This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom. It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism's gendered and racialised governmentalities, Black women's everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising epistemologies of freedom. These, in turn, repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured, the book begins with the narratives of freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK, decolonisation of the British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large in these considerations. In doing all of this, the author unravels the colonial legacies that continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history, politics, feminism, race and postcoloniality.

The heroes of the British and French empires stood at the vanguard of the vibrant cultures of imperialism that emerged in Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Their stories are well known. Scholars have tended to assume that figures such as Livingstone and Gordon, or Marchand and Brazza, vanished rapidly at the end of empire. Yet imperial heroes did not disappear after 1945, as British and French flags were lowered around the world. On the contrary, their reputations underwent a variety of metamorphoses in both the former metropoles and the former colonies. This book develops a framework to understand the complex legacies of decolonisation, both political and cultural, through the case study of imperial heroes. We demonstrate that the 'decolonisation' of imperial heroes was a much more complex and protracted process than the political retreat from empire, and that it is still an ongoing phenomenon, even half a century after the world has ceased to be 'painted in red'. Whilst Decolonising Imperial Heroes explores the appeal of the explorers, humanitarians and missionaries whose stories could be told without reference to violence against colonized peoples, it also analyses the persistence of imperial heroes as sites of political dispute in the former metropoles. Demonstrating that the work of remembrance was increasingly carried out by diverse, fragmented groups of non-state actors, in a process we call 'the privatisation of heroes', the book reveals the surprising rejuvenation of imperial heroes in former colonies, both in nation-building narratives and as heritage sites. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Between 1986 and 1994, East Africa's postcolonial, political settlement was profoundly challenged as four revolutionary 'liberation' movements seized power in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda. After years of armed struggle against vicious dictatorships, these movements transformed from rebels to rulers, promising to deliver 'fundamental change'. This study exposes, examines and underlines the acute challenges each has faced in doing so. Drawing on over 130 interviews with the region's post-liberation elite, undertaken over the course of a decade, Jonathan Fisher takes a fresh and empirically-grounded approach to explaining the fast-moving politics of the region over the last three decades, focusing on the role and influence of its guerrilla governments. East Africa after Liberation sheds critical light on the competing pressures post-liberation governments contend with as they balance reformist aspirations with accommodation of counter-vailing interests, historical trajectories and their own violent organisational cultures.

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town used the slogan #RhodesMustFall to demand that a monument of Cecil John Rhodes, the empire builder of British South Africa, be removed from the university campus. Soon students at Oxford University called for the removal of a statue of Rhodes from Oriel College. The radical idea of decolonization at the forefront of these student protests continues to be a key element in South African educational institutions as well as those in Europe and North America. This book explores the uptake of decolonization in the institutional curriculum, given the political demands for decolonization on South African campuses, and the generally positive reception of the idea by university leaders. Based on interviews with more than two hundred academic teachers at ten universities, this is an innovative account of how institutions have engaged with, subverted, and transformed the decolonization movement since #RhodesMustFall.

The term aecolonisationAe encompasses much diversity, from the settlement of the western Mediterranean and the Black Sea by Greeks in the archaic period to the foundation of Roman colonies in mainland Italy during the Republic. Though very different in their motives and methods, both Greek and Roman colonisations are presented by our sources as organised and clearly defined processes, within which internal and external relations were firmly delineated. This volume contains six new studies, two Greek and four Roman. Contributors employ historiographical, comparative and post-colonial approaches to question ancient constructs. The book contains detailed case-studies as well as synoptic treatments. Contributors build on recent research in Greek and Roman history to show how ideologies of colonisation develop and come to dominate the historical record.

This book explores and discusses emerging perspectives of Ubuntu from the vantage point of "ordinary" people and connects it to human rights and decolonizing discourses. It engages a decolonizing perspective in writing about Ubuntu as an indigenous concept. The fore grounding argument is that one's positionality speaks to particular interests that may continue to sustain oppressions instead of confronting and dismantling them. Therefore, a decolonial approach to writing indigenous experiences begins with transparency about the researcher's own positionality. The emerging perspectives of this volume are contextual, highlighting the need for a critical reading for emerging, transformative and alternative visions in human relations and social structures.

This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. This research contributes to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Table of Contents

1. South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era – An Introduction

Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker

2. Fragments of the Past: Homeland Politics and the South African Transition, 1990–2014

Jason Robinson

3. Material Remains: Artifice versus Artefact(s) in the Archive of Bantustan Rule

Shireen Ally

4. This House Is Not My Own …! Temporalities in a South African Homeland

Steffen Jensen

5. Custom, Normativity and Authority in South Africa

Hylton White

6. South African Land Restitution, White Claimants and the Fateful Frontier of Former KwaNdebele

Olaf Zenker

7. ‘Women Use their Strength in the House’: Savings Clubs in an Mpumalanga Village

Deborah James

8. Moralising Magic? A Brief History of Football Potions in a South African Homeland Area, 1958–2010

Isak Niehaus

9. City Slums, Rural Homesteads: Migrant Culture, Displaced Urbanism and the Citizenship of the Serviced House

Leslie Bank

10. ‘Keeping Land for Their Children’: Generation, Migration and Land in South Africa’s Transkei

Derick A. Fay

11. Epilogue

Joost Fontein

Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei and Bophuthatswana: four African countries that, though existing in a literal sense, were, in each case, considered by the international community to be a component part of a larger sovereign state through which all official communications and interactions were still conducted. This book is concerned with the intertwined histories of these four right-wing secessionist states in Southern Africa as they fought for but ultimately failed to win sovereign recognition. Along the way, Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana each invented new national symbols and traditions, created all the trappings of independent statehood, and each proclaimed that their movements were legitimate expressions of national self-determination. Josiah Brownell provides a unique comparison between these states, viewed together as a common reaction to decolonization and the triumph of anticolonial African nationalism. Describing the ideological stakes of their struggles for sovereignty, Brownell explores the international political controversies that their drives for independence initiated inside and outside Africa. By combining their stories, this book draws out the relationships between the emergence of these four pseudo-states and the fragility of the entire postcolonial African state structure.

This essential book explores the early years of military rule following the Free Officers' coup of 1952. Enriched by interviews with actors in and observers of the events, Nasser's Blessed Movement shows how the officers' belief in a quick reformation by force was transformed into a vital, long-term process that changed the face of Egypt. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the military regime launched an ambitious program of political, social, and economic reform. Egypt became a leader in Arab and non-aligned politics, as well as a model for political mobilization and national development throughout the Third World. Although Nasser exerted considerable personal influence over the course of events, his rise as a national and regional hero in the mid-1950s was preceded by a period in which he and his colleagues groped for direction, and in which many Egyptians disliked--even feared--them. Joel Gordon analyzes the goals, programs, successes, and failures of the young regime, providing the most comprehensive account of the Egyptian revolution to date. This edition includes a new Introduction that looks back at the post-1952 period from a post-2011 perspective.

The Subaltern Studies Collective, founded in 1982, was begun with the goal of establishing a new critique of both colonialist and nationalist perspectives in the historiography of colonized countries. Its most famous members -- Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and others -- were instrumental in establishing the discipline best known as postcolonial studies. A selection of the definitive and most influential work from the collective's eponymous journal, these essays chart the course of subaltern history from an early concentration on peasant revolts and popular insurgency to an engagement with the more complex processes of domination and subordination in a variety of the changing institutions and practices.

Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, this book seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics. In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain-three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.

The emergence of the modern Middle East is the result of three complementary historical developments: the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the institution of British and French control in its stead and the nationalist challenges to this colonial scramble. The introduction of international borders that accompanied this process is commonly portrayed as the drawing of lines in the sand, an artificial partitioning that brought diplomatic closure to an otherwise contested historical space. For the past two decades, insights gained from the burgeoning field of borderlands studies have enabled a new generation of scholars to challenge such popular depictions. For them, the region's borderlands were not sites of peripheral activity, but rather liminal spaces criss-crossed by global flows and circulations central to state- and nation-formation across the Middle East. Regimes of Mobility offers a select number of case studies that highlight the connectedness of the politics of borderlands throughout the interwar Middle East.

This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. This research contributes to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Table of Contents

1. South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era – An Introduction

Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker

2. Fragments of the Past: Homeland Politics and the South African Transition, 1990–2014

Jason Robinson

3. Material Remains: Artifice versus Artefact(s) in the Archive of Bantustan Rule

Shireen Ally

4. This House Is Not My Own …! Temporalities in a South African Homeland

Steffen Jensen

5. Custom, Normativity and Authority in South Africa

Hylton White

6. South African Land Restitution, White Claimants and the Fateful Frontier of Former KwaNdebele

Olaf Zenker

7. ‘Women Use their Strength in the House’: Savings Clubs in an Mpumalanga Village

Deborah James

8. Moralising Magic? A Brief History of Football Potions in a South African Homeland Area, 1958–2010

Isak Niehaus

9. City Slums, Rural Homesteads: Migrant Culture, Displaced Urbanism and the Citizenship of the Serviced House

Leslie Bank

10. ‘Keeping Land for Their Children’: Generation, Migration and Land in South Africa’s Transkei

Derick A. Fay

11. Epilogue

Joost Fontein

Lionel Curtis C.H. once counted among the great and the good, working behind the scenes of international politics and honoured as the `pioneer of a great idea' - international federation as the natural successor to empire. He advocated federation as the way to create a new South Africa after the Boer War; he called for self-government in India in 1912; in 1921 he was instrumental in attempting to pacify the Irish Troubles by treating Eire as if it were a self-governing Commonwealth Dominion. He went on to preach the conversion of the Empire-Commonwealth into a multinational federation, which, in association with the United States, would serve as a model for a united Europe, and even for world government. He founded the Round Table think-tank, the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, and the Oxford Society. He lobbied indefatigably for his vision of the Commonwealth as a new world order, to be more effective that the League of Nations in making wars obsolete. In the process, he exasperated nationalists and imperialists alike as a prophet of apparently lost causes. He deserves to be remembered not only for what he achieved but for what he was: the bore who never lost a friend; the optimist who stuck to his belief when all was lost, the third-class scholar who became a Fellow of All Souls; the visionary riding his hobby-horse into the drawing rooms of high political society and yet invited affectionately to return. The remarkable character of the man and the influence he exerted on the history of the Empire and Commonwealth are explored in this authoritative biography.

Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a destruction of property, a system of banking, and a struggle for prestige, the potlatch is one of the founding concepts of anthropology. Some researchers even claim to have discovered traces of the potlatch in all the economies of the world. However, as the author of this text shows in this closely-argued work, the potlatch was in fact invented by the 19th-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In addition to giving the world its own potlatch, the law also generated a random collection of "potlatch papers" dating from the 1860s to the 1930s. Bracken analyzes these documents - some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known - to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain "first nations" and then deploying those fictions against them. Rather than referring to objects that already exist, the "potlatch papers" instead gave themselves something to refer to: a mirror in which to observe not "the Indian," but "the European."

In recent decades, much of the most vital literature written in English has come from the former colonies of Great Britain. But while postcolonial novelists such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, and V. S. Naipaul have been widely celebrated, the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected.
In "The Hybrid Muse," Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English, infusing modern and contemporary poetry with indigenous metaphors and creoles. A rich and vibrant poetry, he contends, has issued from the hybridization of the English muse with the long resident muses of Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Starting with the complex case of Ireland, Ramazani closely analyzes the work of leading postcolonial poets and explores key questions about the relationship between poetry and postcolonialism. As inheritors of both imperial and native cultures, poets such as W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, A. K. Ramanujan, and Okot p'Bitek invent compelling new forms to articulate the tensions and ambiguities of their cultural in-betweeness. They forge hybrid figures, vocabularies, and genres that embody the postcolonial condition.
Engaging an array of critical topics, from the aesthetics of irony and metaphor to the politics of nationalism and anthropology, Ramazani reconceptualizes issues central to our understanding of both postcolonial literatures and twentieth-century poetry. The first book of its kind, "The Hybrid Muse" will help internationalize the study of poetry, and in turn, strengthen the place of poetry in postcolonial studies.

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

The 'Rhodesian crisis' of the 1960s and 1970s, and the early 1980s crisis of independent Zimbabwe, can be understood against the background of Cold War historical transformations brought on by, among other things, African decolonization in the 1960s; the failure of American power in Vietnam and the rise of Third World political power at the UN and elsewhere. In this African history of the diplomacy of decolonization in Zimbabwe, Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia examines the relationship and rivalry between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe over many years of diplomacy, and how both leaders took advantage of Cold War racialized thinking about what Zimbabwe should be, including Anglo-American preoccupations with keeping whites from leaving after Independence. Based on a wealth of archival source materials, including materials that have recently become available through thirty-year rules in the UK and South Africa, it uncovers how foreign relations bureaucracies the US, UK, and SA created a Cold War 'race state' notion of Zimbabwe that permitted them to rationalize Mugabe's state crimes in return for Cold War loyalty to Western powers.

Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi's Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism's relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngu gi wa Thiong'o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought-hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism. The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking-as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.

Taiwan's relationship with mainland China is one of the most fraught in East Asia, a key issue in the island's domestic politics, and a major obstacle in Sino-American relations. "Between Assimilation and Independence" explores the roots of this conflict in the immediate postwar period, when the Nationalist government led by Jiang Jieshi took control of the island after fifty years of Japanese rule. It is the first in-depth examination of how the Nationalists consolidated their rule over Taiwan even as they collapsed on the mainland.
During the 1945-50 period, the Taiwanese experienced disappointment with Nationalist misrule; struggles over decolonization and the Japanese legacy; a violent uprising and brutal government response; and the chaos surrounding Jiang Jieshi's retreat with his mainlander-dominated authoritarian regime. This book, based on archival materials newly available in Taiwan and the United States, shows how the Taiwanese sought to place the island between independence--becoming a sovereign nation--and assimilation into China as a province.

Using firsthand accounts--journals, letters from British officers in the field, reports from colonial governors in the colonies--Michael Pearson has provided a contemporary report of the Revolution as the British witnessed it. Seen from this perspective, some of the major events of the war are given startling interpretations: For example, the British considered their defeat at Bunker Hill nothing more than a minor setback, especially in light of their capture of New York and Philadelphia. Only at the very end of the conflict did they realize that the Yankees had lost the battles but won the war. From the Boston Tea Party to that day in 1785 when the first U.S. ambassador presented his credentials to a grudging George III, here is the full account of "those damned rebels" who somehow managed to found a new nation.

A Concise History of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonisation, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements towards political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora of Caribbean people. In this second edition, Higman covers the political, social, and environmental developments of the last decade, offering sections on insular politics, Cuban communism, earthquakes, hurricanes, climate change, resource ecologies, epidemics, identity and reparations. Written in a lively and accessible style, and current with the most recent research, the book provides a compelling narrative of Caribbean history essential for students and visitors.