Colonialism And Cultural Identity

This book examines the diverse responses of colonized people to metropolitan ideas and to indigenous traditions. Going beyond the standard isolation of mimeticism and hybridity—and criticizing Homi Bhabha's influential treatment of the former—Hogan offers a lucid, usable theoretical structure for analysis of the postcolonial phenomena, with ramifications extending beyond postcolonial literature. Developing this structure in relation to major texts by Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Chinua Achebe, Earl Lovelace, Buchi Emecheta, Rabindranath Tagore, and Attia Hosain, Hogan also provides crucial cultural background for understanding these and other works from the same traditions.

Canada has never had an “Indian problem”— but it does have a Settler problem. But what does it mean to be Settler? And why does it matter? Through an engaging, and sometimes enraging, look at the relationships between Canada and Indigenous nations, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada explains what it means to be Settler and argues that accepting this identity is an important first step towards changing those relationships. Being Settler means understanding that Canada is deeply entangled in the violence of colonialism, and that this colonialism and pervasive violence continue to define contemporary political, economic and cultural life in Canada. It also means accepting our responsibility to struggle for change. Settler offers important ways forward — ways to decolonize relationships between Settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples — so that we can find new ways of being on the land, together. This book presents a serious challenge. It offers no easy road, and lets no one off the hook. It will unsettle, but only to help Settler people find a pathway for transformative change, one that prepares us to imagine and move towards just and beneficial relationships with Indigenous nations. And this way forward may mean leaving much of what we know as Canada behind.

Explores diverse cultural identities, both theoretically and through concrete, specific interpretations of selected major texts from former British colonies.

How do foreign schemas and objects enter into indigenous ways of understanding the world? How are the cultural self and the cultural other constructed in acts of remembering? What is memory's role in the generation or degeneration of cultural meanings? In contemporary Pacific societies these questions are not merely the subject of scholarly debate but speak to pressing life concerns. This volume offers fruitful responses to such questions, providing insights into colonial memory and its limitations and proposing explanations that illumine cultural memory processes. These processes, in turn, elucidate ways of authoring cultural history and shed light on cultural identity, which, like other forms of identity, is built from a remembered self. Contributors explore valorizations of certain aspects of the remembered past, amnesias about other aspects. Both are part of the rhetoric of colonizing cultures and of cultural identity and nationhood in many contemporary Pacific societies. The provocative analyses and responses offered here are both academic and personal: close engagement with individuals and their ways of life is evident. These are at once intellectual journeys through the colonial landscapes of Pacific memory and attempts to understand the problems of politics and personhood, cultural identity and meaning, for real people in real places. Cultural Memory confronts many of the most central anthropological issues of our time.

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Italy’s colonial past was a largely neglected topic in historical studies. Before then, only a handful of historians had shown any inclination for rescuing it from the dusty shelves of history, to which it had been relegated. With a few exceptions – most notably Angelo Del Boca – not many had the courage to venture into such treacherous territory. Colonial studies experienced a resurgence at the start of the new millennium, with remarkable progress in the quantity and quality of research, along with the wider public’s newfound interest, as evidenced by an important conference held in Milan in 2006 and the large audience it attracted. This book addresses the relationship between national identity and colonial culture in Italy. The centrality of the construction of Otherness in the identity formation of the colonizer has been extensively reported, both in Europe and elsewhere, and the relevance of colonial heritage has also been attested. In Italy, however, this relationship has been neglected in existing historiography, and the colonial experience has traditionally been side-lined and marginalized. This volume is divided into several sections, each organized around an underlying theme. Within each theme, a broad array of topics and methodologies reflect the authors’ approach in analysing the role of colonialism in the process of Italian identity formation. The rather heterogeneous works contained in this book, which attest the vitality and complexity of the debate on Italian colonialism, are clustered around one central theme: the reconstruction of un-comfortable memories, and a past that will not pass – which overlap the challenging present circumstances of rigidity, racism and rejection. As such, this book is a work of critical reflection, assembled using varied resources and scientific tools in order to shed light on a common past that is still so near and vivid in the minds of Italians, but at the same time so denied, distorted and forgotten in the collective memory.

A widespread and still contemporary political phenomenon that exercises a profound effect on societies, settler colonialism structures relationships both historically and culturally diverse. This book assesses the distinctive feature of settler colonialism, and discusses its political, sociological, economic and cultural consequences.