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

An Idiom for India: Hindustani and the Limits of the Language Concept

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers, consequently, understand each other most of the time, but not all of the time, though they can never read each other’s texts. Their shared space, Hindustani, finds no official recognition in India or in Pakistan, but it denotes, particularly in the early twentieth century, an aspiration for Hindu–Muslim unity: the dream of a shared, syncretic culture, crafted from the speech genres of everyday life. Beginning with the colonial project of Hindustani, the essay focuses on a discussion of the works of early twentieth-century writers like Nehru, Premchand and Sa’adat Hasan Manto. I argue that the aesthetic project of Hindustani attempted to produce, not a common language, but a common idiom: a set of shared conventions, phrases and forms of address, which would be legible to Indians from all religions and all regions. By theorizing Hindustani as an idiom, and not a language, I explain its persistence in Bollywood cinema well after its abandonment in all literary and official registers. Bollywood, I argue, is Hindustani cinema, not only because of its use of a mixed Hindi–Urdu language in its dialogues, but also because of its development of a set of clearly recognizable, easily repeatable conventions that can surmount linguistic differences

Mexican Indigenismo, Choctaw Self-Determination, And Todd Downing's Detective Novels

Englis

Native Birth: Identity and Territory in Postcolonial Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Author's final manuscript

Native Birth: Identity and Territory in Postcolonial Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Author's final manuscript

Gandhi\u27s Other Daughter: Sarala Devi and Lakshmi Ashram

In 1946, Sarala Devi, formerly Catherine Mary Heileman of London, founded a Gandhian training center for women and girls in Kumaon, in what was then the Himalayan region of the United Provinces, India. She and her students challenged conventions regarding gender, sexuality, and appropriate roles for colonial women. This essay analyzes Sarala Devi’s translocal work and shifting subjectivity in the context of her transnational position as she negotiated colonial, modernist, feminist, Gandhian, and village discourses in her mission to “uplift” women. It identifies and analyzes the varied historical contexts, ideologies, and discourses that created the possibility for Sarala Devi’s life and work in the Kumaon Himalaya

Reading Globalization from the Margin: The Case of Abdullah Munshi

In this essay I argue that the global perspective, established in the era of modernEuropean imperialism, is given institutional expression as a way of seeing that is engaged—both by ruler and ruled— as the frame of adequate representation. Briefly outlining how this frame operates in historical and cultural studies today, I examine its deployment in mid-nineteenth-century Melaka and Singapore through a reading of the Hikayat Abdullah, a seminal Malay-language text composed by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir. Although Abdullah self-consciously sets about reproducing the global perspective, I show how this mode of thematization is interrupted and displaced as it brings about an encounter between the diverse and uneven contexts of the native and European worlds

From Communism to Postcapitalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848)

History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all classes, professions, nations and ethnicities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing