Essay from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: This essay details how colonialism unfolds in Africa and how post colonial writers and critics try to reverse the socio-economic imbalances and other resulting effects.
This book offers new perspectives on the history of exploitation in Africa by examining postcolonial misrule as a product of colonial exploitation. Political independence has not produced inclusive institutions, economic growth, or social stability for most Africans—it has merely transferred the benefits of exploitation from colonial Europe to a tiny African elite. Contributors investigate representations of colonial and postcolonial exploitation in literature and rhetoric, covering works from African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, and Bessie Head. It then moves to case studies, drawing lines between colonial subjugation and present-day challenges through essays on Mobutu’s Zaire, Nigerian politics, the Italian colonial fascist system, and more. Together, these essays look towards how African states may transform their institutions and rupture lingering colonial legacies.
This book examines a range of fiction and criticism as it pertains to colonialism, the North/South engagement and contemporary Third World politics.The Fiction of Imperialism attempts to promote dialogue between international relations and postcolonialism. It addresses the value of fiction to an understanding of the imperial relationship between the West and Asia and Africa. A wide range of fiction and criticism is examined as it pertains to colonialism, in North/South engagement and contemporary Third World politics.The book begins by contrasting the treatment of cross-cultural relations in political studies and literary texts. It then examines the personal as a metaphor for the political in fiction depicting the imperial connection between Britain and India. This is paired with an analysis of African literary texts which takes as its theme the relationship between culture and politics. The concluding chapters approach literature from the outside, considering its apparent silence on economics and realpolitik, and assessing the utility of postcolonial reconceptualization.-- Renewal of interest in imperialism and literary texts about imperialism-- Examines a range of fiction and criticism as it pertains to colonialism, the North/South engagement and contemporary Third World politics.-- First volume in a new series which deals with the differences between culture and politics as well as in ways of seeing and the sources that can be drawn on.
Taking a strikingly interdisciplinary and global approach, Postcolonialism Cross-Examined reflects on the current status of postcolonial studies and attempts to break through traditional boundaries, creating a truly comparative and genuinely global phenomenon. Drawing together the field of mainstream postcolonial studies with post-Soviet postcolonial studies and studies of the late Ottoman Empire, the contributors in this volume question many of the concepts and assumptions we have become accustomed to in postcolonial studies, creating a fresh new version of the field. The volume calls the merits of the field into question, investigating how postcolonial studies may have perpetuated and normalized colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers. The volume is the first to open a dialogue between three different areas of postcolonial scholarship that previously developed independently from one another: • the wide field of postcolonial studies working on European colonialism, • the growing field of post-Soviet postcolonial/post-imperial studies, • the still fledgling field of post-Ottoman postcolonial/post-imperial studies, supported by sideways glances at the multidirectional conditions of interaction in East Africa and the East and West Indies. Postcolonialism Cross-Examined looks at topics such as humanism, nationalism, multiculturalism, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene in order to piece together a new, broader vision for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. By including territories other than those covered by the postcolonial mainstream, the book strives to reframe the “postcolonial” as a genuinely global phenomenon and develop multidirectional postcolonial perspectives.
Decolonizing Colonial Development Models in Africa: A New Postcolonial Critique confronts colonial development models to decolonize methodologies, epistemologies, and the history and practice of development in postcolonial African societies and advocates for Afrocentric alternatives. By taking a critical approach and drawing on postcolonial, postmodern, post-developmental, and post-structural theories, the contributors identify and analyze the effects of global inequality, racism, white supremacy, crisis, climate change, increasing environmental insecurity, underdevelopment, chronic diseases, and the vulnerability of the postcolonial societies of the global South. Together, the collection calls for and theorizes a new direction of development that incorporates indigenous-Afrocentric alternatives.
Drawing together contributions from academics based in Africa and its diaspora, this work is unique in considering the situation and status of Africans globally. It explores a broad range of contemporary issues - from development and culture to linguistics - within the socio-political framework of Africa in the 21st century.
Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject African Studies - Linguistics, grade: 95, , language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the questions of language, intellectual and cultural decolonization in post colonial worlds. The concern with cultural decolonization hails from different academic spheres, and as well as different geographical settings that either experienced European colonialism like in Africa, Asia or, from geographies with masses who were subjected to a forceful removal and enslavement and subsequently ferried from their indigenous homelands to Europe or America. To decolonize culture in this context primarily means, to liberate language, identity, and the intellectual constellation of the colonized communities from the colonial experience that some/many believe to have suppressed and subjugated their cultural identities.
This book shows the many facets of African engagements with the world. It starts from the premise that current global asymmetries ascribing Africa to a marginalized position are the effects of colonial and imperial pasts still lingering on. The decolonization process of the post-war structure which privileges the West in both political and economic terms. While new dependencies emerged, several old bonds were maintained and continue to influence African affairs quite strikingly. It is appropriate, then, to call these continued unequal relations between Africa and the West frankly 'neo-colonial'. This designation applies all the more as the post-colonial states of Africa inherited a complex legacy of foreign rule – colonial frontiers, colonial languages, colonial infrastructure and authoritarian institutions, as well as the social intricacies and imbalances so characteristic of the 'colonial situation'. The contributions to this volume look at various aspects of these complex processes from intellectual history perspectives. The topics dealt with are manifold. Contributions deliberately attack key themes, ideas and discourses of an intellectual history of Africa ('state', 'modernity', 'development', 'dependency', 'art', etc.), and introduce important engaged public intellectuals from Africa and the African diaspora. What is Africa, and how is she related to the rest of the world? How can she overcome her internal problems and her external dependencies? – These are perennial questions critically tackled by Africans throughout the 20th century. Dealing with various cases looked at from a variety of perspectives, the contributions to this book offer original insights into the intellectual history of Africa.
The Crises of Postcoloniality in Africa is an assemblage of transdisciplinary essays that offer a spirited reflection on the debate and phenomenon of postcoloniality in Africa, including the changing patterns and ramifications of problems, challenges and opportunities associated with it. A key conceptual rhythm that runs through the various chapters of the book is that, far from being demised, postcoloniality is still firmly embedded in Africa, manifesting itself in both blatant and insidious forms. Among the important themes covered in the book include the concepts of postcolonialism, postcoloniality, and neocolonialism; Africa’s precolonial formations and the impact of colonialism; the enduring patterns of colonial legacies in Africa; the persistent contradictions between African indigenous institutions and western versions of modernity; the unravelling of the postcolonial state and issues of armed conflict, conflict intervention and peacebuilding; postcolonial imperialism in Africa and the US-led global war on terror, the historical and postcolonial contexts of gender relations in Africa, as well as pan-Africanism and regionalist approaches to redressing the crises of postcoloniality.
Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ngũgĩ continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey’s comprehensive study concentrates on Ngũgĩ’s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ngũgĩ’s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ngũgĩ’s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ngũgĩ’s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.
