Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa's Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000 is a study of Okinawa's incorporation into a subordinate position in the Japanese nation-state, and the role that cultural heritage, especially Okinawa's iconic Shuri Castle, plays in creating, maintaining, and negotiating that position. Tze May Loo argues that Okinawa's cultural heritage has been - and continues to be - an important tool with which the Japanese state and its agents, the United States during its 27-year rule of the islands (1945-1972), and the Okinawan people articulated and negotiated Okinawa's relationship with the Japanese nation state. For these three groups, Okinawa's cultural heritage was a powerful way to utilize the symbolism of material objects to manage and represent the islands' cultural past for their own political aims. The Japanese state, its agents, and American authorities have all sought to use Okinawa's cultural heritage to control, discipline, and subordinate Okinawa. For Okinawans, their cultural heritage gave them a powerful way to resist Japanese and American rule, and to negotiate for a more equitable position for themselves. At the same time, however, this book finds that Okinawan strategies to deploy their cultural heritage politically are deeply intertwined with, and to a significant extent enabled by, precisely these Japanese and American attempts to govern Okinawa through its heritage. This examination of the political role of Okinawa's cultural heritage is a window into a wider process of how nation-states and other political formations make themselves thinkable to the people they rule, how the ruled seek out spaces to make claims of their own, and how cultural pasts, once made usable, are implicated in these processes.

Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. Through an analysis of a variety of texts ranging from literature to prison correspondence to tourist questionnaires it exposes the ways in which nationalism relies on fictions of insularity and intactness, which the island and island tourism appear to provide. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island form exposes an anxiety about boundaries and limits on the part of the postcolonial nation. In appropriating island tourism, the new nation tends to recapitulate the failures and crises of the colonial nation before it. Starting with the first literary tourist, Robinson Crusoe, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism goes on to show how authors such as JM Coetzee, Romesh Gunesekera, and Julian Barnes have explored the outlines and implications of islandness. It argues that each text expresses a profound discomfort with national form by undoing the form of the island through a variety of narrative strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres. By throwing the category of the island into crisis, these texts let uncertainties about the postcolonial nation and its violent practices emerge as doubt in the narratives themselves. Finally, in its selection of texts that shuttle between South Africa, Great Britain, and Sri Lanka, equalizing the former colonial metropole and its outposts, it offers an alternative disciplinary mapping of current postcolonial writing.

From a colonial campaign that was envisioned by France as the redemption of its Algerian "children" through Western civilization to Algerian Independence that was lived by both parties as a bloody divorce; recent Algerian history has been imagined and represented in terms of the family. Prominent authors such as Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri pondered their own fate during the War of Independence as the "mixed" children of a failed colonial marriage. Contemporary postcolonial authors such as Rachid Boudjedra, Yasmina Salah, and Arezki Mellal have filled their narratives with orphaned children searching for ideal parents as a civil war ripped Algeria apart in the 1990s. Violent Beginnings: Literary Representations of Postcolonial Algeria explores how violence, during the War of Independence (1954-1962) to the more recent civil war (1991-2002), has shaped literary representations of both family and nation in contemporary literature. For example, discussions of the struggle for independence in Assia Djebar's La femme sans sepulture and Ahlam Mostaghanemi's Memory of the Flesh, represent sexual torture associated with this earlier war period as having a negative impact on victims' ability to have children and contribute to the development of the Algerian nation. Texts examining the more recent civil war such as Rachid Boudjedra's La vie a l'endroit and Yasmina Salah's Glass Nation establish a link between the earlier violence of the independence struggle and contemporary events. Additionally, these texts proceed to demonstrate how violence has shaped familial and national structures, more specifically causing distorted familial bonds and political chaos in contemporary Algerian society.

Neo-liberal Strategies of Governing India and its companion volume Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India tell the story of governance in independent India and address the critical question: how is a post-colonial democracy governed? Further, they attempt to understand why the process of governing a post-colonial democracy, particularly in the neo

This book analyses South Asian Islam's engagement with the West, and Britain in particular. It traces the roots of British multiculturalism to South Asia and the Deobandi school of Islam. The work shows how the pattern of interaction that initially emerged between the Deobandi Muslims and the colonial British state in late-19th century replicated i

This volume investigates how, where and when subjects and citizens come into being, assert themselves and exercise subjecthood or citizenship in the formation of modern India. It argues for the importance of understanding legal practice how rights are performed in dispute and negotiation from the parliament and courts to street corners and fiel

Mauritian independence in 1968 marked the end of a regime favorable to the Franco-Mauritians, the island's white colonial elite. Now, in postcolonial Mauritius, this group is faced with a much more diverse power constellation and often feels in competition with others vying for their privileges. Though this is a clear departure from the colonial heydays, Franco-Mauritians have been able to continue their elite position into the early twenty-first century. This book focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and with regards to elites and power in general, addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.

Grace Ibingira seeks the fundamental causes of the widespread upheavals (at least thirty-eight army coups in the past fifteen years) in African states today and finds them in the inadequate colonial preparation of African leaders for the responsibilities of independence, the earlier practices of "divide and raie,aEURO and the "winner-take-allaEURO polici

This volume is a theoretico-empirical study of nations and nationalism on a global scale. It enquires if the idea of the nation, by its own logic, is feasible and whether India fulfils the requirement of nationhood with a reasonable prospect of survival. The monograph engages with the theories of nation and nationalism and examines if they are rele

This book bridges the gap between the simultaneously unfolding histories of postcoloniality and the forty-five-year ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Not only did the superpowers rely upon the decolonizing world to further imperial agendas, but the postcolony itself was shaped, epistemologically and materially, by Cold War discourses, policies, narratives, and paradigms. Ruptures and appropriated trajectories in the postcolonial world can be attributed to the ways in which the Cold War became the afterlife of European colonialism. Through a speculative assemblage, this book connects the dots, deftly taking the reader from Frantz Fanon to Aaron Swartz, and from assassinations in the Third World to American multiculturalism. Whether the Cold War subverted the dream of decolonization or created a compromised cultural sphere, this book makes those rich palimpsests visible.

"The Dutch Atlantic" investigates the Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and assesses the historical consequences of this for contemporary European society. Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen show how the slave trade and slavery intertwined economic, social and cultural elements, including nation-state formation in the Netherlands and across Europe. They explore the mobilization of European populations in the implementation of policies that facilitated the slave trade and examine how European countries created and expanded laws that perpetuated colonization. Addressing key themes such as the incorporation of former slaves into post-slavery states and contemporary collective efforts to forget and/or remember slavery and its legacy in the Netherlands, this is an essential text for students of European history and postcolonial studies.

The Social Context of the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya (1952-1960) explores the social aspects of the Mau Mau Movement, which have been relatively unexamined in scholarly studies of the movement. This work situates the Mau Mau in the context of "Social Movement" literature; and more importantly, blends theory and practice through the use of first-hand narrative from Muigai Kanyua, a fighter in the Mau Mau forest for at least three years. Muigai Kanyua describes the need for strong social networks, trust, faith, and determination in the community and how the Mau Mau provided this courage and perseverance. Through detailed research and Kanyua's narrative, author Kinuthia Macharia explores the social climate that united different clans and ethnic groups and sustained the Mau Mau Movement. The work also examines the role of women in the movement and combat, and the enduring relevance of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya's politics and economic development.

The creation of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) at the close of the First World War, and its successor, the United Nations Trusteeship Council (TC), following the Second, were watersheds in the history of modern imperialism. For the first time, the international community had asserted that the well-being of colonial peoples was not merely the private concern of metropolitan states, but a shared responsibility of humankind that transcended national boundaries. Editors R.M. Douglas, Michael D. Callahan, and Elizabeth Bishop have assembled a wide array of scholars to assess the relative weight to be placed on international influence in the process of decolonization. Imperialism on Trial reveals, across a broad cross-section of geographical and political settings, the operation of the complicated and often conflicted dynamic between the national and international dimensions of colonialism in its final and most historically consequential phase.

The Franco-Algerian War (1954-62) remains a powerful international symbol of Third Worldism and the finality of Empire. Through its nuanced analysis of the war's depiction in film, The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens locates an international reckoning with history that both condemns and exonerates past generations. Algerian and French production partnerships-such as Hors-la-loi, (Outside the Law, Rachid Bouchareb, 2010) and Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari, 2013)-are one of several ways citizens collaborate to unearth a shared history and its legacy. Nicole Beth Wallenbrock probes cinematic discourse to shed new light on topics including: the media revelation of torture and atomic bomb tests; immigration's role in the evolution of the war's meaning; and the complex relationship of the intertwined film cultures. The first chapter summarizes the Franco-Algerian War in 20th-century film, thus grounding subsequent queries with Algeria's moudjahid or freedom-fighter films and the French new wave's perceived disinterest in the conflict. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to understand cinema's role in re-evaluating war and reconstructing international memory.

Postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, rich in theory, but it is based mostly on postcolonial experiences in former West European colonial empires. This book takes a different approach, considering postcolonial theory in relation to the former Soviet bloc. It both applies existing postcolonial theory to this different setting, and also uses the experiences of former Soviet bloc countries to refine and advance theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and presenting insights and material of relevance to scholars in a wide range of subjects, the book explores topics such as Soviet colonality as co-constituted with Soviet modernity, the affective structure of identity-creation in national and imperial subjects, and the way in which cultural imaginaries and everyday materialities were formative of Soviet everyday experience.

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe.

Britain's main imperial possessions in Asia were granted independence in the 1940s and 1950s and needed to craft constitutions for their new states. Invariably the indigenous elites drew upon British constitutional ideas and institutions regardless of the political conditions that prevailed in their very different lands. Many Asian nations called upon the services of Englishman and Law Professor Sir Ivor Jennings to advise or assist their own constitution making. Although he was one of the twentieth century's most prominent constitutional scholars, his opinion and influence were often controversial and remain so due to his advocating British norms in Asian form. This book examines the process of constitutional formation in the era of decolonisation and state building in Asia. It sheds light upon the influence and participation of Jennings in particular and British ideas in general on democracy and institutions across the Asian continent. Critical cases studies on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Nepal - all linked by Britain and Jennings - assess the distinctive methods and outcomes of constitution making and how British ideas fared in these major states. The book offers chapters on the Westminster model in Asia, Human Rights, Nationalism, Ethnic politics, Federalism, Foreign influence, Decolonisation, Authoritarianism, the Rule of Law, Parliamentary democracy and the power and influence of key political actors. Taking an original stance on constitution making in Asia after British rule, it also puts forward ideas of contemporary significance for Asian states and other emerging democracies engaged in constitution making, regime change and seeking to understand their colonial past. The first political, historical or constitutional analysis comparing Asia's experience with its indelible British constitutional legacy, this book is a critical resource on state building and constitution making in Asia following independence. It will appeal to students and scholars of world history, public law and politics.

Inequality and unfairness still stalk Scotland after more than twenty years of devolution. Having done little to shield against austerity, Brexit and an increasingly right-wing Westminster agenda, calls for further constitutional reform to solve pressing political, economic and social problems grow ever louder. The debate over further devolution or independence continues to split the population. In A New Scotland, leading activists and academics lay out the blueprints for radical reform, showing how society can be transformed by embedding values of democracy, social justice and environmental sustainability into a coherent set of policy ideas. Structured in two parts, the book takes to task the challenges to affect radical change, before exploring new approaches to key questions such as healthcare, education, public ownership, race, gender and human rights.

Italian Women at War: Sisters in Arms from Unification to the Twentieth Century offers diverse perspectives on Italian women's participation in war and conflict throughout Italy's modern history, contributing to the ongoing scholarly conversation on this topic. Part one of the book focuses on heroines who fought for Italy's Unification and on the anti-heroines, or brigantesse, who opposed such a momentous change. Part two considers exceptional individuals, such as Eva Kuhn Amendola, who combatted both with her body and her pen, as well as collective female efforts during the world wars, whether military or civilian. In part three, where the context is twentieth-century society, the focus shifts to those women engaged in less conventional conflicts who resorted to different forms of revolt, including active non-violence. All of the women presented across these chapters engage in combat to protest a particular state of affairs and effect change, yet their weapons range from the literal, like Peppa La Cannoniera's cannon, to the metaphorical, like Letizia Battaglia's camera. Several of the essays in this volume discuss fictional heroines who appear in works of literature and film, though all are based on actual women and reference real historical contexts. Italian Women at War furthers the efforts begun decades ago to recognize Italian women combatants, especially in light of the recent anniversary of the Unification in 2011 and global discussions regarding the role of women in the military. Its aim is not to glorify violence and war, but to celebrate the active role of Italian women in the evolution of their nation and to demystify the idea of the woman warrior, who has always been viewed either as an extraordinary, almost mythical creature or as an affront to the traditional feminine identity.

After the end of Euro-American hegemony and the return of the multi-centric world, Eurocentrism in philosophy and the social sciences has come under attack. However, no real alternative has been proposed. This provides an opportunity to reassess the philosophy of the social sciences that has been developed in the West. This book argues that the re-emergence of a multi-centric world allows the Euro-centric social sciences in general, and critical theory in particular, to finally disengage from countless paradoxes and impasses by which they have heretofore been hindered. The author presents a solution in the form of the "kaleidoscopic dialectic." This dialectic is unique in that it is able to overcome the precarious dichotomy between universalism and relativism by relying on an original approach to the philosophy of science. With this approach, the focus is on the configurations embedded in the ethics of understanding, accommodation and learning and on their connections to broader social scientific critique. This book demands that the European social sciences make philosophical and methodological adaptations to the new realities of the social world by becoming more reflexive and, by extension, less Euro-centric.

This anthology reflects the complex processes in the production of historical knowledge and memory about Sierra Leone and its diaspora since the 1960s. The processes, while emblematic of experiences in other parts of Africa, contain their own distinctive features. The fragments of these memories are etched in the psyche, bodies, and practices of Africans in Africa and other global landscapes; and, on the other hand, are embedded in the various discourses and historical narratives about the continent and its peoples. Even though Africans have reframed these discourses and narratives to reclaim and re-center their own worldviews, agency, and experiences since independence they remained, until recently, heavily sedimented with Western colonialist and racialist ideas and frameworks. This anthology engages and interrogates the differing frameworks that have informed the different practices-professional as well as popular-of retelling the Sierra Leonean past. In a sense, therefore, it is concerned with the familiar outline of the story of the making and unmaking of an African "nation" and its constituent race, ethnic, class, and cultural fragments from colonialism to the present. Yet, Sierra Leone, the oldest and quintessential British colony and most Pan-African country in the continent, provides interesting twists to this familiar outline. The contributors to this volume, who consist of different generations of very accomplished and prominent scholars of Sierra Leone in Africa, the United States, and Europe, provide their own distinctive reflections on these twists based on their research interests which cover ethnicity, class, gender, identity formation, nation building, resistance, and social conflict. Their contributions engage various paradoxes and transformative moments in Sierra Leone and West African history. They also reflect the changing modes of historical practice and perspectives over the last fifty years of independence.

This book adopts a global approach to analysing Danish nationhood in the current context of a Europe paralysed by crises. Focusing on the global strands which have produced understandings of national selfhood as a consequence of a series of historical and contemporary global encounters, it calls for the production of narratives which better capture how European nations, including Denmark, are shaped by narratives that cannot be understood in (national) isolation, but are contingent on ideas about the nation's globality. In historical terms, this entails examining how colonialism shaped national self-perceptions; in a contemporary context, it requires looking at colonialism's unfinished business. The first chapters revisits colonialism throughout the Danish empire. In the second section, the book revisits Danish (post-1945) attempts to restage global interventions and military intervention since 2000, and considers how migration since 1965 has led to a profound questioning of relationships with the non-European world - and increasingly with Europe itself. Postcolonial Denmark situates Denmark at the centre of a number of current and ever more urgent challenges facing Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies with interests in Europe, the Nordic region through a postcolonial, a whiteness and a decolonial inspired approach.

When in 1821, the Greeks rose in violent revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks, waves of sympathy spread across Western Europe and the United States. More than a thousand volunteers set out to fight for the cause. The Philhellenes, whether they set out to recreate the Athens of Pericles, start a new crusade, or make money out of a war, all felt that Greece had unique claim on the sympathy of the world. As Byron wrote, 'I dreamed that Greece might Still be Free'; and he died at Missolonghi trying to translate that dream into reality. William St Clair's meticulously researched and highly readable account of their aspirations and experiences was hailed as definitive when it was first published. Long out of print, it remains the standard account of the Philhellenic movement and essential reading for any students of the Greek War of Independence, Byron, and European Romanticism. Its relevance to more modern ethnic and religious conflicts is becoming increasingly appreciated by scholars worldwide. This new and revised edition includes a new Introduction by Roderick Beaton, an updated Bibliography and many new illustrations.

This book reconceptualises the idea of communalism in independent India. It locates the changing contours of politics and religion in the country from the colonial times to the present day, and makes an important intervention in understanding the relationship between communalism and communal violence. It evaluates the role of state, media, civil societies, political parties, and other actors in the process as well as ideas such as secularism, nationalism, minority rights and democracy. Using new conceptual tools and an interdisciplinary approach, the work challenges the conventional understanding of communalism as time and context independent. This second edition includes a Foreword by Romila Thapar and an Afterword by Dipesh Chakrabarty, along with a new Introduction which revaluate the trajectory of communal politics in contemporary India, and question how secularism has come to be understood today. This topical volume will be useful to scholars and researchers in South Asian politics, political science, history, sociology and social anthropology, as well as the interested general reader.

Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing?
In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption.
Global in scope, the book takes in everything from:
* the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series
* from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system
*from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'.
This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.