British Colonial Realism In Africa

What role do objects play in realist narratives as they move between societies and their different systems of value as commodities, as charms, as gifts, as trophies, or as curses? This book explores how the struggle to represent objects in British colonial realism corresponded with historical struggles over the material world and its significance.

African Realism explains Africa’s international conflicts of the post-colonial era through international relations theory. It looks at the relationship between Africa’s domestic and international conflicts, as well as the impact of factors such as domestic legitimacy, trade, and regional economic institutions on African wars. Further, it examines the relevance of traditional realist assumptions (e.g. balance of power, the security dilemma) to African international wars and how these factors are modified by the exigencies of Africa’s domestic institutions, such as neopatrimonialism and inverted legitimacy. This study also addresses the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of international relations theory as it engages African international relations, and especially, its military history

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Why Europe Intervenes in Africa analyses the underlying causes of all European decisions for and against military interventions in conflicts in African states since the late 1980s. It focuses on the main European actors who have deployed troops in Africa: France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. When conflict occurs in Africa, the response of European actors is generally inaction. This can be explained in several ways: the absence of strategic and economic interests, the unwillingness of European leaders to become involved in conflicts in former colonies of other European states, and sometimes the Eurocentric assumption that conflict in Africa is a normal event which does not require intervention. When European actors do decide to intervene, it is primarily for motives of security and prestige, and not primarily for economic or humanitarian reasons. The weight of past relations with Africa can also be a driver for European military intervention, but the impact of that past is changing. This book offers a theory of European intervention based mainly on realist and post-colonial approaches. It refutes the assumptions of liberals and constructivists who posit that states and organisations intervene primarily in order to respect the principle of the 'responsibility to protect'.

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity’s displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis’s homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature’s defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger’s phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

Imperialism, Race and Resistance marks an important new development in the study of British and imperial interwar history. Focusing on Britain, West Africa and South Africa, Imperialism, Race and Resistance charts the growth of anti-colonial resistance and opposition to racism in the prelude to the 'post-colonial' era. The complex nature of imperial power in explored, as well as its impact on the lives and struggles of black men and women in Africa and the African diaspora. Barbara Bush argues that tensions between white dreams of power and black dreams of freedom were seminal in transofrming Britain's relationship with Africa in an era bounded by global war and shaped by ideological conflict.