in Urdu poetry.

Arrowsmith goes native: Medicine and empire in fiction and film (2000)

by Lisa Lynch

The Neo/Bio Colonial Hot Zone: African Viruses, American Fairytales (1998)

by Lisa Lynch

Colonialism

by József Böröcz

Co-authored with Mahua Sarkar. Published as an entry in the Sage Encyclopedia of Global Studies. 2012.

Mansfield Park reconsidered: pheasants, game laws, and the hidden critique of slavery

by Helena Kelly