Postcolonial African writers have made an enormous contribution to world literature. These writers frequently examine such issues as emerging identities in the postcolonial climate, neo-colonialism and new forms of oppression, cultural and political hegemonies, neo-elitism, language appropriation, and economic instability. During the last decade, their works have elicited increasing critical attention. This reference book overviews the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume focuses on how postcoloniality is reflected in the novels, poetry, prose, and drama of major, minor, and emerging writers from diverse countries in Africa, including representative North and South African writers as well as writers of the Indian diaspora born in Africa. While authors in indigenous African languages continue to produce valuable works, the volume principally considers Anglophone and Francophone authors, along with two Lusophone writers. The reference book begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing. The volume then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of approximately 60 writers, such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Tabar Ben Jelloun, Doris Lessing, Peter Nazareth, Gabriel Okara, Femi Osofisan, and Efua Theodora Sutherland. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's works, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many valuable perspectives. The volume concludes with a selectedgeneral bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.

Henry Gurney was the last Chief Secretary of the Mandate Government of Palestine. From mid-March to mid-May 1948, at his HQ in Jerusalem's King David Hotel, he wrote his diary under fire from Jews and Arabs alike, with both groups taking aim at the British Administration as the Mandate drew to a close and the country spiralled into violence.

A widespread and still contemporary political phenomenon that exercises a profound effect on societies, settler colonialism structures relationships both historically and culturally diverse. This book assesses the distinctive feature of settler colonialism, and discusses its political, sociological, economic and cultural consequences.

The history of European expansion overseas also includes the history of the expansion of concepts and principles of European law into the non-European world. The values and ideas it expressed have, to this day, deeply influenced indigenous societies and governments. At the same time indigenous concepts of law were 'discovered' and codified by European scholars. The outcome of this was a complex and intense interaction between European and local concepts of law, which resulted in many dual legal systems in the African and Asian colonies and which is examined in this volume by prominent historians, lawyers and legal anthropologists.

Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.

Drawing on recent trends in both Atlantic and center-periphery literature, this book examines the relationship between the English crown - monarch, privy council, and ancillary bodies - and its Atlantic colonies under the early Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, circa 1603-1642.

This is one of the very few scholarly Western-language studies of the Vietnamese reaction to the French colonial conquest of Vietnam during the nineteenth century. Utilizing Vietnamese primary sources to examine the reaction of scholars and the Vietnamese court to the French conquests, Mark McLeod goes beyond studies that only analyze the conflict from primarily French sources. As he states in the introduction, the dynamic force behind Vietnamese historical development was usually seen to be the activity of colonial enterprises. The Vietnamese people themselves enter these histories only insofar as they hinder or advance colonial policies, to be blamed or praised accordingly. McLeod studies the renaissance of historical writing that followed the political independence of Vietnam and presents the Vietnamese view of the nineteenth century colonization.

"The Vietnamese Response to French Intervention, 1862-1874" focuses on a period that has been generally neglected by Vietnam scholars, the crucial early years of the French conquest. It then analyzes the role of Catholic missionaries and the Vietnamese reaction to their presence during the conquest. Providing historical background to the period of French colonization, McLeod explores the significance of the long Nguyen Dynasty as well as the Franco-Spanish invasion prior to French occupation. Students and scholars of Southeast Asian history and colonization, as well as the general reader interested in Vietnamese ideology and thought, will find this book a valuable resource.

The history of the often-overlooked chewa Ethiopian warriors and their crucial role in defending their homeland against invasion, as well as their strong influence on political identity and the social infrastructure. Today best known for their role in defending Ethiopia from Italian invasion 1935-41, chewa warriors protected Ethiopia for centuries. Yet, depicted by some 19th-century Western observers as little more than "a horde" of warmongers, and later suppressed by Ethiopian monarchs who sought to create a centralized modern state, their contribution has been neglected. Drawing on oral and written sources, as well as the zeraf poetry through which theyexpressed themselves, this book explores for the first time in depth the history, practices and principles of warriorhood of the chewa, and their wider influence on society and state. Often self-trained individuals who began by defending their communities, by the end of the 19th century there were chewa warrior groups from almost all linguistic groups who fought together to resist foreign invaders. Some chewa enrolled in the service of the Ethiopian "kings of kings", who organized them as named corps that supplemented the formal defence of the state. Today, chewa political identity, which transcended social, familial, political and other groupings, remains deeply rooted in Ethiopian society. Tsehai Berhane-Selassie taught Social Anthropology, Gender and Development Studies in universities in Ethiopia, the UK, the USA and Ireland. She is a former member of The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her publications include editing Gender Issues in Ethiopia.

In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier. Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.

Charts the making of colonial spaces in settler colonies of the Pacific Rim during the last two centuries. Contributions journey through time, place and region, and piece together interwoven but discrete studies that illuminate transnational and local experiences - violent, ideological, and cultural - that produced settler-colonial space.

There is today a new interest in empires past and present. Scholars seek fresh ways of understanding a form of power far older than the modern nation state. Others see empire, not long ago assumed to be a mode of governance on the way out, as having a surprising new lease on life, and want to better understand the reasons why. This volume focuses on the interconnected formations of patrimonialism, colonialism/empire and capitalism. Leading scholars analyze patrimonial politics in empires in regions throughout the world, including the United States, Latin America, China, South Africa, North Africa, West Africa, India, Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The articles show that patrimonial practices, which often form the backbone of empire, are present throughout history, including in global capitalist modernity. This volume will appeal to students of politics, and to a multidisciplinary scholarly audience in political sociology; historical social science; history; social theory, and area studies.

Providing a succinct yet comprehensive introduction to the history of the Atlantic world in its entirety, "The Atlantic Experience" traces the first Portuguese journeys to the West coast of Africa in the mid-fifteenth century through to the abolition of slavery in America in the late-nineteenth century.
Bringing together the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas, this book supersedes a history of nations, foregrounds previously neglected parts of these continents, and explores the region as a holistic entity that encompassed people from many different areas, ethnic groups and national backgrounds. Distilling this huge topic into key themes such as conquest, trade, race and migration, Catherine Armstrong and Laura Chmielewski's chronological survey illuminates the crucial aspects of this cutting edge field.

At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, drawn by the twin objectives of securing the route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in an antique land. But these competing objectives created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and promise of fame and escape from Britain? Spies in Arabia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this dilemma and its myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences during and after the Great War. Arguing that violence and culture were more closely allied in imperial rule than has been recognized, it tells the story of an imperial state dependent on equivocal agents groping through a fog of cultural notions and an interfering mass democracy towards a new style of "covert empire" centered on a brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources - from the fictional to the recently declassified - it explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire - how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world. In doing so, it offers the first cultural history of Britain's Middle Eastern empire, anchored in a radically new interpretation of the institutions and practices of intelligence-gathering and the state. The result is a new understanding of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British empire in the twentieth century. Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a start tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption - and the prehistory of our present discontents.

Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Rowe's work is particularly innovative in taking account of the public, cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture, American studies, and cultural studies.

"Tributary Empires in Global History" is one of a very select few to pioneer comparisons between the great historical empires of agrarian societies, such as the Roman, Mughal and Ottoman empires, and others. As such, it is an exercise in global and comparative history over time. It examines and interrogates our basic historiographical, theoretical and comparative models and conceptions about how large pre-colonial empires expanded, operated and declined. In 14 chapters, all of them explicitly comparative, a group of leading historians, sociologists and anthropologists illuminate tributary empires from diverse perspectives ranging from the character of the state and fiscal organization, to imperial households, royal rituals, provincial societies as well as shared historiographical traditions and tropes. In doing so, the essays draw attention to the importance of these earlier forms form of imperialism to broaden our perspective on modern concerns about empire and the legacy of colonialism.

While the study of "indigenous intermediaries" is today the focus of some of the most interesting research in the historiography of colonialism, its roots extend back to at least the 1970s. The contributions to this volume revisit Ronald E. Robinson's theory of collaboration in a range of historical contexts by melding it with theoretical perspectives derived from postcolonial studies and transnational history. In case studies ranging globally over the course of four centuries, these essays offer nuanced explorations of the varied, complex interactions between imperial and local actors, with particular attention to those shifting and ambivalent roles that transcend simple binaries of colonizer and colonized.

Long before the British Empire came into existence, was there an English Empire? In this compelling study, R. R. Davies examines England's medieval conquest and colonization of the outer zones of the British Isles. He shows how the increasingly vexed question of the future of the United Kingdom has its roots in the Middle Ages, when Edward I set out to subjugate his Celtic neighbours.

Located at the intersection of British imperial and cultural history, and classical reception studies, Britain's Imperial Muse explores the classics' contribution to Britain's culture of imperialism and to the experience of empire in India through the long nineteenth century. Dismissing grammar-grind stereotypes, this study argues that classical education left powerful images of empire in many students destined to play a part in Britain's imperial drama; and that these classically founded images constituted a key pillar of British imperial identity. But it simultaneously acknowledges the classics' role as a rhetorical arsenal used and abused by commentators to justify imperial domination, particularly of India. In its final act, the book follows the classics to India, where they provided knowledge of Indian civilization, defined and maintained the cultural solidarity of the imperial elite, entrenched the 'difference' of Indians, and helped Britons cope with the social, physical, and cultural alienations of life in India.

John Brown Russwurm and African American Settlement in West Africa examines Russwurm's intellectual accomplishments and significant contributions to the black civil rights movement in America from 1826 - 1829, and more significantly explores the essential characteristics that distinguished his thoughts and endeavours from other black leaders in America, Liberia and Maryland in Liberia. Not surprisingly, the most controversial of Russwurm's ideas was his unwavering support of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS), two organizations that most civil rights activists found racist and pro-slavery. Beyan probes the social and intellectual sources, underlying motives and the legacies of Russwurm's thoughts and endeavours, all in an attempt to dissect why Russwurm acted and made the choices that he did.

In "The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home," John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations. He contends that the work of these writers significantly informs not only African American literary studies but also U.S. political history.
Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire at home ( James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others), Gruesser examines U.S. black participation in, support for, and resistance to expansion. Race consistently trumped empire for African American writers, who adopted positions based on the effects they believed expansion would have on blacks at home. Given the complexity of the debates over empire and rapidity with which events in the Caribbean and the Pacific changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should come as no surprise that these authors often did not maintain fixed positions on imperialism. Their stances depended on several factors, including the foreign location, the presence or absence of African American soldiers within a particular text, the stage of the author's career, and a given text's relationship to specific generic and literary traditions.
No matter what their disposition was toward imperialism, the fact of U.S. expansion allowed and in many cases compelled black writers to grapple with empire. They often used texts about expansion to address the situation facing blacks at home during a period in which their citizenship rights, and their very existence, were increasingly in jeopardy.

Recent scholarship in political thought has closely examined the relationship between European political ideas and colonialism, particularly the ways in which canonical thinkers supported or opposed colonial practices. But little attention has been given to the engagement of colonized political and intellectual actors with European ideas. The essays in this volume demonstrate that a full reckoning of colonialism's effects requires attention to the ways in which colonized intellectuals reacted to, adopted, and transformed these ideas, and to the political projects that their reactions helped to shape. Across nine chapters, a mix of political theorists and intellectual historians grapple with specific thinkers and contexts to show in detail the unpredictable, complex and sometimes paradoxical impact of European ideas in an array of colonial settings. -- .

This book uses political process theory to examine the three most successful cultural movements that have mobilized around Christopher Columbus, a figure whose surrounding myths have served many interests. The author examines the religious, ethnic, and anti-colonial movements that were most successful in rewriting national origin myth, providing a clear application of the political process model while telling the story of how a powerless public mobilized to rewrite its past.

The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

Christopher Columbus' discovery of the new world launched a process of economic and cultural integration that continues to this day. In the wake of Columbus's voyages, the major powers of Western Europe established imperial systems that shaped global politics and economics for centuries. "The Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism" is designed to provide a ready reference tool for students and scholars of these systems. Its major focus is the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, German, Belgian, and Italian empires during the past 500 years.

"The Dictionary" offers brief descriptive essays on a variety of topics--colonies, prominent individuals, legislation, treaties, conferences, wars, revolutions, and technologies. The individuals included have a historical significance that transcends their own countries. Essays on individual colonies usually end with the winning of independence or formal incorporation into the body politic of the mother country. References at the end of each entry provide sources of additional information for those interested in further research. Cross-references within the text help the reader to find related items. Three appendixes provide a guide to contemporary languages in former colonial areas, a chronology of European imperialism, and a complete table of island systems in the world. This unique reference work will interest scholars and students of European imperialism and the reference librarians who assist them.