Akin House Curriculum Development and Living History Programming

This unit plan is comprised of a variety of inquiry-based lessons that explore the culture and way of life of the Native Americans who occupied New England. After studying the Akin house documents, materials, and narratives, I chose to focus my unit on the land and the people who came before the Akin family so that students will learn the long-view of our rich New England history

Colonial Figures: Memories of Street Traders in the Colonial and Early Post-colonial Periods

This article explores post-colonial memories about street traders among individuals who lived in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies. It argues that these narratives romanticize the relationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Street vendors are also used to differentiate between periods within colonial and post-colonial history. The nostalgic representation of interracial contact between Europeans and traders is contrasted with representations of other figures such as the Japanese and the nationalist. A recurring feature of these representations is the ability of Europeans to speak with street traders and imagine what they wanted and needed. The traders are remembered as a social type that transgressed politics and represented the neutrality of the economic sphere as a place for shared communication. The article concludes that the figure of the street vendor contributes to the nostalgic reinvention of the colony but is also used in narratives to differentiate between and mark changes across the colonial and post-colonial periods

‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous 'Other' (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on 'race' or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite

Curls, Kinks and Colonization: The Decolonization of Afrodescendant Women’s Bodies in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

This paper documents the experiences of Afrodescendant women in the Dominican Republic who choose to wear their hair naturally curly, despite the norm to straighten it. I argue that Afrodescendant Dominican women are decolonizing racial and gendered discourses of the Afrodescendant body through their pursuit of beauty, blackness, health and self-definition. I draw on Ana Irma Rivera Lassén\u27s allegory of the spiderweb to suggest that my informants are the spiders of their webs, weaving the discourses of the Afrodescendant female body into a web in which they are free to move in/through their multiple identities and find empowerment

In the Shadow of a Willow Tree: A Community Garden Experiment in Decolonising, Multispecies Research

In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world

Goan Literature from Peter Nazareth: An Interview

Peter Nazareth is an associate professor in the English Department and the Afro american Studies Program at the University of Iowa. His job includes being an advisor to the International Writing Program, which brings published writers from thirty to forty countries to Iowa City each fall. During the fall of 1984, he accompanied Michael Anthony (Trinidad) and Flora Nwapa (Nigeria) to Iowa State University for readings, and it was a golden opportunity to get some insights about the growth and development of both Goan literature and its primary catalytic agent to date

Lives in halves: A homage to Vidiadhar Naipaul

Literary and film scholar Vijay Mishra highlights the similarities of his life with Vidiadhar Naipaul, in paying tribute to writer V.S. Naipaul on being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for 2001. He suggests that Naipaul has lived his life in halves, as part of the Indian diaspora in Fiji and then in Trinidad which he considers 'half-baked societies', but it is these societies which have provided him his experiences and stories for his books

The Theological Misappropriation of Christianity as a Civilizing Force

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies

Gender and Empowerment: Contemporary Lakota Women of Rosebud

Western-European stereotypes still permeate Plains Indian culture suggesting that women were passive and subjugated while men were dominant warriors. This research challenges those stereotypes through exploration of origin and spirituality accounts, kinship organization, historical impact, contemporary and traditional issues, and through first hand ethnographic research of the Sicangu Nation of Lakota people in regards to gender roles. Using feminist critique and reflexive theoretical approaches, information was collected through participant observation and interviews with Sicangu people in 2004. By focusing on how Lakota women have empowered themselves, this research illustrates how women were and continue to be respected, influential members of what is now a matrifocal society

“Untiring Joys and Sorrows”: Yeats and the Sidhe

Excerpt: In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the “good people”—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological con- struct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that the fairies have taken the real person and left a changeling instead. Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) examines the case of Michael Cleary, who burned his relatively independent wife to death in the hopes of forcing the fairies to change her back to the acquiescent wife that he desired. Bourke finds the mythology of the fairy world so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that it blurs the lines between the literary construct and the sociological us