Building on what has already been documented in related scholarship concerning this topic, this article will look into facets of postcolonial theory vis-à-vis appropriations and adaptations of the plays of Shakespeare in Arabic. In doing so, the article will compare known postcolonial 'Shakespeares', and Arabic appropriations of his plays. It will comment on the postcolonial aspects of these plays and show whether Arab dramatists have been 'writing back', so to speak, in response to the colonial experience. The article addresses the following questions: first, do Arab playwrights deal with postcolonial issues in their appropriations of Shakespeare? Second, to what extent have Arab playwrights used Shakespeare to 'strike' at colonialism? Third, are Arab playwrights aware of postcolonial theory and discourse? And fourth, what is the nature of the Arabic contribution to postcolonial discourse? Although the treatment of Shakespeare in Arabic literature, especially drama and poetry, has been considered elsewhere, this particular approach to the Bard is relatively new. The article contends that there are postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare in Arabic, which need to be properly investigated and commented upon with reference to postcolonial literary theory.
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Arabic Adaptations of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory
Mahmoud F. Al-Shetawi
Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence
Epifanio San Juan Jr.
After the excesses of fascism in World War II and inter-ethnic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia, it became axiomatic for postmodernist thinkers to condemn the nation and its corollary terms, ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation-state,’ as the classic evils of modern industrial society. The nation-state, its reality if not its concept, has become a kind of malignant paradox if not a sinister conundrum. It is often linked to violence and the terror of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Nonetheless, the U.N. and the interstate system of nation-states still function as seemingly viable institutions of everyday life.1 How do we explain these seemingly paradoxical trends?
Mobilizing Malian-Diasporic Identities
How Southern News Websites Facilitate Non-sedentarist Discourses on African Migration
Syntia Hasenöhrl
Abstract
Whereas identities in postmodern societies are increasingly celebrated as mobile and fluid for agents from the Global North, agents from African societies face sedentarizing discourses. Recent research has shown that digital media play an ambivalent role in this process. This article explores the circulation of migration-related news on a Malian-diasporic online news portal during the month of December 2016. It argues that Southern online news and user interactions with them can mobilize African identity constructions in opposition to sedentarist hegemonic discourses in three ways: (1) the traveling of articles across space reconstructs the complexities of Malian mobilities; (2) user profiling and interactions produce non-sedentarist narratives about mobile Malians; and (3) the circulation of specific expressions and content questions fixed connections of identities and territories.
Book Reviews
Jeffrey D. Hilmer Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically by Chantal Mouffe
Benoit Challand Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism by Vivek Chibber
Clare McCausland Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification, and the Law by Tony Milligan
Rehabilitating Eden
Archetypal Images of Malaya in European Travel Writing
Siti Nuraishah Ahmad, Shanthini Pillai, and Noraini Md. Yusof
This article links Jungian literary criticism on archetypes with contemporary postcolonial theories on colonial discourse in travel writing (David Spurr) and the worlding of a colonized land (Gayatri Spivak) in order to understand the pattern of images in European travel writing that created the fiction of Malaya. This fiction is created through a process of worlding by European travelers from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. The practice of Islam and magic among the Malays was represented as contributing to the degeneration of Malaya. The resulting image is that of an Eden that has fallen into ruin and that needs to be transformed back into paradise by the white man.
Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis
Valuing Marginalized Environmental Knowledges in the Face of the Neoliberalization of Nature and Science
Brian J. Burke and Nik Heynen
Citizen science and sustainability science promise the more just and democratic production of environmental knowledge and politics. In this review, we evaluate these participatory traditions within the context of (a) our theorization of how the valuation and devaluation of nature, knowledge, and people help to produce socio-ecological hierarchies, the uneven distribution of harms and benefits, and inequitable engagement within environmental politics, and (b) our analysis of how neoliberalism is reworking science and environmental governance. We find that citizen and sustainability science often fall short of their transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion, including the knowledge hierarchies that shape how the environment is understood and acted upon, by whom, and for what ends. To deepen participatory practice, we propose a heterodox ethicopolitical praxis based in Gramscian, feminist, and postcolonial theory and describe how we have pursued transformative praxis in southern Appalachia through the Coweeta Listening Project.
In Environment and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 7–27 (21 total)
To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel
Efrat Yerday
Abstract
This article reviews works of contemporary female artists of Ethiopian origin active in the Israeli art field. I analyse the subjects in their work and argue these artists are presenting their attitudes towards the ‘white gaze’. Though constantly subjected to it by the Israeli hegemony and the Western masculine discourse, they are notably decreasing their consideration of it. They broaden the restricted field of action that seems designated for them and alter its boundaries. Drawing on theorists of gender, postcolonial theory and theory of art, I demonstrate how these artists are promoting an agenda that reflects their lives as black women in Israel. Influenced by recent socio-political changes and a decline in representations of black women on TV and in visual arts, these artworks were increasingly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 70–86 (17 total)
Climate Change and the Museum
Decolonizing and Decarbonizing Parallels and Consequences
David C. Harvey
Abstract
Recent years have seen an increasing prominence of anthropogenic climate change issues within museums. While climate change itself has become a central theme for many exhibitions, some museums are, themselves, under threat from climate change. Within many industrial museums, however, there has been surprisingly little critical self-reflection, leaving themes of climate change both central and unsaid. Developing cases studies of Ironbridge Gorge (Shropshire, UK) and Heartlands (Cornwall, UK), this essay explores how certain museums have celebrated, often uncritically, the capacity for humans to alter the climate. Drawing parallels with how postcolonial theory has prompted critical self-reflection, the article examines how the climate crisis provides an imperative for museums both to explore their role in climate injustice and to seize a critical opportunity to make a contribution towards sustainable decarbonization. The article, therefore, calls for contemporary museum ambitions towards decolonization to be matched by activities that have an ambition towards decarbonization.
Introduction
Literature of the Thirties – Region and Genre
Mary Joannou
The second special issue on the literature of the thirties follows on from an earlier edition of Critical Survey which brought together new critical writings on the period (volume 10, number 3, 1988). The first four essays selected are responses to regionalism and identity and the last two to the issues raised by the relationships of gender and generic fiction. Simon Featherstone analyses how two popular artistes, Gracie Fields (the ‘mill girl’) and Max Miller (‘the cheeky chappie’) achieved success in an entertainment industry that was changing rapidly in response to technological and cultural pressures. Their stardom depended on the dialogues between regional and national identities as part of a national cultural dynamic during a decade in which mass popular forms reconstituted the older regional and local traditions of dialogue and performance. Steven Matthews sees Auden’s injunction to ‘Consider this and in our time’ as a ‘clarion call to a particular, post-The Waste Land, form of modernity’. Focusing on Scottish and Irish writers (Louis MacNeice, Sorley Maclean, Grassic Gibbon et al.) Matthews argues that the temporality of some thirties’ writing aligns it closely with the emergent nationalisms familiar in recent postcolonial theory.
Boundaries and Crossings: Mobility, Travel, and Society in China, 1500–1954—A Survey of the Field
Yajun Mo
Overtaking Americans and Germans as the world’s most exuberant tourism spenders, middle-class Chinese tourists have become the most coveted demographic in the global tourism market. At the same time, robust “Golden Week” tourism data, which tracks domestic tourism during the two-week national holidays in mainland China, has indicated a surge in travel within China. Viewed as a revealing lens through which one could observe Chinese modernity, travel and tourism-related activities have attracted considerable attention from scholars interested in China.1 However, marked as a “contemporary” phenomenon, tourism and travel in China seem to have remained largely outside historians’ purview. In response to calls from mobility scholars for a historical understanding of the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas since the late twentieth century, China historians have begun to examine the practice of travel and tourism, especially from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the same time, infl uenced by colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, literary scholars have renewed their interests in Chinese travel accounts, both textual and visual, making connections between travelers’ representations and the imaginations of empire and nation-state over the past few centuries.
In Mobility in History
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jan 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 150–157 (8 total)