bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Webster, Augusta
Authors: Houston Natalie M.
Published: June 2017

Augusta Webster was an accomplished translator and prolific poet who was well regarded by Victorian readers. Webster wrote in many genres: she published translations of
Prometheus Bound
and
Medea
, seven books of poetry, two novels, three plays, and numerous essays and reviews. In addition to her literary career, Webster was politically active in feminist causes. Many of her poems focus on women's lives and experience. Today she is best known as the author of “A Castaway,” a dramatic monologue about a prostitute, and for a posthumous sequence of sonnets celebrating maternal love.
Japonisme
Authors: Lavery Joseph
Published: June 2017

Victorian representations of Japanese beauty oscillated between an enthusiasm that verged into mania and a rejection that verged into racial paranoia. Treating aesthetic theory as an index of possibilities and problematics of Japanese modernization for British writers and artists, this entry takes seriously both Victorians’ own claims for Japanese art's particular properties and the intersections of these properties with broader cultural categories. I treat Japonisme as a hinge between the serious and the trivial, the futuristic and the unspoiled, the visual and the literary, with reference to texts ranging from highly canonical to less familiar ones.
Purity, Pollution, and Systems of Classification
Authors: Forth Gregory
Published: June 2017

Ideas of purity express a value for keeping different categories of things—be they substances, natural kinds, or social statuses—separate from one another, thereby avoiding consequent impurity or pollution. Necessarily, therefore, notions of purity and pollution are connected to systems of classification that define the culturally recognized categories to which purity rules apply. Issues of pollution, as well as the closely related concept of taboo, have been treated by a variety of anthropological theorists, from Frazer to Durkheim and from Douglas and Dumont to Valeri. But, while these authors have mainly been concerned with practices and ideologies pertaining to religion and magic, it can further be shown how notions of purity also inhere in the classifying behavior of both folk biologists and international scientific taxonomists, and, moreover, how they relate to panhuman classificatory practices of interest to cognitive anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists.
Grandmother Hypothesis, Grandmother Effect, and Residence Patterns
Authors: Blell Mwenza
Published: June 2017

The grandmother hypothesis is an adaptationist hypothesis suggesting the extended human female postmenopausal life span is explainable by kin selection. Grandmothers who provide alloparental care to their grandchildren are suggested to increase their fitness. Much research has focused on detecting grandmother effects in a range of settings worldwide. Evidence indicates that there may be differences in the effects of paternal and maternal grandparents on a range of fitness measures and suggests a role for consideration of local ecological conditions and kinship structures.
African Anti‐Colonialism
Authors: Adesokan Akin
Published: June 2017

African anti‐colonialism was one of the defining political experiences of the twentieth century. Between 1935 and 1945, through the work of African political activists and diasporic African intellectuals in Europe and the United States, the ground was prepared for the eventual independence of a majority of African colonies in the following decades. The struggle had political, cultural, artistic, and economic dimensions, and the sense of identity that now seems natural to most Africans was a result of the anti‐colonial struggle.
Anthropophagy
Authors: Marsal Meritxell Hernando
Published: June 2017

Anthropophagy is a cultural trope that takes a practice colonially attributed to indigenous Brazilians (a statement of abjection and a justification for conquest) and redefines it as a mechanism of cultural appropriation and redistribution, which questions dependence and allows for action from the periphery. In this sense, anthropophagy is linked to other notions that allude to processes of cultural assimilation such as transculturation and hybridity. Anthropophagy was defined in 1928 by Oswald de Andrade and formed an avant‐garde movement that left profound marks on Brazilian literature and art. This movement continues to be discussed today because it involves central questions of Brazilian culture, with contributions from Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and the actions taken on the periphery of São Paulo.
Ayllu
Authors: Galdo Juan Carlos
Published: June 2017

This entry focuses on the indigenous community of the Andes known asayllu. More than seeking a definition of the term, it maps a panorama of historical movements, cultural representations, projects, politics, epistemological and ontological approaches, debates, and key figures concerned with role the of theaylluin Andean society from the early twentieth century until the present times.
Bâ, Mariama
Authors: Edwin Shirin
Published: June 2017

This entry describes the life and work of the legendary Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. In many respects, Bâ is considered to be a pioneer: she began writing at a time when few other African women were producing written works; she became one of the first African Francophone writers to reflect on the future of African writing; and, most significantly, she made a lasting contribution to African literature with her classic novel
Une Si Longue Lettre
(
So Long a Letter
). This entry briefly dwells on the major themes of Bâ's small, albeit influential, literary corpus.
Bennett‐Coverly, Louise (Miss Lou)
Authors: Weir‐Soley Donna Aza
Published: June 2017

Louise Coverly‐Bennett (1919–2006), or Miss Lou, as she was fondly called, was a Jamaican poet, a performance artist, a folklorist, and a comedian. She became a strong proponent of the African influence on Jamaican culture and championed the Jamaican Creole language as an artistic medium long before it was popular to do so. Her body of work, which focuses on issues of both national and global import, has been instrumental in the formation of Jamaican identity at home and in the promotion and dissemination of Jamaican culture abroad.
Biko, Steve
Authors: Napolitano Joe
Published: June 2017

Bantu Stephen Biko (more commonly, Steve Biko) is the intellectual and political figure most closely identified with the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. Emerging to fill the void created by the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) by the apartheid government in the 1960s, black consciousness as articulated by Biko involved both a rejection of white liberal paternalism and a rehabilitation or revaluation of blackness, guided by the recognition, in the most commonly quoted phrase of Biko's, that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo
Authors: González Eduardo
Published: June 2017

Alongside José Martí (1843–98), exiled apostle of Cuba's drawn‐out struggle for independence from Spanish colonial rule (1868–98) and the war's iconic martyr, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005) stands as the embodiment of exile consciousness and banishment from the nation's insular territorial boundaries. Earthly boundaries are spiritual as well as territorial and are often traced by obsession and courage, and not exclusively by the sovereign agencies of state rule. It is on such grounds of dissensus that the questionable inclusion of Cabrera Infante in postcolonial studies is welcome. It provokes renewed debate on who belongs or does not belong, who lies inside the nation's political body, and who remains banished from it and from the nation's covenant, which in Cuba's case has for long been dictated by the sole authority of the Communist Party.
Caribbean Indigenous Cultures
Authors: Castanha Antonio
Published: June 2017

Indigenous cultures and traditions of the Caribbean region are rich and diverse, dating back thousands of years. The European contact era, beginning in 1492, would see an acute disruption to ways of life, fierce resistance to colonialism, and subsequent production of mythologies strongly embedded over time. Both colonial and postcolonial narratives have been importantly responsible for erasing Amerindian populations from history by justifying alternative epistemologies and presences. While substantial ethnic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic changes and modification occurred, indigenous peoples in numerous parts of the region survived and many of their cultural traditions live on. Some are now responding about their experience.
Caribbean Popular Culture
Authors: Lantz Victoria Pettersen
Published: June 2017

Caribbean popular culture is the production and reception of a variety of visual and written texts that illustrate the complex hybrid identity of the Caribbean people. It is both regionally specific and part of a pan‐Caribbean experience. The performative traditions of music, dance, and carnival are three forms of popular culture that read particularly pan‐Caribbean as representations of artistic, commercial aspects of society. Examining specific historical and aesthetic foundations for these three aspects of Caribbean popular culture allows for an in‐depth understanding of the hybridity and diasporic social structure of the Caribbean. Carnival, initially formed through recasting European and African religious traditions and continuing to change in order to fit shifting societal needs of Caribbean populations, inherently carries with it the elements of popular culture. Like carnival, music from the Caribbean mixes European and African traditions into forms original to the islands, and different nations have created varied music and dance forms such as salsa, reggae, calypso, and rumba.
Conrad, Joseph
Authors: Mallios Peter Lancelot
Published: June 2017

Joseph Conrad, a Polish‐born British writer of fiction, is one of the major generative novelists in English of the twentieth century. His novels, a form of world literature distinctive for the planetary scope of world contact to which they lay claim, practice a highly controversial engagement with questions of race, coloniality, and imperialism. Conrad's writings have elicited a vast latitude of literary responses and rewritings from diverse authors throughout the postcolonial world, especially in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and among cosmopolitan and transnational writers generally. Conrad has also been of theoretical and scholarly interest in postcolonial studies from its inception as an academic field.
Dependency in Latin America
Authors: Russo Michela
Published: June 2017

The question of dependency has been a recurring concern within the Latin American intellectual community since the nineteenth century, when the discussion over national independence was initiated. This concept refers to a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another country's economy to which the former is subjected, originating a situation of dependency based on the center–periphery and metropolitan–satellite dualistic models that result in unequal forms of development. Studies on dependency emerged in Latin America in the late 1960s; they became predominant during the Cold War and rapidly diffused among Third World theorists. Understood in this context, the idea of dependency appeared to be more than a simply heuristic tool or a methodology of study of development and underdevelopment, as it bore a sort of counterdiscourse, not just economic but one that also accounted for sociopolitical phenomena.
Devy, G. N.
Authors: Malekar Anosh
Published: June 2017

G. N. Devy is a linguist, literary scholar, cultural activist, and institution builder for the cause of India's
adivasis
or indigenous peoples. He is founder of Bhasha Research and Publication Centre for the conservation of adivasi languages, and fights for the rights of India's nomadic tribes declared “criminals” by the British colonizers.
Environmentalism
Authors: Whalen Ken
Published: June 2017

Environmentalism is a movement promoting the conservation and preservation of nature for the sake of both human and nonhuman beings. Its origins lie in the modern paradigm and, arguably, in Western imperialism. Both tend to reinforce the perception that nature is Other, often as adversary, but mostly as resource for human profit and/or progress. There are a number of environmental organizations, groups, and philosophies all in one way or another caught up in the Western dualism of nature/culture. This makes environmentalism an extraordinarily rich topic for postcolonial studies, especially since this assumption influences political, economic, and cultural relationships between core and peripheral countries of the colonial present.
Ezekiel, Nissim
Authors: Qadeer Haris
Published: June 2017

Nissim Ezekiel (December 24, 1924 – January 9, 2004) was an Indian Jewish poet, a playwright, a noted journalist, an academician, and an art critic, who occupies an important position in the canon of postcolonial Indian writings in English. He is often referred to as the father of modern Indian poetry in English. He was among the first few poets who opted to write in English in postcolonial India.
Decolonization
Authors: Gray Ros
Published: June 2017

Decolonization refers to the withdrawal of colonial powers from their colonies and to the achievement of political, economic, and cultural independence by those former colonies. The term was first used in the 1930s, though it did not come into frequent use until the 1960s. Its usage has thus chiefly referred to the decolonization of former European colonies in Africa and Asia that took place over a period of roughly 50 years in the twentieth‐century, from the late 1940s to the late 1990s. While formally achieved when a government of a newly independent country is recognized internationally as a sovereign state, decolonization is also understood as a revolutionary process that continues after independence. In this sense, decolonization refers to social and cultural transformations aimed at overcoming colonial hierarchies and at achieving ambitions of development that were promised, but not fulfilled, by colonial regimes.
Feminism in Latin America
Authors: Garrigós Cristina
Published: June 2017

It is a common belief that Latin American feminism owes much to European and North American ideas, but it developed its own idiosyncrasies, since, as opposed to what happened in other places, it was less concerned with issues such as the right to vote, more with the larger goal of attaining legal and social equality. However, many feminists nowadays believe that the history of Latin American feminism has to be considered independently from any external influence, and that we can find examples of early feminism even in the precolonial period.
Eurocentrism and Orientalism
Authors: Xypolia Ilia
Published: June 2017

Eurocentrism is the discourse that emphasizes European concerns, culture, and values at the expense of others. It uses Europe as a cultural rather than a cartographical expression, which incorporates the so‐called “West,” in other words, Western Europe and North America. Eurocentrism assumes that Europe is civilized and has been throughout history and that European civilization has a unique historical advantage that leads to its permanent superiority over all other cultures. Eurocentrism sanitizes European history neglecting its dark sides by considering them as mere aberrations. At the same time, Eurocentrism understates the achievements and contributions of other cultures. Orientalism, the theory and the practice of representing “the Orient” in Western thought, is a controversial concept. In the aftermath of the decolonization period in the second half of the twentieth century an increasing body of academic literature produced by scholars of orientalism has challenged the authoritative claims and knowledge that have been produced in the discipline.
Galeano, Eduardo
Authors: Longo Teresa V.
Published: June 2017

Eduardo Galeano (1940– ) is a journalist, essayist and storyteller. His work locates Latin America's colonial and postcolonial history in a global context and links storytelling to resistance. Galeano is known for his critiques of imperialism, his creative approach to history, and for his emphasis on the promise of humanity.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
Authors: Siddique Soofia
Published: June 2017

This entry includes a broad survey of M. K. Gandhi's life, focusing more particularly on his political philosophy of nonviolence. Exploring the essential connections between Gandhian politics, lifestyle, and writing, it lays out his elaboration of concepts such as Satyagraha and Swaraj, which are essential to the vocabulary of the Indian national movement. His rejection of the terrorist model of revolutionary action and his refusal to work within binary oppositions of race or nationality were articulated in his 1909
Hind Swaraj
. Gandhi's anti‐colonial politics included both attempts to address imperialist Britain as diseased with modern civilization, as well as to invoke alternative modes of existence in India, as seen for instance in his
khadi
program. The entry then moves on to detail his debates with two significant contemporaries, Rabindranath Tagore and Bhimrao Ambedkar. In conclusion, it provides a description of some recent interests and trends in Gandhi scholarship.
Glissant, Édouard
Authors: Thomas Bonnie
Published: June 2017

Édouard Glissant is one of the most significant contributors to literary and postcolonial thought of our time. Leading a distinguished career as a poet, novelist, theoretician, and academic, Glissant has engaged in a unique way with crucial questions concerning colonialism, postcolonialism, memory, and trauma. He has made particularly powerful contributions to reconciliation with the past through his concepts of
Relation
and
Tout‐Monde
.
Guevara, Ernesto “Che”
Authors: Yaffe Helen
Published: June 2017

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–67) was an Argentinian‐born Marxist revolutionary whose contribution to anti‐imperialist struggles, in practical and political terms, has significantly influenced postcolonial discourse. Politicized during his travels throughout 1950s Latin America, he went on to play a key role in the Cuban Revolution and subsequently engaged in military operations in the Congo and Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in 1967. His “guidebook” to guerrilla warfare became known as the “
foco
theory”; that a “vanguard” of armed fighters could a spark revolution. His contribution to socialist political economy debates is less well known. Guevara served as a member of the Cuban government in charge of industry and the banking system between 1959 and 1965; he contributed to the national development strategy and represented the Cuban government overseas. He created an innovative system of economic management, as an alternative to the Soviet system, for the transition to socialism.
Guha, Ranajit
Authors: Dube Pankhuree
Published: June 2017

Ranajit Guha (b. 1923) is a historian of modern India, founder of the Subaltern Studies Collective, editor of the first six volumes of
Subaltern Studies
and author of seminal monographs and essays. Guha's work decisively altered the terms of debate concerning forms of domination and subordination, peasant rebellion, as well as colonial constructions and indigenous idioms. Guha's work may also be traced in the role he played from 1979 onwards as mentor to a group of junior historians based in England. He envisioned a form of disciplinary history writing that was both dialogic and yet fiercely individualist. At the same time, Guha's own writings were energized by these intellectual exchanges. Guha resists the impulse to subsume his own work, or that of the Collective, into a unified theory of postcolonial historiography. In Guha's representation, Subaltern Studies is not a theory but a project, one that that involves a set of explorations.
Haitian Revolution
Authors: Daut Marlene L.
Published: June 2017

The Haitian Revolution refers to a collection of slave revolts and military strikes beginning in August of 1791 that resulted in the eventual abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint‐Domingue and its subsequent independence and rebirth in January of 1804 as Haiti, the first independent black nation of the American hemisphere.
hooks, bell
Authors: Houten Christina Van
Published: June 2017

bell hooks is an American feminist, social activist, critical theorist, and author. She is a leading figure in the establishment of “second‐wave feminism,” centered on the history, experiences, and interests of women of color. Her literary works and cultural theory examine the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender, as well as the way these systems intersect to produce oppression. hooks argues for the development of an intersectional analysis of social relations, a framework in which equal weight is given to gender, race, class, and sexuality in an attempt to challenge global systems of power and inequality.
Hulme, Keri
Authors: Bushnell Cameron Fae
Published: June 2017

Keri Hulme (b. March 9, 1947, Christchurch, New Zealand) is best known for her novelThe Bone Peoplewhich, amid controversy, won the 1985 Booker Prize; telling the story of a self‐fashioned family of Maori, white, and hybrid cultures, it is one of a handful of novels that have introduced Maori writers to an international audience. Although Hulme's fame rests on her novel, she has also written a novella,Te Kaihua/The Windeater, and her collection of poetry,Strands, has ensured her reputation as a significant New Zealand poet.
Hybridity
Authors: Ratti Manav
Published: June 2017

Widely used in cultural, literary, and linguistic studies, hybridity began as a biological and racial term, used during the peak of nineteenth‐century colonialism to mark a clear distinction between colonizer and colonized. Hybridity can reveal and emphasize the sense of physical and social mixture and interaction among peoples, cultures, and nations and entails concepts such as diaspora, creolization, and cultural criticism. Scholars have theorized hybridity across a range of fields. Within postcolonial and cultural theory, work has been undertaken by Homi K. Bhabha and Robert J. C. Young; the work of the writer Édouard Glissant has also been influential, and the writings of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall have been significant for postcolonial studies, particularly in the British and Caribbean contexts. In linguistics, there is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and in anthropology that of Néstor García Canclini and Ulf Hannerz. As peoples and cultures continue to interact, hybridity promises to retain explanatory power for phenomena such as nationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism.
Identity in Latin America
Authors: Castro Carolina Bruna
Published: June 2017

Identity is a concept related to various fields. An initial approach associates identity with a national identity or with a person who has rights, a voice, and a place in society. In other words, identity is written in the law; it is the opposite of exclusion or alterity. However, in every discussion about the term “identity” there is the problem of the subject. That is, identity implies a kind of subjectivity. Thus, it is possible to present the term “identity” within the realm of cultural thought that prevails in Latin America, a type of thought that originated with the emergence of the republics. This kind of subjectivity is rooted in Latin American thought as a way of providing Latin American subjectivity with a place in the world. From this perspective, it is possible, by way of a formal approach, to say that identity is the intention to establish what is inherent in the individual, on the one hand, and, on the other, what distinguishes one individual from another. In other words, identity is what differentiates me from another person. Latin American identity is achieved by considering different positions between diverse histories and cultures and by considering the possible conflicts regarding territorial boundaries. The problem derived from logical identity is that it attempts to establish only one form of identity in which different peoples must converge. However, the postcolonial period has brought consideration of another kind of identity to the table.
Ihimaera, Witi
Authors: Fresno‐Calleja Paloma
Published: June 2017

Witi Ihimaera is a leading New Zealand writer and a pioneer in the inscription of the Maori voice as the first writer of Maori ethnicity to have published a novel and a collection of short stories. His prolific career encompasses all genres. His works are characterized by the crossing of ethnic and cultural boundaries, generic and narrative experiments, and the use of eclectic textual sources to reflect on Maori identity from historical and contemporary perspectives.
Khoury, Elias
Authors: Head Gretchen
Published: June 2017

The author of eleven novels and four books of criticism, Elias Khoury has become one of the most important figures in modern Arabic literature. Often charting the quotidian reality of the Lebanese civil war, Khoury has developed a highly distinctive narrative style. Digressive with overlapping temporal frames, his innovative prose is ordered by a repetition that lends it a sense of orality. Several themes frequently recur and overlap in Khoury's writing: narration as trope, memory and the Lebanese civil war, the representation of marginalization, and the Palestinian experience.
Kingston, Maxine Hong
Authors: Kong Belinda
Published: June 2017

This entry on Maxine Hong Kingston (1940– ) offers a brief biography and an overview of her oeuvre (from 1976 to 2011), with emphasis on her major contributions to Asian American literature and literary criticism.
La Guma, Alex
Authors: Field Roger Michael
Published: June 2017

Born in Cape Town, Alex la Guma (1925–85) directed his fiction, journalism, politics, and art toward South Africa's liberation. A socialist who supported the nationalism of the African National Congress, he espoused the socialist realism canon. In practice, his journalism and radio plays are examples of satire, while his novella
A Walk in the Night
and the novels that followed display a range of intriguing, contradictory influences that include Jack London, Charles Dickens, the orientalism of Walter Scott, and John Steinbeck. His last three works, which include travel writing, display a tension between realism and modernism in both narrative and characterization. This is particularly evident in
A Soviet Journey
and
Time of the Butcherbird
, in which Hemingway's fiction is both vital and a source of irony. La Guma died in Cuba.
Latin American Literature, Criticism and Theory
Authors: Sánchez Prado Ignacio M.
Published: June 2017

This entry discusses the role of literature in Latin America with respect to coloniality, decolonization, and postcolonialism. It focuses on the development of theoretical approaches that emphasize Latin America's literary and intellectual emancipation by focusing on the specificity of its cultural productions, the negotiation with processes of occidentalism, transculturation, and heterogeneity and the agenda of a properly Latin American expression as a key pursuit for decolonization.
Lessing, Doris
Authors: Turner Ellen
Published: June 2017

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was one of the twentieth century's most important literary figures. She was a prolific novelist and short story writer whose varied output spanned a multitude of genres and resisted attempts at classification. Lessing was born of British parentage in Persia, moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia in 1925, and from 1949 spent most of her time in London. Lessing's first novel,
The Grass is Singing
was published in 1950.
The Golden Notebook
(1962) is widely recognized as one of Lessing's most important pieces of writing. Other important works include the five novels in her
Children of Violence
series (1952–1969); the dystopian
Memoirs of a Survivor
(1974); five science fiction novels (1979–1983); two novels published under the pseudonym Jane Somers; and
The Fifth Child
(1988) and its sequel
Ben in the World
(2000). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren)
Authors: Wang Pu
Published: June 2017

Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), known by his pen name Lu Xun, was a pioneering Chinese writer and intellectual who became a symbol of spiritual enlightenment and cultural revolution in twentieth‐century China and East Asia. He was one of the founding fathers of what came to be known as China's “New Culture” (
xin wenhua
). Since his death, he has been accorded the status of the “soul of the nation.” Mao Zedong praised him as the “giant of Chinese cultural revolution,” and during the heyday of Maoism in the 1960s–70s, the iconic status of Lu Xun's image was second only to Mao's own. Even today, Lu Xun's works continue to stir controversy and invite reinterpretation.
Mahfouz, Naguib
Authors: Salama Mohammad
Published: June 2017

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) is one of the best known and most prolific novelists of the twentieth century and the first Arab to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1988). Mahfouz's early writings openly criticize the colonial rule under which Egyptians lived. His postcolonial novels are marked by characters and narratives that allegorically describe and comment on contemporary Egyptian society in a nuanced and complex way.
African American Images and Stereotypes
Authors: Leonard David
Published: June 2017

This entry explores the contested struggle over the meanings and available representations afforded to African Americans. Focusing on the longstanding tension between those challenging anti‐black stereotypes and developing representations that pay no mind to altering these dehumanizing prejudices, this entry highlights the cultural, ideological, and communal stakes at the core of image production and dissemination.
Mapanje, Jack
Authors: Kerr David
Published: June 2017

Jack Mapanje, born of mixed Yao and Manganja parents in Malawi, has found issues of identity to be a rich source of creativity. His poems, which first came to light when he was at the University of Malawi in the 1970s, used irony to lampoon the dictatorial head of state, Kamuzu Banda. In London Mapanje assembled enough poems to be published in the Heinemann African Writers Series. His satirical verse led to his imprisonment without trial for nearly four years. Soon after his release he went into exile in UK. This proved a base for a series of poetry collections in which he explored the ironies of global and local identities, particularly in their manifestations of contesting oralities.
Marxist Postcolonial Criticism
Authors: Bohrer Ashley
Published: June 2017

While often considered opposed theoretical traditions, Marxism and postcolonial theory have a vibrant history of interaction and synthesis. This entry examines the history of the synthetic tradition of Marxist postcolonial criticism, as well as the crucial debates, disagreements, and directions of this line of thinking. In particular, it discusses postcolonial Marxism's relationship to literary theory, feminist theory, and to liberation theology.
Menchú Tum, Rigoberta
Authors: Pardee Shiela Ellen
Published: June 2017

Rigoberta Menchú is a K'iche’ Maya woman of Guatemala whose 1983 testimonial
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nacio la conciencia
exposed the brutality of the Guatemalan military campaign against Mayan villagers. The book, based on interviews by ethnologist Elisabeth Burgos‐Debray, put Menchú in the public eye as an advocate for Mayan rights and resulted in her Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Her book was also the subject of extended controversy about its accuracy and suitability for inclusion as required reading in high school and college classes in the United States. Several aspects of the risks involved when testifying from a subaltern viewpoint were illuminated by the extended scrutiny given to Menchú's work.
Messianism in Latin America
Authors: Price Rachel L.
Published: June 2017

Messianic and millenarian thought informed both the first European voyages to Latin America and indigenous resistance to European empire. Messianism – the belief in the imminent arrival on earth of a divine savior and of radical change – has often fused in Latin America with millenarianism – the idea that Christ (or another figure) will return to Earth in a near future and establish a reign or final judgment – and has been extended to more secular political movements and thought. Crucial to the very conception of the New World, messianism also characterizes colonial‐period experiments in alternative communities, nineteenth‐century religious communities resistant to modernizing republics, and it constitutes an undercurrent in twentieth‐century political movements throughout the region. Although messianism and millenarianism were originally religious lenses that attempted to fit new histories into Christian typological frames, messianism has been an important component of political thought in modern Latin America, inflecting colonial, indigenous, modernizing, and Caribbean movements, among others.
Morrison, Toni
Authors: Bower Rachel
Published: June 2017

Toni Morrison is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and a central figure in African American literature. Over the course of her career, Morrison has authored 10 magnificent novels and produced an extremely influential corpus of essays and speeches. She has played a central editorial role in shaping two decades of African American literary history, and has also written plays, librettos, and children's books. Morrison was the first African American woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first black woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university. Over the course of her career, Morrison has moved from the margins of the literary establishment to the very heart of the literary canon.
Nandy, Ashis
Authors: Deftereos Christine
Published: June 2017

Ashis Nandy is an Indian political psychologist, contemporary cultural critic, social theorist, and self‐defined “intellectual streetfighter.” He is one of the most original and confrontational thinkers of his generation, and is one of India's leading public intellectuals. Some of the themes that Nandy's work addresses are postcolonial consciousness, the modern secular Indian state, cultural resistance, the psychosocial dimensions of power, cosmopolitanism, and post‐secular forms of awareness. Having written over 25 books and countless articles, he has made extensive contributions to the way in which colonialism is understood, and to postcolonial theory and contemporary social and political criticism.
Négritude
Authors: Simeon‐Jones Kersuze
Published: June 2017

The Négritude philosophy preceded the literary and cultural movement that emerged in 1939. Equally important, the principles and objectives of the movement are continuous and evolve in time to address the general black condition, which Césaire termed the “Negro situation.” Through its evolution the Négritude movement remained grounded in history. In studying, examining, and exposing the particular roots of contemporary black conditions, advocates of the movement contributed to its intellectual, social, and political developments, from the twentieth century into the twenty‐first century. Similar to the preceding and concurrent movements of the black world, Négritude is essentially a call for the reclamation of the Negro humanity and, by extension, the humanity of all races and colors. It is a humanism, as Césaire repeatedly asserted. In its ideologies, Négritude complements the literary and political works of such diasporic movements as Pan‐Africanism, Indigénisme, New Negro/Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, and Afrocriollo.
Nuyorican Poets Café
Authors: Waldron John
Published: June 2017

The creation of the Nuyorican Poets Café was an important moment in the history of Puerto Rican diasporic literature and culture. The Café itself continues to be an important place that provides a space for and unites writers from marginalized groups in the United States.
Opium
Authors: Wright Ashley
Published: June 2017

Opium is a drug that has had transformative effects on politics, cultures, and economies in Asia and Europe. Since the late eighteenth century, opium has been inextricable from imperialism, as Indian opium revenues helped fund the maintenance of the British Empire in India, and opium contributed to two wars between Britain and China and the subsequent significant shift in the balance of power between the two countries. In the twentieth century, the international consensus came to favor the eradication of the opium industry, though colonial powers with an interest in its continuance opposed this consensus. Despite international attempts to regulate sales and consumption of this drug, opium cultivation continues in the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia and in Afghanistan.
Pacific Studies and Oceania
Authors: Najita Susan Y.
Published: June 2017

The first section of the entry charts the emergence of Pacific Studies out of the years leading up to, during, and after World War II as US military and economic interests facilitated the production of useful knowledge about peoples and places it sought to occupy or influence during the Cold War. Literature by indigenous writers emerged in the post‐independence era of the 1970s with some of the first native writers to be published in the English language. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a critique of neocolonialism and globalization as these ideologies and practices threatened repetition – with a difference – of earlier imperial and colonial forms of oppression. Epeli Hauʻofa's notion of “Oceania,” perhaps the single most influential concept in resituating Pacific Studies, intervenes in these neocolonial discourses. The entry ends with a discussion of diasporic literatures.
Partition
Authors: Daiya Kavita
Published: June 2017

The British partition of India in 1947 to create Pakistan signaled a bloody end to British colonialism and the legacies of decolonization in South Asia. Marked by Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim ethnic violence and mass migration, it turned millions into refugees, and generated horrific violence against women in the name of religion, nationalism, and the state. While the partition has never been officially memorialized, postcolonial South Asian literature, Bollywood film, art cinema, and oral history archives now illuminate this migration and refugee experience in South Asia and its diasporas. Partition has been widely used as a strategy of divide and rule and of resolving political conflict in the twentieth century. Yet as with the division of Ireland, the Indian partition has only led to more conflict like the Bangladesh War of Independence, the Kashmir conflict, the Kargil war, and violent ethnonationalism in South Asia.
Peck, Raoul
Authors: Nzengou‐Tayo Marie‐José
Published: June 2017

Born in 1953 in Haiti, Raoul Peck is today a renowned and respected filmmaker and film teacher. His filming choices are strongly influenced by his political commitment and his Haitian experience. With the passing of time, he has developed an inimitable style which mixes fiction and authentic documents. The recurring themes in his films include friendship, betrayal, and faithfulness to one's idea until death. He has received several awards and he is dedicated to the promotion of the Cinema of the South.
Postcolonial Digital Humanities
Authors: Olsen Porter , Risam Roopika
Published: June 2017

Postcolonial digital humanities comprises a range of dialogues at the juncture of postcolonial studies and the digital milieu. Emerging from the diverse fields of humanities computing, new media studies, rhetoric and composition, and science and technology studies, these interventions foreground important questions of power, development, knowledge production, labor, and globalization elicited by computational technology and digital media. In addition to articulating a genealogy of postcolonial digital humanities, this entry examines a sampling of digital projects and discusses the challenges to pursuing postcolonial digital humanities scholarship.
Postcolonial Studies
Authors: Singh Amardeep
Published: June 2017

Postcolonial studies refers to a broad range of inquiries related to the formerly colonized world, especially in literature, cultural anthropology, history, political science, religion studies, and sociology. Postcolonialist methodology originated in literary studies, but has subsequently had an intensely interdisciplinary focus. The use of the term “postcolonial” has been controversial, with some critics questioning the use of the prefix “post‐” and others questioning the ideological differences between postcolonial studies and Marxist thought. That said, postcolonial studies has become a broadly influential and established analytical lens, especially for research and teaching related to the Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone worlds, largely displacing earlier academic configurations such as the area studies model. Postcolonial studies can also be seen as a successor to terminology related to the “Commonwealth” (in the Anglophone world) as well as to the “Third World” configuration that was widely prevalent during the Cold War.
Postcolonial Theory
Authors: Phillips Delores B.
Published: June 2017

Postcolonial studies analyzes the legacy of violence of over 500 years of Western colonialism and the ways in which non‐Western people resist it. Its interest lies in the continuing significance of the colonial encounter for both Western and non‐Western people. Postcolonial theory constitutes a subfield of cultural studies even as it complicates not only the other subdisciplines that comprise cultural studies, but also the broader rubric of cultural studies itself. Postcolonial theory sinks deep theoretical roots into Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. Postcolonial theory studies migration and globalization, hybridity, diaspora, global momentum, transnationality, and transculturation. As it continues to evolve, postcolonial theory embraces multiple vantage points of gender, race, sexuality, and (inter)national identity.
Queer
Authors: Hawley John
Published: June 2017

Queer is anti‐essentialist and defines sexuality as an effect of discourse and social context and construction. Gender, far from binary, reveals itself as unstable and its norms in the definition of the sexes as only artificially fixed. Queer might be conceived as a militant sensitivity to historic silences and crude universalisms. The intersection of postcolonial and queer theories has invited highly imaginative comparative interdisciplinary studies.
Rhys, Jean
Authors: Johnson Erica L.
Published: June 2017

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica. Although she moved to England in 1908 and spent the rest of her life in Europe, her Caribbean origins informed much of her writing as well as its critical reception. Most notably, her 1966 novel
Wide Sargasso Sea
catapulted Rhys to fame and has become a fixture of postcolonial reading lists. The four novels and three collections of short stories that Rhys wrote prior to
Wide Sargasso Sea
, and mostly before 1939, are less well‐known but equally important artistic achievements that make Rhys a foremost modernist as well as postcolonial author. Rhys's explorations of race, class, gender, colonial relations, psychological dynamics, affective states, and aesthetics continue to inspire new scholarly directions.
El Saadawi, Nawal
Authors: Mehta Brinda J.
Published: June 2017

Nawal El Saadawi is an internationally known Egyptian writer, activist, psychiatrist, and physician. Named “the Simone de Beauvoir” of the Arab world, in her work El Saadawi focuses on the empowerment of women, children, and the rural poor in Egypt. Her writings critique the many faces of patriarchy found in religion, medicine, politics, nationhood, and the family. She is an award‐winning author and a voice of social justice for the “wretched of the earth.”
Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Robbins Bruce
Published: June 2017

Traditional definitions of cosmopolitanism may tend more to the positive or negative, but they usually agree on some degree of synthesis: cosmopolitanism as a commitment to the good of humanity as a whole that overrides all smaller loyalties and commitments, creating a habitual detachment from the values of the locality. This account is singular and normative. Over the past 30 years, however, it has been gradually if only partially displaced by a plural, descriptive understanding. According to the new understanding, cosmopolitanism can be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others. This shift from a normative to a descriptive register has meant that there are more kinds of cosmopolitanism out there to be observed and explored, both in the present and in the past, and perhaps also a greater absolute quantity. It has meant a disciplinary shift: social scientists, cultural critics, and historians have recently staked claims to a concept that had seemed to belong largely to philosophers and political theorists.
Sexual Difference in Latin America
Authors: Pey Francisca Garat
Published: June 2017

To understand the consolidation of sexual difference in postcolonial Latin America we need to analyze the hegemonic evolution established by the nations of the Iberian peninsula – within an independent framework of civil and discursive laws – as they attempted to represent a unified Latin American community and identity. Recognizing this hegemonic imperialist framework enables an analysis from within its own configuration that puts that same configuration to the test because the existence of independent postcolonial national states is nothing but an attempt to construct a common history that defines (and was invented to monolithically transform) the continent while adhering to a structure of heterosexual sexual difference.
Sidhwa, Bapsi
Authors: Bhattacharya Anindya
Published: June 2017

Bapsi Sidhwa (1938– ), a celebrated Pakistani author, spearheaded the new wave of writing from the Indian subcontinent that came with the phenomenal success of Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
. Her intimate and humane presentation of the Parsee diaspora in
The Crow Eaters
and
An American Brat
establish her as an authentic voice of that community. Her fame mainly rests on her saga,
Ice‐Candy‐Man
, which explores the growth of ethnic nationalisms before India's Partition and the issue of the rehabilitation of abducted women. Sidhwa's feminist politics is often asserted in her work through a presentation of women getting round patriarchal control through mutual empathy and benevolence.
Pueblo
Authors: Ortega Francisco A.
Published: June 2017

The history of the Spanish term
pueblo
(people) conveys a broad range of political and social experiences: the location of inhabited settlements; the lower classes; a nation's core inhabitants; a state's population mass; a community of believers; a modern form of publicity; and the site of sovereignty. This entry treats
pueblo
as the central aporetic figure that at once refers to the emancipatory agents of political transformation, the source of a new legitimacy, the abstract and indivisible form of the general will, and the preferential object of attention by modern states. Far from possessing a stable definition, the concept of
pueblo
is best grasped as an object of dispute and a field of polemics structured around the above‐mentioned nodes of experience. This entry elucidates the history of that field of debate in Spanish America.