Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse

Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse
Author: Christoph Schubert
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-06-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443896853

In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.

Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory

Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory
Author: Francis Barker
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719048760

This book on post-colonial theory has a wide geographic range and a breadth of historical perspectives. Central to the book is a critique of the very idea of the 'postcolonial' itself.

Offers and Offer Refusals

Offers and Offer Refusals
Author: Eric A. Anchimbe
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263280

This study offers a pragmatic dimension to World Englishes research. It is particularly timely because pragmatics has generally been understudied in past research on World Englishes, especially postcolonial Englishes. Apart from drawing attention to the paucity of research, the book also contributes to theory formation on the emerging theoretical framework, postcolonial pragmatics, which is then applied to data from two World (postcolonial) Englishes, Ghanaian and Cameroon Englishes. The copious examples used clearly illustrate how postcolonial societies realise various pragmatic phenomena, in this case offers and offer refusals, and how these could be fruitfully explained using an analytical framework designed on the complex internal set ups of these societies. For research on social interaction in these societies to be representative, it has to take into account the complex history of their evolution, contact with other systems during colonialism, and the heritages thereof. This book does just that.

What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say

What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say
Author: Anna Bernard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113509618X

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics

Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics
Author: Daniel Schmidt-Brücken
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110434024

Research in Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics has experienced a significant increase in contributions from varying fields of language studies, gaining the attention of scholars from all over the world. This volume aims to showcase the variety of topics relevant to the study of language(s) in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. A main reason of this variety is that the new paradigm invites and necessitates research on different subject matters such as language typology, grammar and cross-linguistics, meta-linguistics and research on language ideology, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The contributions of this volume are selected, peer-reviewed papers which were partly invited and partly given at the First Bremen Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, held in September 2013.

Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory

Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory
Author: Patrick Williams
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 1994
Genre: Colonies
ISBN: 0231100205

Provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The many contributors include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Anthony Giddens, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and bell hooks.

The Politics of Language in Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses

The Politics of Language in Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses
Author: Elena Agathokleous
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 10
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3346395545

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: In this essay the various ways through which colonials imposed imperial languages are presented followed by examples of how postcolonial responses on the issue of language might have varied but shared the goal of declaring resistance and reclaiming indigenous identities. In colonial and postcolonial discourse, language has a central role since language has the power to shape people’s perception of the world. Language was used during colonization as a tool which could influence knowledge and understanding in many significant aspects of life such as politics, economics and social environment. However, language has been used by both colonials as a means for establishing their domination but also by post-colonial individuals in order to reclaim their cultural identities after emancipation.

Order and Partialities

Order and Partialities
Author: Kostas Myrsiades
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1995-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438414048

Order and Partialities explores the complex and problematic relations among postcolonial literatures and theories, the people who teach them at the university level, and the institutions in which they are taught. Each essay traces a path through these relations; yet each also comments on the fundamental paradox and contradiction within which these relations operate: that they must engage with the powerful, labyrinthine apparatus of Western cultural hegemony—a set of systematic, interpretative procedures corresponding to, and in service of, a regime of ideological expectations and its institutional representatives—in order to disengage themselves from its operations. There is no way to teach these relations without entering, oneself, into the entanglements of postcolonial power.

Navigating Modernity

Navigating Modernity
Author: Albert J. Paolini
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1999
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781555878757

"Paolini is concerned with the connections among postcolonialism, globalization, and modernity, and he offers one of the first detailed statements of those connections to be undertaken in the field of IR. Focusing on the Third World, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, he questions dominant notions of identity and subjectivity in the social sciences."--BOOK JACKET.

Postcolonialism Cross-Examined

Postcolonialism Cross-Examined
Author: Monika Albrecht
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-06-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000007820

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.