Postcolonial Theory

Colonialism and its aftermath prompt a form of cultural studies that seeks to address questions of identity politics and justice that are the ongoing legacy of empires. Postcolonial theory has its origins in resistance movements, principally at the local, and frequently at nonmetropolitan, levels. Among its early thinkers, three seem of special importance: Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. Antonio Gram sci ( 1891- 193 7) was a founder of the Communist Party in Italy. In his Prison Notebooks (1971 ), he wrote insightfully about the proletariat, designated by him as subalterns; his thoughts regarding the responsibilities of public intellectuals inspired many, and his notion of hegemony and resistance proved influential. Paulo Freire ( 192 1- 97) was a Brazilian with a special interest in education. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( 1970) seeks to restore subjectivity to objectified, oppressed classes in society. Frantz Fanon ( 1925- 6 l) was a psychiatrist of Caribbean descent who participated in the Algerian independence movement. His two books, The Wretched of the Earth ( 1963) and Black Skin, White Masks ( 1967) inspired many anticolonial struggles and investigations of racism\u27s many manifestations

Freya Stark

Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself, she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7); I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates. Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. She had no duplicate. The writings that resulted from her constant travels began as wonder-filled accounts of ancient storybook kingdoms of the Middle East and moved impressively toward a reflective consideration of the differences between a nomadic way of life and the stable urbanity that might have been her lot if she had decided to fit the mold of those around her. In these accounts of her own transformation she brought a growing body of readers not only into exotic locales but also to the brink of metaphysical questions about the meaning of life

Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity

The widespread notion of the abiku in Nigerian culture says volumes about the heartrending deaths of countless newborns throughout the region\u27s history. It also testifies to a belief in the permeability of the membrane separating the spirit world from our world. As the abiku puts it, in his family he is surrounded by people who are seeded in rich lands, who still believe in mysteries (F am 6), people who hold that one world contains glimpses of others (F am 1 0), and people who acknowledge a personal relationship with these spirits in the course of daily life. In western Nigeria, however, a mother who suspects that her newborn is one of these child-spirits must do whatever she can to persuade the baby to stay in this difficult world, rather than have it return to the spirit-world where it will be bathed in the ecstasy of an everlasting love (F am 18). Mothers will give such children names like Malomo-Do Not Go Again ; Banjoko-Sit Down And Stay With Us ; Duro oro ike-Wait And See How You Will Be Petted ; and Please Stay And Bury Me (Maclean 51, 57). Special jewelry and foods are prepared to tempt the baby to choose life, and circumcision for such young boys is frequently postponed (56)

Introduction: Unrecorded Lives

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call subaltern cosmopolitanism. Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as one we have all tried our hand at, in one form or another: a record of discomfort in confronting the inconsistencies of another person\u27s-the other person\u27s-reality. The book is hardly recognizable as a novel; nor is it simply a historical investigation, since it blends an anthropological record with a travelogue, a diary, and speculations. Within the parameters of history, Ghosh told one interviewer, I have tried to capture a story, a narrative, without attempting to write a historical novel. You may say, as a writer, I have ventured on a technical innovation (Dhawan 1999: 24). In India in Africa, Africa in India we are attempting a parallel innovation : using what we know of the past to inform our understanding of the present Indian Ocean world; examining today\u27s imaginative interpretations of India by Africans and Africa by Indians to speculate on how, historically, these regions understood each other. Ghosh gathered evidence relating to a Jewish merchant operating in the twelfth century in Aden, and he was seeking to document, more remarkably, the merchant\u27s barely recoverable Indian slave. In the process, Ghosh learns as much about the interpretation his visit gets from the Africans he meets as he does about the merchant Ben Yiju\u27s reception in India and the role of the slave Bomma in the world of Indian Ocean commerce seven hundred or so years ago-for Ghosh was as much an object of fascination to the Egyptians as they were to him. There has been a coming and going for centuries, sometimes enforced, sometimes enthusiastically entered into, and one might have thought that this would have made for greater understanding among the various parties. But exactly the opposite was the case when the young doctoral student sat across from the aged imam in the Egyptian village and was told by him to stop doing the strange things that the villagers had heard were done by Hindus. Did his people bury their dead, or cremate them, he was asked. Was he circumcised? Did they worship cows? Is there military service for all in India, as there is in Egypt? Why did they not purify (i .e., infibulate or circumcise) their women? In fact, the imam and his villagers seemed to encourage him to remain apart from them, making sure that the young interloper did not enjoy the sense of community that they created during Ramadan. As Ghosh puts it, to belong to that immense community was a privilege they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries (A. Ghosh 1992: 76)

Postcolonial Theory

Rather than agreeing to any one meaning or referent, most critics these days speak of ‘post-colonialisms’ to refer principally to ‘historical, social and economic material conditions’ and at other times to ‘historically-situated imaginative products’ and ‘aesthetic practices: representations, discourses and values’ (McLeod 2000: 254). Arising from subaltern studies, its theorists embrace hybridity, indict alterity, analyze colonial discourse, and employ strategic essentialism to promote identity politics. Under its influence, a strain of self-interrogation has for decades run as an undercurrent through much of anthropology and archaeology. Topics including looting, repatriation, stewardship, and the transformation of disciplinary identity are now persistent tropes in the field. Indigenous archaeology, emergent cosmopolitanisms, building up knowledge from below—these now occupy ongoing archaeological work. Limiting its applicability, though, are charges against its homogenization of colonial experience, its perpetuation of academic imperialism, and its relative neglect, until recently, of regions such as Latin America

Gus Lee

Augustus Samuel Mein-Sun Lee was born in San Francisco on August 8, 1946, the only son of Tsung-Chi Lee and Da-Tsien Tsu. His three sisters had been born in mainland China and accompanied his mother on the difficult trek across China to India and then to the United States in 1944. There, the family rejoined Tsung-Cbi, wbo had once been a major in the Kuomintang army and who, since 1939, had been working in San Francisco for the Bank of Canton. When Gus was only five, his mother died of breast cancer, and his father, two years later, married a severe Pennsylvania Dutch woman. Gus grew up in the Panhandle and the Haight, a predominantly African American area of San Francisco, and he had a difficult time becoming accepted. He joined the Young Men\u27s Christian Association (YMCA) and learned to box

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Christian Imagination

The role of poets is to get their anchors caught in many such monasteries, to shimmy down the entangling ropes, and then to record the marvelous resistance that caused them to stop in the first place to notice. But those in the monastery, putting in their time, must not too quickly conclude that such accidental tourists, dropped from some ethereal realm, are likely to drown if we do not distance them from the world we consider mundane. In both situations, that of the sailor and that of the abbot, the question of how we envision reality, of what our shaping paradigms may be, dominates our interpretation and response. Imagination shapes our engagement with reality. What remains opaque or simply insignificant to one individual nags someone else, fascinates or haunts, sometimes opens onto an experience of epiphany. Imagination also reshapes logic and offers a new approach to a problem that facts and reason cannot sufficiently describe. Thus, Albert Einstein was once asked to explain the theory of relativity in terms that might make it a bit more accessible to the average human being. Einstein replied: I cannot do what you request, but if you will call on me at Princeton, I will play it for you on my violin (Fischer 15). Einstein implicitly suggested a new paradigm for the reality he had been representing until then by the mathematical paradigm that so confused his listener. This calls to mind, in light of our principal focus during these days, the particular aspect of imagination that theologian David Tracy calls analogical. Analyzing our age as one of porous boundaries between various paradigms for reality, he argues strongly in favor of an ecumenism in our religious imagination, an opening up of our systematic approach to transcendent encounters

Introduction to Through A Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination

The question that so disturbed Christ\u27s contemporaries resonates even now: Who do you say that I am? (Matt. 16 : 15). Paradoxically, the answers his disciples boldly or clumsily offer seem to define them far more clearly than describe their teacher. The New Testament stands as a record of their subsequent obsession with the question, with what they remember their answers to have been, and with how this radically creative interrogation ordered their remaining years. Throughout the centuries their own disciples, variously aided and obstructed by these confessions, used the question as a litmus test not only in their prayer and in their personal relations, but, eventually, in their global politics, as well

Christianity

According to tradition and to the early church historian Eusebius, Christianity was preached in Ethiopia by the apostle Matthew before it reached Europe; Mark the evangelist is said to have established the church in Alexandria in 43 C.E. What is clear is that some of the most important early Christian theologians were from northern Africa: Augustine, from present-day Algeria, and Clement and Origen, from present-day Egypt. The monastic movement in the early church drew its inspiration from these writers. By the 4th century, Christianity was well established in what are today Ethiopia and Eritrea, and was centered in a city called Aksum. From the 6th to 14th centuries, it flourished in what is now Sudan. Coptic Christianity, as it is now known, flourished as the majority faith in this northeastern section of Africa until the end of the 14th century, and is still vibrant in the area. Though considerably diminished by the Arabic conquest of northern Africa, Christianity nonetheless continued in Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria