Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery

Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery
Author: Ana Cristina Mendes
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031202864

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.

Decolonising the Literature Curriculum

Decolonising the Literature Curriculum
Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2022-03-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030912892

This book explores pedagogical approaches to decolonising the literature curriculum through a range of practical and theoretically-informed case studies. Although decolonising the curriculum has been widely discussed in the academe and the media, sustained examinations of pedagogies involved in decolonising the literature at university level are still lacking in English and related subjects. This book makes a crucial contribution to these evolving discussions, presenting current and critically engaged pedagogical scholarship on decolonising the literature curriculum. Offering a broad spectrum of accessible chapters authored by experienced national and international academics, the book is structured into two parts, Texts and Contexts, presenting case studies on decolonising the literature curriculum which range from the undergraduate classroom, university writing centres, through to the literary doctorate.

Decolonising Europe?

Decolonising Europe?
Author: Berny Sèbe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429639376

Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire offers a new paradigm to understand decolonisation in Europe by showing how it was fundamentally a fluid process of fluxes and refluxes involving not only transfers of populations, ideas, and sociocultural practices across continents but also complex intra-European dynamics at a time of political convergence following the Treaty of Rome. Decolonisation was neither a process of sudden, rapid changes to European cultures nor one of cultural inertia, but a development marked by fluidity, movement, and dynamism. Rather than being a static process where Europe’s (former) metropoles and their peoples ‘at home’ reacted to the end of empire ‘out there’, decolonisation translated into new realities for Europe’s cultures, societies, and politics as flows, ebbs, fluxes, and cultural refluxes reshaped both former colonies and former metropoles. The volume’s contributors set out a carefully crafted panorama of decolonisation’s sequels in European popular culture by means of in-depth studies of specific cases and media, analysing the interwoven meaning, momentum, memory, material culture, and migration patterns of the end of empire across eight major European countries. The revised meaning of ‘decolonisation’ that emerges will challenge scholars in several fields, and the panorama of new research in the book charts paths for new investigations. The question mark in the title asks not only how European cultures experienced the ‘end of empire’ but also the extent to which this is still a work in progress.

Degrowth Decolonization and Development

Degrowth Decolonization and Development
Author: Milica Kočović De Santo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031259459

Degrowth Decolonization and Development reveals common underlying cultural roots to the multiple current crises. It shows that culture is an essential sphere to initiate fundamental changes and solutions as it brings about transformative imaginaries on a theoretical, political and practical level. The book focusses on the interplay between culture and the environment, society and the economy. It provides a critique of concepts associated with the term “Development” and reveals knowledge and theories outside the comfort zone of the mainstream Western theoretical landscape, which will certainly be instrumental in the decolonization of both development theories and practices. The book convincingly reveals the large array of domains, which, when interpreted from a decolonization and Degrowth perspective, can be managed through logics of environmental justice, social equity and equality, and generate societally more desirable outcomes. The book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary global crises and features interdisciplinary analyses thereof through the lenses of cultural studies, critical development studies, political economy, eco-feminist political ecology, anthropology and sociology. Degrowth Decolonization and Development unveils the fundamental role of the dichotomies characterizing the Western modern development paradigm in shaping today’s actions, and especially the dichotomies of Global North and Global South, Centre and Periphery, Developed and Developing/Underdeveloped, Man and Nature. Degrowth Decolonization and Development addresses all researchers and activists interested in sustainability transformation and decolonization processes in Development studies. Degrowth Decolonization and Development is structured as a collection of seven original case studies. These are authored by researchers who met when presenting their work in Decolonization and Degrowth panels from the ISEE-ESEE-Degrowth Conference, Manchester, July 5-8, 2021, and the 8th International Degrowth Conference in The Hague, Netherlands, August 24-28, 2021. The concluding chapter proposes a synthesis identifying key concepts and steps in cultural change for the decolonization of the Western worldview towards “pluriverse” alternatives. The book traces future imaginaries for modelling future new systemic solutions and a needed radical change.

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.

The Process of International Legal Reproduction

The Process of International Legal Reproduction
Author: Rose Parfitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2019-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316515192

Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities

Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland

Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland
Author: Lynsey Black
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2022-08-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800436068

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter Leading scholars on Irish penal history and theory explore trends and debates that have surrounded patterns of punishment in Ireland since the formation of the State and foreground often absent perspectives in criminology and punishment.

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa
Author: Andrew W.M. Smith
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1911307746

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2021-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108924956

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2012-10-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0307829650

A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.