Colonial Extensions, Postcolonial Decentrings: Cultures and Discourses on the Edge

by Salhia Ben-Messahel (Editor), Vanessa Castejon (Editor)

Overview

The essays assembled in this volume explore the meaning of the term "postcolonial" through various theoretical perspectives and disciplinary fields of expertise. They address issues ranging from culture, politics and history to literature and the arts, with particular emphasis on colonialist discourses within a postmodern and globalised world. Identity-formation, cultural space, indigeneity, colonial perspectives and anti-colonial struggles suggest that former imperial (and often marginalized) colonies/territories operate as decentring spaces, becoming dynamic postcolonial centres. The consequences of colonial history in postcolonial environments in the Americas, the Caribbean, the Middle East and the South Pacific regions are being analysed. This shows that postcolonial subjectivities call for a reconceptualization of the nation as political agency. The essays interrogate the social and psychological effects of colonialism, the political subjugation and instrumentalisation of colonial pasts and the perception of the self through the colonizer’s eyes, that may still surface in discourse on identity and belonging. The "postcolonial" is then a floating concept in a global environment where some individuals still experience a neo-colonial condition while others dismiss the colonial past but may yet re-enact colonial practices. The volume shows that the extension of a colonial centre, often raised in postcolonial criticism, is synonymous with the decentring of identity, and that the re-conceptualization of a Diasporic condition initiates a new postcolonial moment based in translation and on a new modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782807600539
Publisher:	P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales
Publication date:	12/20/2017
Series:	Comparatisme et Societe / Comparatism and Society Series , #36
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Salhia Ben-Messahel is an Associate Professor at Université de Lille-SHS. She is the author of Mind the Country, Tim Winton's Fiction (2006) and Des Frontières de l'Interculturalité (2009). She has also published Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction (2017).

Vanessa Castejon is an Associate Professor at University Paris 13. She has explored Indigeneity and politics in Australia (Les Aborigènes et l’apartheid politique australien, 2005), the representation of Indigenous people in Europe and transcultural history through Ego-histoire (Ngapartji, Ngapartji, in Turn, in Turn: Egohistoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, 2014).

Table of Contents

Contents: Salhia Ben-Messahel/Vanessa Castejon: Introduction – Paolo de Meideros: Postcolonial Memories and the Shattered Self – Elisabeth Bouzonviller: Dorris and Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus, or Building Up a Hybrid Version of 1492 for a New, Mixed-Blood America – André Dodeman: Alistair MacLeod’s Engagement with the Modern World in No Great Mischief (1999) and Island (2001) – Vanessa Castejon/Anna Cole/Oliver Haag: European Views of the Indigenous «Other», A Study of Responses to Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah – Paul Giffard-Foret: In Trans/Action: Materialising Cultural Dissent, Activising Asian Australian Communities – Salhia Ben-Messahel: Australian spaces, the Reconfiguring of Cultural Maps and Enrootings – Sabine Lauret: «What sort of world would they build on our remains». Postcolonial Anxiety in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef – Laurence Randall: Calixthe Beyala’s Fiction: Disguised Writing? – Sharon Baptiste: The Evolution of the Black Cultural Archives: 1981–2015 – Fouad Nohra: Arab Post-colonial Ideologies versus Colonial Political Legacy. The case of Arab Nationalism.