Postcolonial Criticism

Combining key insights from aesthetic theory and various postcolonial critiques, this research looks into the aesthetics of revolt. Taking the recent and exceptional sequences of revolts in Tunisia as a case study and thus starting from an extensive and unique fieldwork, it follows the aesthetic turn in political science and wants to contribute to the further development of an epistemologically more self-conscious and recognizable academic field of study that engages with aesthetics, politics and revolt in the region, the continent and beyond in the Global South. By unraveling contrapuntally the complex entanglement of processes concerning the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics, revolting senses show how state aesthetics are always historically formed and how the sensible, or that what can be seen, imagined or embodied, is consequently shared, divided and distributed, but also how accumulated aesthetic agency can question and possibly alter this shared distribution in times of revolt. Attention is directed on the aesthetics of revolt, especially on the visible and corporeal or embodied qualities of sense experience. This study apprehends revolt in a phenomenological way as a lived, embodied and visual experience and thus as a process of diversion or reappropriation of spectacular power. It contends that revolt has the potential to alter a given police order, its properties of space and possibilities of time, to re-determine the distribution of the roles and modes of participation, its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and thus to restructure the shared division of the sensible. Nevertheless, the often too precipitated contentions that the moving body politic would have radically altered the order of the sensible, during the latest sequences of revolt in Tunisia, is altogether tempered. This dissertation points at the intricacies that accompany the processes of revolt against a firmly seated police order, especially the difficulty of creating different conditions of intelligibility and possibility that entail a fundamental transformation of what appears to sense experiences. These particular intricacies could somehow have been foreseen as aesthetics was explicitly grasped as a historically formed contrapuntal ensemble or as an all-encompassing realm that is made of different intermeshed, overlapping, and mutually embedded histories traversed by a colonial divide.

This article is a Postcolonial study about season of Migration to the North a novel written by Tayyeb Salih (the renowned Sudanese writer). The novel, season of migration to the north, is the most famous postcolonial Arabic novel which has caught the attention of so many literary critics including Edward Sa’eed, the Palestinian-American literary theoretician, and even in 2001, the academy of Arabic literature in Damascus named it as the best Arabic novel in the twentieth century.
A noticeable part of this research has been allocated to analysis of postcolonial concepts of the novel such as ego/other (core/periphery), hybridity, eurocentrism, and gender. It is worth noting that analysis of ego/other (core/periphery), in addition to text of the novel, includes some paratext elements like title and cover design.  The primary outcome achieved from this composition is that the novel Season of Migration to the North, projecting a vivid objective image of economical and sociological position of Sudan and its intellectuals’ crisis in postcolonial period gained an elevated status among other similar Arabic novels.

Drawing from the work of feminists and queer advocates, this paper posits that insights can be gained from the contestations in feminist and queer theory and practice. Building on the work of third world/postcolonial feminists and queer activists, the paper agrees that strategies for transnational alliances need to be nuanced and intersectional, admitting ‘contextual multiplicity of queer subjects ’ and reflective of hierarchies of power and colonial history. The paper agrees that such strategies recognize the autonomy and agency of the local, and instead of prescribing and imposing, proceeds through dialogue and solidarity in processes of translation and vernacularization in contesting homophobia and sexism.

This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reality that remains unable to be demarcated, this article examines the generative principles of Sikh practices and concepts that both structure Sikhism's institutions and productively conceptualize this antagonism. Examining these concepts and practices, I consider the possibility of different modes of both historical being and becoming not bound within our current conceptual rubrics. These different possibilities culled through Sikh concepts and theories demand we reflect upon the rabble: those unable to be contained within colonial civil society or within attempts by the colonized for self‐determination in political societies. This void then fractured Sikh reform organizations historically, providing multiple avenues for politics unaccountable within our bifurcated and asymmetrical understandings of civil society and political societies and colonizer and colonized.

Various mass media products, even those that are expected to disseminate reality, have become sources of images and imaginaries of various groups, ethnicities, genders, and cultures. Environmental documentaries, which are supposedly based on accurate information, still use portrayals or representations that were forged by ideologies and social structures dominating the society in which they are produced. Employing a postcolonial framework, this paper discusses the portrayal of indigenous peoples in Philippine environmental documentaries—specifically, in GMA Network’s “Signos,” “Planet Philippines,” “Wildlife for Sale,” and “Oras Na.” Through a textual analysis on the documentaries’ narratives, visual elements, and “mise-en-scène,” it has been found that indigenous peoples have been portrayed according to the colonial tropes of infantilization, animalization, and poverty. Overall, “othering” is still prevalent in these environmental documentaries.

Available in: https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/imaging-the-indigenous-in-philippine-environmental-documentaries

Post-colonialism, as a body of theory, reveals the continuous effects and outcomes of colonization. It is a counter-discourse which puts forth the inextricable relationships between European nations and the societies they have colonized. As a case in point, the post-colonial theory aims at examining such philosophical, yet sensitive, issues as the problematic of difference, identity, hybridity, historical objectivity, etc. This paper seeks to examine the extent to which the three novels: Surfacing, Fire on the Mountain and Things Fall Apart are representative of the problematic of Post-colonialism, and to cast light on the limitations and strengths of Post-colonialism in these three novels. What draws these three novels together perhaps is the foregone conclusion that all of them are set in post-colonial countries, namely, Canada (Surfacing), India (Fire on the Mountain), and Nigeria (Things Fall Apart) which were all formerly colonized by Britain. This paper is organized in terms of four parts; the first three parts are going to be devoted to the analysis of the three novels in the order mentioned above. The last part, however, is going to establish a comparative approach in studying the similarities and differences of the three novels in terms of how they are representative of the problematic of Post-colonialism.

Resumo: Observamos a sociedade barroca em Minas Gerais delineada pelo choque dos múltiplos modelos simbólicos, dos conflitos cotidianos e pela violência colonial socialmente reconhecida. Neste instável universo em equilíbrio dinâmico entre movimentos de tensão e repouso, observamos uma lingüística musical marcada por desvios aos procedimentos do cânone europeu. Acreditamos que, diferentemente de distrações técnicas ou concepções estilísticas turvas, as divergências observadas representam estratégias simbólicas, no âmbito lingüístico, ao reconhecimento e racionalização de um universo em instável equilíbrio. A universe in unstable balance: strain and rest in the musical linguistic of the baroque from minas gerais Abstract: We look at the baroque society of Minas Gerais outlined by the shock of the multiple symbolic models, the daily conflicts and the social recognized violence of the colonial enterprise. In this unstable universe in dynamic balance between movements of strain and rest, we see an musical linguistic marked by deviations in the procedures of european canon. We believe that, differently from technical distractions or cloudy stylistics conceptions, the divergences observed represents symbolic strategies, in the linguistic field, toward the recognition and rationalization of this universe in unstable balance.

The film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) reflects some of the typical consequences of both colonization and decolonization and one of its most important themes is the portrayal of illicit trafficking in organs of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The aim of this paper is to present and examine different aspects of otherness, depicted in this film and show the role of the body and the dominant body politics related to those aspects of otherness such as gender, race and ethnicity. The methods used in this paper to discuss the film are generalisation and the analysis of gathered information (e.g. mise-en-scene). The entire film is observed through the prism of postcolonial critique, taking into consideration its crucial elements and topics such as Orientalism, sexual exploitation, body exploitation (in terms of, say, organ trafficking or for cheap labour) and double colonization, while the 'double imaginary' and 'heterotopia' also play an important role in the analysis of selected scenes. Otherness and its aspects are crucial for the unveiling of the elements of postcolonial critique depicted in this film, while the body of ‘the other’ is just another currency in the global capitalist system. Human body, especially female body is just another commodity and instrument of trade in the free market of liberal capitalism.

This is the introduction to my PhD thesis, "The Violence of Legitimacy: Democracy, Power, Antagonism", in which I offer a deconstructive reading of the violence-legitimacy 'couple' in the context of democratic theory and International Relations theory.

On the basis of my reading of Derrida, I propose new interpretative models in order to understand the violence consubstantial with democratic power, without falling in the traps of ideology and legitimacy. In other words: how may we criticise democratic violence without repeating the self-legitimating discourses and categories which have been imposed on us through dispositives of power or structures of domination? How may we 'invent' something, something truly different? And what conception of democratic legitimacy could help us think something like a properly democratic 'event' — beyond power, antagonism, and performativity? and, maybe, beyond legitimacy?

My starting point is to analyse and deconstruct the concept of legitimacy — first through a historical overview and a reflection in conceptual terms, then through a reading of its most famous theoretician, Max Weber. This leads me to reflect on the conditions of possibility of legitimacy, which inseparably binds it to violence and conflictuality. I then discuss agonistic theories of democracy (Connolly, Laclau & Mouffe, Honig, Balibar), because they offer an intricate articulation of democratic legitimacy with conflictuality. But do they actually define violence and antagonism in the context of democracy? On these premises, I try to conceive a more originary articulation between violence of legitimacy by clarifying Derrida's notions of 'economy of violence' and 'arche-violence'. Finally, after introducing to my following chapters, I analyse the notion of 'critique' in its articulation to power and violence: this involves a discussion of Weber and Balibar's characterisation of democratic politics as a 'tragic' negotiation with its own violence.

My essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern/ist assumptions in contemporary Anglophone Indian literary-critical discourse. Its chief aim is to call for and contribute towards rupturing this modernist hegemonic. The essay identifies the major traits of the critical consensus and then discusses its harmful effect on Anglophone Indian literary studies. First, in the hope to persuade that such a consensus indeed exists and second to encourage a fresh re-examining of the terms of debate that currently monopolize Anglophone Indian literary studies. The latter task, it suggests, is not just desirable but urgent.

In a recent paper on 1 Peter, David Horrell has argued that the long-running “Balch–Elliott debate” regarding the stance the author takes toward the values and ethos of his readers’s pagan social environment needs to be focussed more deliberately on the particularities of the imperial context and the shape that it gave to the power-structures within which the letter’s readers were required to relate to their social environment.
In this chapter, I argue that another crucial particularity of the text that needs to be taken into account is the tradition of understanding within the author encourages his readers to interpret that imperial power and their relation to it.
With those two considerations in mind, this chapter examines the ways in which the author’s use of OT traditions contributes to the stance that he urges his readers to take toward the imperial dynamics of fear, patronage, and honor that shaped their socio-political context, concluding that both the socially “conformist” and the socially “resistant” dimensions of the letter’s injunctions are expressed in terms of scriptural categories and grounded in scriptural patterns of judgement.

Poco a poco va ganando fuerza la necesidad de entender y estudiar los procesos coloniales en la Antigüedad desde una perspectiva que vaya más allá de las teorías aculturacionistas, lo que conlleva la necesidad de emplear enfoques teóricos como el postcolonialismo, en lo referente a las interacciones que se produjeron durante los contactos que pueblos, como griegos o romanos, mantuvieron con muchas de las sociedades con las que tuvieron contacto, a través de los diversos asentamientos que en aquellas regiones se establecieron desde época temprana.

Los procesos de construcción identitaria pueden, así, ponerse en relación con los conflictos inherentes a los desarrollos de sociedades coloniales, expresados muchas veces a través de cultos, ritos y mitos. Cualquier tipo de encuentro cultural representa un proceso complejo, a todos los niveles, entre grupos sociales, que debe abordarse lejos de las teorías basadas en la influencia unidireccional que, por este motivo, tienden a realizar un nivel de análisis superficial donde muchas facetas de interrelación se dejan de lado o se niegan, pero de las cuales tenemos noticias gracias a las fuentes clásicas y arqueológicas. Es necesario intentar ahondar en el punto de vista de los colonizados, en la medida en que ello nos sea posible (Loomba, 1998), dado que es lógico pensar en la existencia de una transferencia multilateral de ideas, costumbres, etc., entre los sujetos que mantuvieron un tipo de contacto prolongado o, al menos, regular, sin que tengamos que entender a los colonizados como meros receptores pasivos.

La teoría postcolonial ha surgido con fuerza para afrontar esa nueva concepción de los procesos de interacción cultural; sin embargo, ¿se ha logrado abandonar por completo las reminiscencias relacionadas con el marco conceptual de la sociedad que intenta definir al “Otro”? ¿Podemos emplear términos como aculturación a la hora de definir un proceso colonial sin que ellos mismos conlleven cierta carga ideológica? No es mi intención dar respuesta aquí a preguntas tan importantes y que, aún hoy, generan un intenso debate, sino sólo exponer el proceso de surgimiento de la teoría postcolonial como un nuevo enfoque teórico surgido de una realidad contemporánea y aplicado a procesos de interacción cultural colonial en diversas épocas.