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In the context of English’s apparent worldwide spread, this book brings together the fields of postcolonial studies and world Englishes, arguing that this is a necessary and long overdue connection. Although postcolonial studies appears to have its origins in literary studies, and accordingly in the study of language, in fact there have been few connections with fields in linguistics that are clearly relevant to postcolonial approaches to English in particular. The book chiefly makes connections with the growing field of World Englishes studies, considering points of contact, differences in emphasis, and fundamental disagreements. It proposes that postcolonial studies can be renewed through engaging with World Englishes studies, but also that postcolonial studies as a discipline can offer powerful frameworks for World Englishes studies itself. The book examines the existing and potential connections between the fields through examples such as postcolonial dictionaries, postcolonial composition, the language of global citizenship, and the interface between World Literatures and World Englishes. It concludes that World Englishes, by contrast with a monolithic Global English, contribute to a vision of communication that resists globalization’s demand for accessibility and transparency.

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson’s thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson’s work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson’s conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the “reconstruction of religious thought in Islam,” a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future. At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson’s thought in a postcolonial context.

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterised most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

Bamako Sounds tells the story of an African city, its people, their values, and their music. Centered on the music and musicians of Bamako, Mali’s booming capital city, this book reveals a community of artists whose lives and works evince a complex world shaped by urban culture, postcolonialism, musical expression, religious identity, and intellectual property. Drawing on years of ethnographic research with classically trained players of the kora (a twenty-one-string West African harp) as well as more contemporary, hip-hop influenced musicians and producers, Ryan Thomas Skinner analyzes how Bamako artists balance social imperatives with personal interests and global imaginations. Whether performed live on stage, broadcast on the radio, or shared over the Internet, music is a privileged mode of expression that suffuses Bamako’s urban soundscape. It animates professional projects, communicates cultural values, pronounces public piety, resounds in the marketplace, and quite literally performs the nation. Music, the artists who make it, and the audiences who interpret it thus represent a crucial means of articulating and disseminating the ethics and aesthetics of a varied and vital Afropolitanism, in Bamako and beyond.

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts. This book studies how the region of the Welsh borderlands before 1066 was depicted in a group of texts from early medieval Britain which have traditionally been interpreted as reflecting a clear and adversarial Anglo/Welsh divide. Chapters focus on some of the most central literary and historical works from Anglo-Saxon England, including Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Latin and Old English Lives of St. Guthlac, the Old English Exeter Book Riddles, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These texts depict the Welsh borderlands region differently than the rest of Wales — not as the site of Anglo/Welsh conflict, but as a distinct region with a mixed culture. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England alters our understanding of how the Anglo-Saxons and Welsh interacted with one another in the centuries before the Norman arrival. It demonstrates that the region of the Welsh borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised.

The concept of translation has become central to postcolonial theory in recent decades, offering as it does a useful metaphor or metonym for many of the processes explored within the framework of postcolonial studies. Translation proper, however, remains relatively underexplored and, in many postcolonial multilingual contexts, underexploited. This volume draws together reflections by translators, authors and academics working across three broad geographical areas where the linguistic legacies of French colonial operations are long-lasting and complex, namely Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. The perspectives that emerge move beyond traditional views of translation as loss or betrayal and towards a more positive outlook, highlighting the potential for translation to enrich the lives of readers, translators and authors alike, to counter some of the destructive effects of globalisation, and to promote linguistic diversity. In addition, translation is shown to be a most valuable tool in revealing the dynamics and pressures that are relevant to the political and economic contexts in which books are read, written and sold.

In a work that challenges the notion that fundamentalism is an appropriate analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies, Benjamin Soares explores different, and often seemingly contradictory, ways of being Muslim in Mali. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, he traces the transformations in ideas about Islam and authority and conventions of religious practice in a major Islamic religious centre from the late nineteenth century, through French colonial rule, and in the postcolonial period. Drawing on extensive ethnography, archival research, and written sources, he provides a richly detailed discussion of Muslim religious practice—Sufism, Islamic reform, and other ways of being Muslim—in Nioro du Sahel in western Mali and more broadly in the country. Using an original analytical perspective, he shows the historical importance of more standardized ways of being Muslim and the centrality of exceptional charismatic leaders, Muslim saints, in the development of 'the prayer economy' in the postcolonial period. He analyzes some of the contradictions and tensions in this economy of religious practice in which certain Muslim saints offer blessings and prayers in exchange for substantial gifts. In addition, he considers the implications of the recent expansion of the public sphere and increased global interconnections for the practice of Islam. This study is a major contribution to the study of Islam in Africa and will be welcomed by scholars and students in history, religion, and the social sciences, particularly those interested in anthropology, Islam, colonialism and the public sphere.

This book examines the Indian state's postcolonial development ideology between Independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1975-77. It pioneers a novel methodology for the study of development thought and its cinematic representations, analyzing films made by the Films Division of India between 1948 and 1975. By comparing these documentaries to late-colonial films on “progress”, the book highlights continuities with and departures from colonial notions of development in modern India. It is the first scholarly volume to be published on the history of Indian documentary film. Of the approximately 250 documentaries analyzed in the book, many of which have never been discussed in the existing literature, most are concerned with economic planning and industrialization, large dams, family planning, schemes aimed at the integration of tribal peoples (Adivasis) into society, and civic education.

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women’s rights in British India. Early women’s writings are of immense archival significance by virtue of the time period they were conceived in. In wielding their pens, these trend-setting women writers (such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Cornelia Sorabji, Nalini Turkhud, among others) stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects,’ refusing to remain confined into the passivity of ‘spoken-of objects.’ In focusing on the literary contribution of pioneering Indian women writers, this book also endeavours to explore their contribution to the formation of the image of their nation and womanhood. Some of the complex questions this book tackles are: Particularly when India was forming a vague idea of her nationhood and was getting increasingly portrayed in terms of femaleness (via the figure of an enchained ‘Mother India’), what role did women and their literary endeavours play in shaping both their nation and their femininity/feminism? How and how far did these pioneering authors use fiction as a tool of protest against and as resistance to the Raj and/or native patriarchy, and also to express their gender-based solidarity? How do they view and review the stereotypes about their fellow women, and thereby ‘mother’ India by redefining her image? Without studying women’s perspective in the movement for women’s rights (as expressed in their literature) and their role in ‘mothering India’, our knowledge and understanding of those issues are far from holistic. A detailed study of these largely understudied, sadly forgotten and/or deliberately overlooked ‘mothers’ of IWE is long overdue and this book aims to redress that critical oversight.