Search Results

This chapter examines political organisation in Hong Kong from the point of view of local governance, and argues that the post-colonial government has continued to rely on structures and machinery created by the colonial state for support and legitimacy. Her study of citizens' mobilisation in reaction to urban renewal plans in Wanchai is a case study of how a defensive concern group centring originally on compensation and relocation transformed itself into an activist body demanding, albeit without immediate success, a voice in urban planning.

This chapter discusses Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, It explores, first of all, how Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology and cosmology to emphasise the revolutionary potential of ritual sacrifice. Then, the focus shifts to the politics that the adaptation performs through its ambiguous relation with the Euripedean pre‐text, a relation that is characterised by a dual emphasis on correspondence and difference. In the final part, the cultural politics at play in Soyinka's refiguration of Dionysus and in his theory of ‘Yoruba tragedy’ is considered in relation to Martin Bernal's Black Athena project. The primary intention is to demonstrate how Soyinka does with ‘tragedy’ what Bernal does with ‘Greece’: challenging its conventional definition and destabilising the Eurocentrism that has traditionally inhibited it.

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s focus, structure and remit, outlining commonalities as well as differences between the experiences of colonial nurses discussed in the book. Drawing from their experience in researching and writing gender and racial social histories and in colonial and post-colonial nursing history respectively, the editors tease out emerging themes placing them within a clear chronological and historiographical framework. They examine how this field has developed in the history of medicine and identify questions which current research still leaves unanswered, but for which nursing’s history is uniquely placed. The chapters in this book reveal the presence (or absence) of underlying racial and cultural tensions between nurses and their patients, nurses and professional colleagues or their indigenous counterparts; and the editors question whether past histories have not been grossly oversimplified by projecting images of imperial collaboration/cooperation onto all forms of colonial nursing, by all countries, across a long timespan. We evaluate the difficulties of discussing and analysing the impact of colonial nursing from the indigenous population’s viewpoint to present balanced analyses, and explore different experiences of colonial/post-colonial nursing over more than a century whilst considering the impact of peacetime or conflict on nurses and nursing.

This chapter analyses shifting dynamics within medical missionary work in Nigeria, from support for British colonialism to humanitarianism. It explores Irish Catholic missionaries as nurses, midwives and physicians from c.1937-1970, to the end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970. It uses unpublished documents to disentangle, although not disconnect, modern missionary work from colonialism. Using gender as a category of analysis it focuses on women’s work during the Nigerian civil war compared to men’s activities, and how the media focused on one but not the other. By giving voice to the “silenced” in history it argues that there was a significant Nigerian presence in relief work during the war, differing from most research which focuses only on the work of whites. Significantly, in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholic mission hospitals became sites for shifts in the understanding of mission during periods of violence and upheaval. As Catholic women renegotiated their place in an emerging decolonised world, complex relationships developed among Irish sisters, Nigerian nuns, priests, Nigerian chiefs and international peacekeepers. Whereas in the 1930s and 1940s, Catholic sisters saw Africa as a fertile ground for converts, over time the Catholic mission tradition liberalised to promote humanitarianism.

This chapter draws upon a rich collection of untapped private and public papers held in Canada, the USA, and Great Britain. With the promise to “go anywhere, do anything”, British surgical nurse Elizabeth Hughes and American public health nurse Margaret Stanley were cast into unexpected adventures punctuated by danger and unremitting demands to care. As part of ‘Medical Team 19’, they joined Mao Zedong’s Eighth Route Army when the International Peace Hospital evacuated after the fall of Yennan in 1947. They illuminate ‘complex entanglements of nursing as it was imagined and practiced on the liminal frontiers between war and peace’ that have characterised the post-colonial era. This article is attentive to how multi-faceted power relations intersect with faith, gender, race, place and nation to shape nursing imperial exchanges. Their experiences question post-colonialists’ prevailing portrait of Western nurses as cultural imperialists and reinforce the need for a multidisciplinary framework to critically analyse the agency, assimilation and accommodation of both Western nurses and their Chinese colleagues. Recovering their stories suggests there may be more continuity with the major contemporary challenges for collective humanitarian responses to conflict-ridden complex crises than previously acknowledged.

The previous chapter suggested that the United Kingdom was less united, and perhaps less of a kingdom, in 1999 than 1990, partly the result of the redistribution of political power via the different acts of devolution that opened up new forms of self-determination to the constituent nations of Britain. That chapter also argued that these political and bureaucratic changes reflected complex and often subtle changes in the ways that Britons understood themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English. These developments were not solely the product of the decade, but were accelerated by some of the cultural energies and arguments that came to the fore in the 1990s.

This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, are shown to harbour a sense of artistic exceptionalism which often precludes representations of the everyday, and therefore also limits political solidarity with those usually defended by Lignes. Despite the racial or gendered exclusions it can produce, literary elitism or conservatism is in itself not necessarily criticised, but the hostility to mass culture inculcated by some aesthetic Marxist approaches is seen to be politically unhelpful in the present moment and other approaches to cultural politics in Lignes are sought. After Alain Badiou’s Circonstances 3 caused a row over anti-Semitism and the critique of Israel, it is suggested that the strategic essentialism of Judith Butler provides a more appropriate stance compared to Badiou’s strategic universalism. Lastly, Lignes’ virtual silence on gender and sexuality issues (a stance softening in recent issues) is contrasted to the Parti Socialiste’s progressive measures on parity, PACs and gay marriage.

Historically the non-European quarters in any colonized Asian cities have been depicted as messy and disorderly. Post-World War II cities of the Global South are seen as messy and subject to incorporation into an urban order. In this work the author argues that representation of messiness is imbued with political significance to justify the urban spatial transformation to restore “order”. By engaging the spatial location of kampong (the relatively marginalized urban neighborhoods) in the postcolonial era the work demonstrates how that which is socially and politically marginalized remains economically central to the city. The author presents a response (or a challenge) to the order of the city—the recent domination of motorbikes in the city street—as a form of engaging in messy urbanism. The notion of messiness thus links space, power, and knowledge and is not an isolated category; instead it is a term central to the organization of power relations between the state, the capital, and the divided civil society.

This chapter provides the broad framework for the volume. It introduces the reader to the principal aim and purpose of the work. It discusses the Grenada Revolution from various perspectives and raises probing questions about that Cold War, Caribbean radicalism and the significance of the Grenada Revolution and the US invasion as a critical period in the post-colonial experience of the Caribbean. It then outlines the various chapter themes.

Steven Cornelius and Habib Iddrisu explore the role of traditional music and dance, specifically the Baamaaya dance/music genre of the Dagamba people during and after Ghana’s independence movement. They focus on how art forms were transformed into folkloric patrimony as policy makers staged performances and established national performance troupes to mitigate regional and ethnic tensions in a newly independent, post-colonial nation. Through their insights into the changing social contexts and the national significance of Baamaaya, the authors address questions of identity, cultural values, nationalism, and the politicization of traditional arts.

Unlike most other departments that made the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial regime, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) underwent a fundamental transition of both personnel and ideas. Although there existed three different Departments—the Commonwealth Relations Department and the External Affairs Department and the Commerce Department—which handled different aspects of foreign affairs, there were only four Indians who had served as diplomats abroad. Hence, it was not only the question of recruiting new staff, but also training them in a new skill, diplomacy. The chapter argues that there were five main reasons for the ideational weakness of the MEA in the first decade of Indian independence: the tendency towards greater bureaucratization, the lack of communication, the neglect of thinking on economic issues, the blind imitation of British protocols and policy traditions, and the lack of organizational unity. These factors contributed towards the weak foundations of the MEA.

The Introduction argues for the need to consider the crucial role played by visual representation in mediating understanding of the Franco-Algerian relationship, and how the enduring presence and role of Algeria in the French visual imaginary has been sustained since the Algerian War. It locates the study within contemporary debates on the relationship between history and memory within France, and considers the role played by visual culture in processes of historiography and memorialisation.

The conclusion assesses the relative place and significance of Algeria in contemporary France, and considers the ways in which the colonial and post-colonial relationship between the two countries can be negotiated. Drawing on Deborah Poole's notion of the ‘visual economy’ of the public sphere (Poole 1997), it explores what the visual fortunes of France's Algerian past tell us about the flows of political, social and symbolic capital in contemporary France and the role images play in shaping those flows. Building on the work of Etienne Balibar (1998), it argues for the paradigmatic status of the Franco-Algerian relationship for thinking firstly, about post-colonial relations and secondly, about the relationship between Western Europe and Africa, and the “North” and “South” more generally, in an increasingly globalised world.

This chapter addresses a comparatively recent phenomenon in Japanese cinema – namely magic realism – and argues that this amorphous artistic and cultural mode can best be understood through recourse to postmodernity as both a correlative and a contrastive mode that in crucial respects casts light on magic realism’s cultural and artistic practices. The chapter examines extant discourse on magic realism in art (painting and literature) before going on to look at how a selection of individual films cross-fertilize this mode with postmodernism in order to provide a new discursive framework within which to engage with the problematic concept of Japan as a known and knowable entity – a country with a (perceived) defined and delineated identity that can be both captured and transmitted. Films like Kitano’s Dolls or Imamura’s Warm Water Under The Red Bridge engage critically with, and offer a dialectical relationship to, the proliferation of both Japanese touristic spectacle in advertising campaigns and with the relatively recent proliferation of western travel writing about Japan. This is examined here alongside analyses of style (especially mise-en-scène) and form as they contribute to a critical understanding of how the frequent post-colonial imperatives of magic realism can be applied to a first world example.

Dealing with British colonial Zanzibar, this chapter bridges between the preceding chapters on French colonial Africa and the following ones, on British Mandate Palestine. It was the renowned British architect Henry Vaughan Lanchester who, in 1923, wrote the first comprehensive town planning scheme for Zanzibar, the capital of the British Protectorate of Zanzibar. With Geddesian and garden city influences, Lanchester's plan has cast a shadow over planning policies there – a shadow which is exposed in this chapter with viewing contemporary planning in Zanzibar as well. It argues that there are significant similarities in land management and planning policies between Lanchester's ideas and those being implemented in present day Zanzibar, especially planning associated with the ongoing Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE) Programme. They also contend that from Lanchester's time until contemporary era, planning reforms have continued to be developed within a system that lacks the sort of communicative social dialogue that might allow for genuinely participatory and integrated planning.

This chapter has three goals. First, it situates the story told here in Kenya within the larger white colonial world of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting new ways of understanding race and colonialism worldwide. Second, it brings the story of the settler soul to the present, suggesting ways in which it has and has not changed. Third, it offers some thoughts on how the settler soul affected Africans in the colonial and post-colonial decades.

Writers embedded in the grand discourse of civilising mission and pioneer aesthetic also played roles as critic and conscience of the imperialist project. Baudoux showed a deep interest in the Kanak stories and customs his writing revived and Mariotti's in-between idealised legends of the hunter and his son, Poindi, introduced Kanak culture to a Parisian audience. Laubreaux's texts carried fiercely satirical portraits of a deeply stratified, rigid, and morally ambiguous colonial society fissuring the official discourse from within. Yet, the premise that racial or cultural Otherness was fatal to relationships and that society lacked the capacity to embrace diversity remained common to all of these texts. It was not until the 1970s that the focus moved to a greater openness to biological and cultural métissage. However, this postcolonial movement of self-identification with the ancient knowledge of the Other, the quest for inclusion, does not set up Bhabha's restless, disseminating movement to-and-fro between cultures. Rather, in the inter-cultural writing of Jacqueline Sénès, Claudine Jacques or Nicolas Kurtovitch, among others, which articulate both a greater acceptance of difference and a recognition of difference as irreducible, ‘each one continues to stay in his/her own place’, articulating a separate history of suffering.

This chapter focuses on how Rules hatched in England which governed police–citizen relations helped shape the justice apparatus of occupied states and the actions of officials administering them. In restructuring the relationship of criminal suspects and police to the criminal justice system, English judges rolled out defective procedures, which remain part of the fixture and fittings of those jurisdictions still burdened by the colonial inheritance. This chapter will reveal how senior judges, whether sitting in the Privy Council in London or reposing in the highest courts of former colonial outposts, continue as legal missionaries proselytizing the common law and overseeing the implementation of rules, discredited and long-discarded back home.