The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

The scale of the challenge posed by the recent universal adoption of the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in relation to the achievement of economic, social and environmental objectives is formidable. In order to achieve the trade-related targets included in the 2030 Agenda and SDGs, understanding the trade policy levers with the most potential to advance them remains critical for policy makers. This includes at the bilateral as well as regional level. In this paper, the inclusion of criteria related to sustainable development within free trade agreements (FTAs) is critically reviewed. Through this analysis, the demand for greater coherence amongst levels of trade policy becomes obvious in order to more effectively promote the 2030 Agenda. Finally, impact assessments and review mechanisms will also need to be bolstered.

Commonwealth International Trade Working Paper 2017/01

© The Commonwealth, London
FULL TEXT: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/commonwealth/trade/international-trade-working-paper_24133175

This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.

Phil Kawana's poetry is filled with images of death and burial. Offering such new future which goes beyond these images, at first glance, can seem an impossible task for a writer who invests so much poetic energy in lamentation. While it is certainly patent that lamentation is an act of remembering marginalised voices and histories, it seems to offer little in the way of a postcolonial future in which power is restored to the disenfranchised. In resolving this quandary, I propose that the key to understanding Kawana’s poetic politics lies, paradoxically, within the very metaphor of burial which permeates his work. Kawana’s poems subtly transform ‘burial’ by instilling it with meanings that are unavailable to poets like Eliot. These meanings find their source in Māori stories and rituals of ‘burial’ that accompany death and birth alike. By connecting burial to whenua rituals at birth, and the latent potency of the unborn god Rūaumoko, Kawana’s poems remind readers that memory is “the source from which we [indigenous peoples] draw inspiration.”5 Yet, in order to understand the role of poetry in connecting readers to the past, it is necessary to transform Kawana’s double edged metaphor of burial into a critical tool which reveals the power of his poems. While poetry remains, in one sense, a ‘tombstone’ for a lost past, it is also a ‘womb’ in which a people’s collective memory is buried. Like the whenua, words become the roots which anchor native peoples to their pasts, nourishing them as they engage in the struggle to give birth to a postcolonial future.

This policy paper was prepared for Kailedoscope Trust in London, UK regarding the Commonwealth Meeting 2021. It aims to identify and analyse specific cases of violence targeting  LGBTIQ+ activists and their organisations in Commonwealth countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. To effectively meet this aims we contacted LGBTIQ+ activists and their organizations in the 54 Commonwealth countries for conducting a survey,
interviews, and data collection. The case selection process depended on the response we received from the NGOs we contacted and the availability of data.

I investigate Walcott's dynamics of textualized orality, in which print is disguised as speech so as to erase itself. Using the visual to suggest the oral, the poet deploys a range of rhetorical figures whose resemblances of sound and form alter meaning. I show how Walcott performs a seamless collaboration between word as text and word as sound, and generates meaning through musication all the while emphasizing the iconic variations of the page.

The appropriation of place and language is a key strategy by which post-colonial writers represent the identity of the individual. These two tasks go hand-in-hand because, in order to establish one’s bond with the land and re-write it from one’s perspective, language must also be stripped of its British connotations and adapted to the individual’s consciousness. Because of Singapore’s unique experience of post-colonialism and nation-building, various other presences besides the British coloniser also influence the way that language and place are conceived. These include the homelands of China and India and the government of Singapore, among others. Examining the works of poets from three different periods of the nation's history, I discuss how each practices appropriation through different means and to different ends as they respond to their specific historical circumstances. The three poets I will focus on are Wang Gungwu (pre-independence), Edwin Thumboo (early independence) and Alfian Sa’at (late independence). Each articulates an identity that is a hybrid of its various influences and unique to its moment of utterance.

The symbiotic relationship between theatre and society, especially, in the striking effects of reflection and refraction of actual acts of social life, as dramatised or staged in the symbolic-aesthetic worlds of theatre, is the germ of this paper.

This essay examines an instance of the use of folklore by writers in postcolonial African societies to problematize postcolonial systems in fiction. The essay discusses how Benjamin Kwakye exploits the trickster character as a semiotic figure to construe the themes of survival and social and economic insecurity in The Clothes of Nakedness. The features of the trickster deployed include the spider imagery and his webbing across geographical margins, the use of trickery and manipulation as survival and power-building strategies, and the role of the trickster as a “hero-scamp” and villain. Towards the end of the narrative, the trickster is removed from focalization, and villainous events he engineers are construed as happening in spite of him. He remerges at the end as the ubiquitous spider in whom all mysteries make sense. These strategies are related to postcolonial issues of corruption, socioeconomic marginalization, and international aid.

The South-Asian English literature largely reflects the responses to the colonial and pseudo-colonial experiences of the British Raj era. A love-hate relationship with western elite culture brought to the colonies by the British is one of the themes reflected in the Sri Lankan English literature. The present paper aims to study the said theme as reflected in Sri-Lankan diasporic poet Regi Siriwardena's poem "Colonial Cameo". The speaker in the poem, an Oriental, finds the occidental attractive, prestigious and the model to be emulated in the beginning. The speaker is ashamed of his mother and mother tongue in the beginning; but in the course time he realises the hypocrisy of the occidental and discovers self esteem and love for his mother, mother tongue and mother land. Such kind of dilemma in the minds of the Oriental about the occidental as depicted in the said poem can be termed as 'occi-oriental' dilemma. The conglomeration of such conflicting attitudes can be conceptualised as the 'Occidentalism' of the Orientals. This seems to be one of the salient features of the literature of the Diaspora.

Sveučilište u Zagrebu Filozofski fakultet Odsjek za povijest umjetnosti Seminar iz kolegija Izvaneuropske kulture i moderna umjetnost Postkolonijalna književnost -područje britanske kolonizacije Irena Curić 2. godina dipl. ANG/PUM Mentor: dr.sc. Lovorka Magaš Bilandžić, viši asistent Veljača, 2015.

The Adivasis of India have been subjected to systematic oppression for centuries and postcolonial India continues with the same processes by different means. Hansda Sowvendra Sekhar's short story, "The Adivasi Will Not Dance" explores the subalternization of such communities as well as the evolution of subaltern consciousness, as manifested by the protagonist of the text, Mangal Murmu, whose monologue constitutes the narrative. The paper will not only explore Sekhar's representation of such subaltern consciousness, situated within the context of contemporary conflicts, but also intervene in vexed debates about representing the subaltern, especially in the context of Indian Writing in English where subalternized characters, especially Adivasis, either remain scarce or persist as stereotypes bereft of agency.

Este estudio de La Llamarada tanto como una novela de la tierra como de afirmación nacional, muestra un sistema discriminatorio de  explotación económica, social y racialmente estratificado en el contexto obrero del cañaveral y las centrales azucareras durante la década de los años 30. Dicho sistema se revela en el conflicto interior de Juan Antonio y su choque con los demás personajes masculinos y el ambiente hostil. Juan Antonio huye del cañaveral y se casa con Pepiña para restablecer lazos de seguridad económica con la vieja élite de hacendados en un mundo idílico de añoranzas de un pasado mejor, racialmente blanco e hispanizante. Con su vuelta a la tierra se reproduce o repite contradictori
amente la estructura interna jerarquizada, social y racialmente discriminatoria de poder de la nación. La Llamarada denuncia un sistema de desigualdad racial y explotación económica latifundista y absentista del pasado. Sin embargo, permite criticar las alianzas entre el poder económico político transnacional y estructuras nacionales jerarquizadas social y racialmente discriminatorias que se repiten. Se perpetúan así, formas indirectas o más sutiles de explotación económica discriminatorias del trabajador puertorriqueño, en una economía de dependencia o turística migratoria, dentro del contexto moderno o posmoderno de una economía globalizada.

The fact that women are not defined by the confines of domesticity and colonization and that they can be travellers in their own rights was proved true by none other than Sunity Devee, Maharani of Cooch Behar. Her The Autobiography of an Indian Princess (1921) recounts an Indian princess’s activities in the court of Queen Victoria. Sunity accompanies her husband, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar to the court celebration of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. It gives a detailed idea of what it is like to be in the heart of the Empire for an Indian traveller. Sunity Devee’s autobiography has a freshness and originality about it, because at no point in the book do we find her donning the garb of a typical feminist propagandist nor reinforcing pro-colonial sentiments, judging by her position as the wife of an English educated and colonized Maharaja and, as the Maharani of a subjected Cooch Behar.

This article examines a series of moments of reading and writing in Leonardo Padura’s Havana Quartet detective fiction from the perspective of postcolonial spatial analysis. In contrast to the ways that spaces of crime have been the focus of the spatial examination of crime fiction in work by Hartman, Schmid, and others, and in contrast to the unspecified spaces described by Jenkins as the focus for spatial analysis in the context of a tradition of very mappable geographies in Swedish crime fiction, my work examines a Havana that, while mappable and fundamentally concerned with space, is not always focused on crime or the business of detecting crime. I will explore the spaces of reading in the Havana Quartet books to consider the ways in which reading spaces come to be connected with crime spaces, and what it means when these spaces are brought into contact, engaging with the work of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu in the context of postcolonial globalization and its impact on the literary marketplace.
As Kumaraswami and Kapcia note, the use of space as a conceptual tool enables an analysis of Cuban social reality that goes beyond ‘simplistic assumptions about power structures and their ability to determine sociocultural life’ (Kumaraswami and Kapcia, 2012, 51). I intend to show that spatial analysis enables, too, a deeper understanding of the function and significance of moments of reading in Cuban fiction, and by focusing on Padura’s crime fiction, this paper will explore the ways in which the spaces of reading and the spaces of crime come into contact in the Havana Quartet series, to establish the function and meaning of these moments in the context of the changing Cuban literary marketplace. 

Keywords
Leonardo Padura; detective fiction; postcolonial; space; spatial; literary marketplace; reading; literary culture; Cuba; Havana; globalization; Special Period; capitalism

Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, Europe's empires in Africa and Asia were largely dismantled; in the late 1970s, postcolonial studies as field of scholarly inquiry, primarily in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, began to emerge in the AngloAmerican academy. What is the relationship between decolonization and postcolonial theory? How does decolonization remain an urgent task in the present? How might theory itself be decolonized? Drawing on the work of anticolonial national liberation theorists including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Amílcar Cabral, and postcolonial theorists like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gauri Viswanathan, this chapter examines the multiple objects and aspects of decolonization: political economy, epistemology, culture, language, and nature (including natural resources). The unevenness and incompletion of decolonization can be understood by considering the various roles that colonizers, anticolonial nationalists, and Cold War superpowers played in decolonization: too often, postcolonial Independence did not bring national liberation.

Questions of identity, representation, and difference have a distinctive status in postcolonial studies. "What distinguishes postcolonial approaches to translation is that they examine intercultural encounters in contexts marked "by unequal power relations" (Shamma, 2009, p.185). In postcolonial discourse, language is not neutral and thus translation can never be impersonal. Postcolonialist critics highlight that the translator needs to take the larger framework of power relations into account and neglecting the sociocultural background of the text is considered a major problem in postcolonial studies. Therefore, the translator, from a postcolonial perspective, should embed the translated text in a shell that explains the necessary historical and political background for the receiving audience through the use of introductions, footnotes, critical essays, glossaries, maps, etc. The translator, in postcolonial discourse, must reflect the context in which texts are produced through historicization. Though the translator cannot and will not produce the exact same text, what s/he can do is to encode the text in its textual and contextual spheres through annotations and glosses. For the sake of this paper, I analyze Ghassan Kanafani"s masterpiece Men In the Sun from a postcolonial lens, arguing that Hilary Kilpatrick, the translator, tends to show apolitical impartiality through transferring the surface meaning not the deep meaning of the text with a tendency of not thickening the translation with annotations, glosses, or footnotes to contextualize the piece.

Topography or landscape has been a major aspect of English poetry since 17 th century. The genre called topographical poetry was established in 1642 with Denham's " Cooper's Hill ". Since then the whole corpus of English poetry has been overflowing with brilliant examples of landscape poetry right from Pope's " Windsor Castle " to Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey ". Indian Writing in English too abounds in several examples of topographical poetry – from Jayanta Mahapatra's Orissa, to the pristine hills and rivers of Mamang Dai's Arunachal Pradesh, diverse landscape of India has been featured in its poetry. However, readers will be thoroughly mistaken in believing landscape poetry to be merely picturesque portrayals of geographical reality. This paper attempts to study the works of two poets from two geographical extremes – Arun Kolatkar from western and Jaydeep Sarangi from eastern India – tracing their different attitudes and observation of the topography they set their poems in. The analysis is directed towards how topography or landscape is just the pretext for these poets to articulate different ideas and emotions – while Kolatkar takes up the postcolonial project of subcultural resistance in his Jejuri poems, Sarangi in his Jhargram poems reverts to nostalgia and connectedness to one's roots.

This is a paper I gave to the New Polis conference at the University of Denver by Zoom on 16th April 2021. https://thenewpolis.com/2021/03/22/decoloniality-and-disintegration-of-western-cognitive-empire-rethinking-sovereignty-and-territoriality-in-the-21st-century-international-conference-program/ Here is the video with powerpoint  slides https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkeL60bk-g8
In this paper I identify two problems:
1. The way the language and history of colonialism make the question of the colonial status of Scotland contentious. In histories of empire (including postcolonial histories) the role of incorporating Union of 1707 tends to be treated as a Scottish problem rather than part of a global analysis. By contrast, in histories of Scotland the geopolitical context can be overwhelmed by the detail and the who, what and when, which can obscure the why and the colonial context.
2. The problem of collusion and its implications for colonial/decolonial/postcolonial studies. I show how approaches to competitive oppression, based on anachronistic readings of history, perpetuate the tactic of divide and rule - so effectively applied by colonial powers.
I re-read the 'incorporating Union' of 1707 as one of the many instances of the rhetoric of imperialism. I propose this can assist in a consideration of the status of Scotland in the contemporary debate. - it's a kind of ‘no but yes argument’ - which addresses the continuing dynamics of colonial strategies being played by London to obstruct Scottish Independence in 2021. This is not a paper about the past, it is a paper about the present.

This essay enriches current black queer British and black queer diasporic scholarship by foregrounding the relevance of home-making, affect, and queer ageing for these contexts. I begin by situating relevant diasporic and performative aspects of queer home-making, discussing contributions by both scholars and writers. As a result, “home-making” arises in tension between variable meanings, including home-making as bound up with heteronormative privilege, as facilitating queer heterotopias of security and happiness, queer home-making as unsafe and/or jeopardized by (internalized) homophobia. I complement my conceptualizations with an intersectional discussion of two novels: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) intervenes in a transphobic 1990s Anglo-American context, queering and post-colonializing the biography of Jazz musician Billy Tipton by transferring his life story to the UK and giving him an African father. Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman (2013) queers the home-making project of the Windrush generation, depicting its elderly characters’ struggles to reconcile their secret long-term queer love relationship with the expectations of their Caribbean community, and with their own increasing desire to make a queer home together. The novels offer a combined writing back to heteronormative ideologies of home-making in a transatlantic, black British context and to disempowering narratives of queer diaspora. They position queer ageing, frequently couched in silences and/or heterosexist othering, as central for demands and representations of queer viability, and thus for legitimizing queer claims to citizenship. The novels thus offer diverse contributions to an ongoing process of making a home for queerness in imaginations of black Britain. Read in the current context of surging racism, populism, and homophobia, they also stand as stark reminders of the diversity and validity of non-normative life paths as well as of the legitimacy and humanity of those seeking “liveable lives” in Britain and elsewhere.

This paper will conduct a reconfiguration of nation as a more inclusive space which includes ambivalent migrants, who are also global citizens. Thus, nation comprises subjects who are more or less than just the ideal national citizens. It will explain the liminal spaces that these migrants occupy in between the nation and the global world. The objective of this study is to define nation beyond the geographical boundaries and in terms of the transnational and diasporic identities. The narration of nation is integrated with the ambivalent modernity, cultural transformation, migration patterns, post-9/11 resurgence of American nationalism and its impact on Pakistani diaspora living in America. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid conceives the shift in modern life, but expands his range and focus to the shifting national identities vis-à-vis the global citizenships. When framed through nation, and diaspora, these shifting identities reflect the shifting postcolonial scene.

When the novel Once Were Warriors was first published in 1990, public opinion was often one of shock. To realise why Once Were Warriors had a controversial reception, in New Zealand at least, we should remember the literary and political context of the time, which is the subject of this paper.

This is the introduction to my book "Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction" (HarperCollins, India 2016). The book can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Pakistan-Conversations-Identity-Nationhood/dp/9352640136. In Pakistan, Readings in Lahore and Liberty Books in Karachi usually stock copies of my book.

NB: If you are unable to get hold of my book for any reason and need it for your work, please drop me a line and I will arrange for a copy to be sent to you.

By engaging with multiview, multivocality, and transtextuality, as well as the dialogical process between writer and reader, I investigate how contemporary Indian fiction -- within the brackets of postcolonial literature in general -- articulates and negotiates meaning in our postmodern globalized world.

These are surplus laughter, mild surprise We ate among Friends. Singapore is a nation where people give a lot of value to friendship. They ate with their friends in a jovial and jolly mood with surplus laughter and mild surprizes. This shows the liveliness in their lifestyle. Here poet is contrasting this carpe-diem style of life with the past colonisers who used to boast about their achievements, talk a lot about their facts (exactly like statics and facts made by them are discussed in the poem A far Cry from Africa). So this kind of conversation to show that they are more superior was opted by the colonisers (Eurocentric's). He came late, our guest of honour Perhaps the cares of state, of nerves, Habits of self-debate, took time to shed One who knows famous faces thought He looked angry and red unlikely To sheath his tongue that The good food would not help We ate amidst silence. It's a general practice that the guest of honour will arrive to the function a little late, to show that he has a busy schedule, to emphasise his importance. The poet is mocking this by

This essay attempts to demonstrate the role of contextualisation and background knwoledge in understanding English-speaking African literature. It takes the example of three short stories "Certain Winds from the South" by Ama Ata Aidoo,  and Chinua Achebe's "Civil Peace" and "Dead Men's Path" in order to explain some cultural and linguistic ambiguities. It shows that how impenetrable African literature can be to alien readers who demonstrate serious backgound knowledge of the setting, history, and culture.