Imagining a Postcolonial Nation

Imagining a Postcolonial Nation
Author: Yamini,
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9356400261

This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s–80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualisation of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalised fictional parallels and alternatives to it. Analysing processes of nation-formation and nationalism(s) via experiments with the novel form and versions of realism in Hindi, conversations between the political and the cultural, rural/borders and the urban/central spaces, individual subjectivity and social structures, and the challenges Hindi novels' internal linguistic diversity poses to formalised Hindi's hegemony, Imagining a Postcolonial Nation: Hindi Novels and Forms of India (1940s–80s) traces Hindi fiction's history of postcolonial India. The multiplicity of realisms indicates significant responses to postcolonial nationalism, idealistic, critical, regional, satirical and psychological. Looking at indigenous narrative methods employed by authors to critically evolve Western ideas of the nation and novel, the book explores the simultaneous convergences and divergences between literary and political understandings of ideological, religious and linguistic nationalisms. Surveying the broad sentiments of idealism, enchantment and disenchantment with freedom and postcoloniality, it studies the possibilities of fiction embodying national history without an outright commitment to mainstream nationalism or nationalist literary canon formation. It also briefly tries to understand the repercussions of nationalism as a masculinist project and its gendered nature affecting a section of writing, novels by women authors, to present counter-narratives to both national and literary canons. Choosing a fairly broad historical timeframe, the book reveals the radical potential of narratives that have over the years been critically categorised as canonical. It reopens discussions around nationalism within novels that have been often canonised as apparently uncritically nationalist.

Imagining a Nation

Imagining a Nation
Author: Ruramisai Charumbira
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813938236

In Imagining a Nation, Ruramisai Charumbira analyzes competing narratives of the founding of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe constructed by political and cultural nationalists both black and white since occupation in 1890. The book uses a wide array of sources—including archives, oral histories, and a national monument—to explore the birth of the racialized national memories and parallel identities that were in vigorous contention as memory sought to present itself as history. In contrast with current global politics plagued by divisions of outsider and insider, patriot and traitor, Charumbira invites the reader into the liminal spaces of the region’s history and questions the centrality of the nation-state in understanding African or postcolonial history today. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Charumbira offers a series of case studies, bringing in characters from far-flung places to show that history and memory in and of one small place can have a far-reaching impact in the wider world. The questions raised by these stories go beyond the history of colonized or colonizer in one former colony to illuminate contemporary vexations about what it means to be a citizen, patriot, or member of a nation in an ever-globalizing world. Rather than a history of how the rulers of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe marshaled state power to force citizens to accept a single definition of national memory and identity, Imagining a Nation shows how ordinary people invested in the soft power of individual, social, and collective memories to create and perpetuate exclusionary national myths. Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities
Author: Benedict Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2006-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 178168359X

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

The Nation and Its Fragments

The Nation and Its Fragments
Author: Partha Chatterjee
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691201420

In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere. While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.

Imagining the Cape Colony

Imagining the Cape Colony
Author: David Johnson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2011-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748650873

This volume explores how the Cape Colony was imagined as a political community by considering a variety of writers, from major European literati and intellectuals (Camoes, Southey, Rousseau, Adam Smith), to well-known travel writers like Francois Levaillant and Lady Anne Barnard, to figures on the margins of colonial histories, like settler rebels, slaves and early African nationalists. Complementing the analyses of these primary texts are discussions of the many subsequent literary works and histories of the Cape Colony.

Imagining the Postcolonial

Imagining the Postcolonial
Author: Jaime Hanneken
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438456212

A comparative study of Latin American and francophone postcoloniality. Imagining the Postcolonial is the first book dedicated to comparative analysis of Latin American and francophone postcolonial identity. Jaime Hanneken examines the disciplinary, theoretical, and political stakes involved in postcolonial identification in non-anglophone cultural spheres through readings of José Lezama Lima and Édouard Glissant’s poetics of place, the symbolic value of Paris in modernista writing and in Congolese Sociétés des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes (sape) rituals, and the scandals surrounding Rigoberta Menchú and Yambo Ouologuem. Hanneken argues that reorienting comparative critique to the priority of the object of study can transform rather than replicate existing conceptual formats of postcoloniality.

Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism

Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism
Author: Helen Kapstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-07-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1783486473

Considers how real island spaces have been used in literary texts and the popular imagination to shore up the fiction of the nation in order to offer a new theory of postcolonial nationalism.

Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination

Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination
Author: Silke Stroh
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810134047

Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.” Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands, which also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. Silke Stroh shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism.

The Postcolonial Turn

The Postcolonial Turn
Author: Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9956726656

This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local people's own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts. The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include the Whelan Research Academy, rap musicians, political leaders, wise men and women, healers, Sacred Spirit churches, diviners, bards and weavers who are deemed proficient in the classical African geometrical knowledge. As a tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed real commitment to decolonise social sciences from western-centred modernist development theories, commentators of his work pinpoint how these theories sought to dismiss the active role played by African people in their quest for self-emancipation. One of the central questions addressed by the book concerns the role of an anthropologist and this issue is debated against the background of the academic lecture delivered by René Devisch when receiving an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical but constructive comments from such seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate anthropological knowledge on account that the anthropologist, notwithstanding his or her social and cognitive empathy and intense communication with the host community, too often fails to also question her own world and intellectual habitus from the standpoint of her hosts. Leading anthropologists carry further into great depth the bifocal anthropological endeavour focussing on local people's re-imagining and re-connecting the local and global. The book is of interest to a wide readership in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy and the history of the African continent and its relation with the North.

Designing (Post)Colonial Knowledge

Designing (Post)Colonial Knowledge
Author: Priya Jha
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000369226

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs. At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.