The Postcolonial Subject

This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing, as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas that seek to govern it. Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, postcolonial theory, and political theory.

Regarded as «Cuba's most mysterious poet», Juan Francisco Manzano continues to intrigue scholars across disciplines. Using a postcolonial approach, this book breaks new ground by exploring the poet's connection with the Irish civil rights champion, Richard Robert Madden. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Gera C. Burton takes a fresh look at the relationship between these two extraordinary individuals to reveal facts considered critical in achieving an understanding of their association, with particular resonance for postcolonial studies. What emerges, regardless of their ambivalence, is the creation of a strategic alliance forged by the two writers in opposition to the colonial powers. Scholars in the fields of Latin American, postcolonial, and Diasporic studies, along with specialists in Cuban and Irish studies will welcome this significant contribution to the body of work on «la gente sin historia» - the people without a history.

In Subjectivity, Language and the Postcolonial, Hannah Botsis draws on theoretical work that exists at the intersection of critical social psychology, sociolinguistics and the political economy of language, to examine the relationships between language, subjectivity, materiality and political context. The book foregrounds the ways in which the work of Bourdieu could be read in conjunction with ‘poststructural’ theorists such as Butler and Derrida to offer a critical understanding of subjectivity, language and power in postcolonial contexts. This critical engagement with theorists traditionally from outside of psychology allows for a situated approach to understanding the embodied and symbolic possibilities and constraints for the postcolonial subject. This exploration opens up how micro-politics of power are refracted through ideological categories such as language, race and class in post-apartheid South Africa. Also drawing on the empirical findings of original research undertaken in the South African context on students’ linguistic biographies, the book offers a unique perspective – critical social theory is brought to bear on the empirical linguistic biographies of postcolonial subjects, offering insight into how power is negotiated in the postcolonial symbolic economy. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses including social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology, politics, and education, this is an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike.

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.

'Postcolonial Subjects' is a collective project centered on questions of language, identity, and voice as they engage issues of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and nation. The critical essays presented here focus on the literary contributions of contemporary women writing in French whose cultural ties, ethnic identities, and historical roots lie beyond the Hexagon, beyond the six-sided map of France.

Focusing on the contributions of Frantz Fanon's writing to the construction of a theory of the postcolonial subject, this book engages post-structuralist discussions on subjectivity and explores the most important readings and discussions of Fanon's work. Problems such as historicity, contingency, and the positions of the subject in postcolonial contexts receive special attention together with phenomenological approaches to Fanonian writing. The central idea is to give Fanon a privileged place in social, political, and cultural analysis. The objectives of the book are to insert Fanon’s texts in contemporary critical theory on modernity and coloniality and to incorporate Fanon in the epistemological and conceptual context of the academy. This innovative work allows us to understand Fanon’s writing as key to linking the experiences and critical developments between the global south and the global north.

The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine: Affective, Postcolonial Histories Postcolonial Desires Religious Imaginings Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.

This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing, as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas that seek to govern it. Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, postcolonial theory, and political theory.