Cultures of decolonisation

Cultures of decolonisation
Author: Ruth Craggs
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1784996246

Cultures of decolonisation combines studies of visual, literary and material cultures in order to explore the complexities of the ‘end of empire’ as a process. Where other accounts focus on high politics and constitutional reform, this volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures contributed to wider political, economic and social change. This book demonstrates the transnational character of decolonisation, thereby illustrating the value of comparison – between different cultural forms and diverse places – in understanding the nature of this wide-reaching geopolitical change. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art and interior design, alongside institutions such as artists’ groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint, across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe. Offering a range of disciplinary perspectives, these contributions provide revealing case studies for those researching decolonisation across the humanities and social sciences.

Against Decolonisation

Against Decolonisation
Author: Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1787388859

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora
Author: Tina K Ramnarine
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000766535

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora provides fascinating examples of dance and music projects across the Indian Diaspora to highlight that decolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. The book analyses creative processes in decolonising projects, illustrating how dance and music across the Indian Diaspora articulate socio-political aspirations in the wake of thinkers such as Gandhi and Ambedkar. It presents a wide range of examples: post-apartheid practices and experiences in a South African dance company, contestations over national identity politics in Trinidadian music competitions, essentialist and assimilationist strategies in a British dance competition, the new musical creativity of second-generation British-Tamil performers, Indian classical dance projects of reform and British multiculturalism, feminist intercultural performances in Australia, and performance re-enactments of museum exhibits that critically examine the past. Key topics under discussion include postcolonial contestations, decolonising scholarship, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The book critically reflects on decolonising aims around respect, equality and the colonial past’s redress as expressed through performing arts projects. Presenting richly detailed case studies that underline the need to examine creative processes in the cultures of decolonisation, Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performing Arts Studies and Anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Decolonising the Mind

Decolonising the Mind
Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 126
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0852555016

Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu.

Decolonizing Methodologies

Decolonizing Methodologies
Author: Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1848139527

'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

Decolonizing "prehistory"

Decolonizing
Author: Gesa Mackenthun
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9780816542291

Decolonizing "Prehistory"critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern historical-archaeological scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume empowers Indigenous voices and offers a nuanced understanding of the American deep past.

The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization

The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization
Author: Ron Eyerman
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030270254

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes, but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts, but fail in others.

The Decolonization of Imagination

The Decolonization of Imagination
Author: Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Publisher:
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1995
Genre: Decolonization
ISBN:

The Decolonization of Imagination paves the way for a truly global cultural politics. Acknowledging that both the West and the former colonized have been shaped by colonial imaginaries, the book explores a wide range of cultural decolonization strategies. A distinguished cast of contributors, from both North and South, looks at the relations between culture and power, domination and the imagination in a variety of contexts. This important contribution to post-colonial theory will be essential reading for all students and academics in cultural studies, literary studies, political and social theory and development studies.

Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain

Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain
Author: Anandi Ramamurthy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429685599

First published in 2006, this volume provides the first in-depth analysis of the place of visual representations within the process of decolonisation during the period 1945 to 1970. The chapters trace the way in which different visual genres – art, film, advertising, photography, news reports and ephemera – represented and contributed to the political and social struggles over Empire and decolonisation during the mid-Twentieth century. The book examines both the direct visual representation of imperial retreat after 1945 as well as the reworkings of imperial and ‘racial’ ideologies within the context of a transformed imperialism. While the book engages with the dominant archive of artists, exhibitions, newsreels and films, it also explores the private images of the family album as well as examining the visual culture of anti-colonial resistance.

DEcolonial Heritage

DEcolonial Heritage
Author: Aníbal Arregui
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3830987900

The volume attempts to triangulate three vibrant discourses of our times: It combines postcolonial and decolonial readings of cultural conflicts with assessments of ecological dimensions of those conflicts, as well as their significance within discourses on natural and cultural world heritage. The examples from four continents range from the medieval Middle East - already shaken by a convergence of ecological and social disaster - to modern imaginary constructions of medieval Vikings, the persistence of Indigenous knowledge in the Arctic, literary poetics of patrimony, and the heritage politics of Mediterranean urban architecture. Authors ask which strategies societies in developing countries use to defend their cultural and ecological uniqueness and integrity while being penetrated by environmental hazards and hegemonizing 'Western' forms of heritage culture; or how western societies construct their own past in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of traditional imaginations of a pre-modern past, petrified eternally in an 'ideal' moment of time. Colonial and historical forms of 'heritagization' of human and non-human environments, the essays show, answer to pressing emotional needs for a sense of stability. But the desire for nostalgia, frequently commodified, tends to collide with the similarly pressing need for political and economic survival in a rapidly changing world and in the face of accelerating extraction practices. Without being able to solve this dilemma, the volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to taking intellectual stake of the asymmetrical politics and poetics of heritage and collective cultural memory.