bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cuban Revolution
Authors: Kirk John M.
Published: June 2017

This entry analyzes the Cuban revolutionary process. It starts with a reference to the nineteenth century nationalistic roots of inspiration of José Martí and examines prerevolutionary Cuba under Fulgencio Batista. The main focus is the Cuban revolution, and an analysis is given of the salient features of the key historical periods (1959–61, 1962–89, and 1989–present). The foreign policy, economic model, social change, successes and challenges of this model are given, ending with the reforms undertaken by Raúl Castro.
Davidson, Basil
Authors: Wilkins Sam
Published: June 2017

Basil Davidson (1914–2010) was a prolific British historian of Africa. Notable for his lack of academic qualification and will to immerse himself in guerrilla movements and activist causes, he fought for the dignity of African history in European eyes. With 26 books and a popular television series on African history and politics, he sought a historical discourse on equal terms, recognizing that the empires and cultures of precolonial Africa were just as noteworthy to world history as those in Europe or Asia. Later in his career his focus became more theoretical, looking at the reasons why the European nation‐state model had failed to bring about its promise of liberation in the post‐independence era.
Douglass, Frederick
Authors: Neti Leila
Published: June 2017

This entry considers the life and works of Frederick Douglass. It presents highlights from his career and gives an overview of some of his more prominent works. Focusing on the global context of his work and experiences, this entry attempts to highlight Frederick Douglass's relevance to the field of colonial and postcolonial studies.
Education
Authors: Ramsey‐Kurz Helga
Published: June 2017

In order to do justice to the development of education in (formerly) colonial contexts, the entry draws a diachronic distinction between (1) precolonial, (2) colonial, (3) early‐national, (4) anti‐colonial, (5) postcolonial, and (6) neocolonial education, and describes each of these categories with regard to the historical circumstances under which it evolved and the specific structural features and ideological orientations that define it. While aiming to give a general and acceptably comprehensible overview of the phenomenon of education in colonial and postcolonial situations, it nonetheless addresses very specific aspects such as the role of missionaries, linguistic colonization, forced assimilation of indigenous learners, motivation for colonized societies to endorse Western education, critiques of colonial education, models of liberation through education, and, finally, the internationalization and globalization of teaching services.
European Anti‐Colonialism
Authors: Ganapathy‐Doré Geetha
Published: June 2017

Anti‐colonialism does not simply refer to native opposition to, and resistance against, European colonialism. From the early modern times to decolonization, anti‐colonial thought was expressed by Europeans themselves from the humanitarian, economic, and Marxist perspectives. The relevance of colonialism for national self‐interest, the injustice of slavery and racism, the universality of human rights, Europe's civilizing mission, and the growth of capitalism were debated before socialism and communism sent out the call for nationalist revolutions. Though the colonial present reawakens the ghosts of imperialism and neocolonialism, cosmopolitan friendship and hospitality offer a way out of the antithetic dialogue between Europe and the rest of the world. The rapprochement between rich and emerging nations in the multipolar world order is a sign of a synthesis of European and indigenous anti‐colonialism.
Exile
Authors: Alexander Vera
Published: June 2017

Exile is the condition of living in geographical dislocation from home; it also refers to a person to whom this condition applies. It is often associated with pain, loss, nostalgia, and trauma. In migration discourse, exile has become a trope for the violent displacements resulting from imperialism, slavery, indenture migration, and decolonization. Exile plots have a central role in literary as well as religious history and myths of origin. The subject elicits ambiguous responses, ranging from an emphasis on disempowerment and victimhood to a fascination with exile as enabling creative freedom and intellectual innovation.
African Popular Music
Authors: Nyairo Joyce
Published: June 2017

Debates on the term “popular” in African popular music abound, but it undoubtedly constitutes a critical site for the articulation and interpretation of African social and political life. An important body of academic work has emerged that analyzes the life of musicians and breaks down the intricacies of production and the intertextualities underpinning the meanings of African songs. While questions of identity and influence are paramount, the music has contributed to individuals’ sense of self and ability to articulate quotidian life and challenge state‐ ‐driven inequalities. Individual artists like Miriam Makeba and Youssou Ndour have served as the continent's ambassadors and changed the social status of its musicians. The production and distribution of the music affirm globalization, which has brought a convergence of styles, concerns, performance modes, and sites. Meanwhile, the challenge of documenting the immense contribution of African musicians remains, despite growing attempts to exploit new media to make the archive of African popular music accessible.
Film
Authors: Chaudhary‐Kamdar Neha
Published: June 2017

In the writing of its history, film is often assumed to be a Western art form. But the technology traveled to non‐Western countries at the same time as it arrived in Europe and the United States. By the early twentieth century, filmmaking was thriving in countries like France, the United States, India, and Japan. Over time, the various centers of cinema have shifted across the globe in terms of their political and economic importance. New centers have emerged as well, along with film movements driven by radical political and artistic motives. In recent decades, movements such as Third Cinema, along with postcolonial, immigrant, and transnational films, have come to define our understanding of world cinema. These forms need to be considered along with persistent, classical modes like Hollywood, in order to fully understand the depth and breadth of film in the postcolonial world.
García Márquez, Gabriel
Authors: Thomas Mirosh
Published: June 2017

The Colombian‐born author and journalist, Gabriel García Márquez, won international fame with the publication of his novelOne Hundred Years of Solitude. His novels and short stories are known for their stylistic virtuosity as well as their historical significance. Marquez's literary situations are openly drawn from Latin American history: the oppressive powers of the dictators, the massacre of the protesting banana workers, the abject poverty of the poor, all become his literary sources. His other major novels includeLove in the Time of Cholera,The Autumn of the Patriarch, andThe General in his Labyrinth.
Garvey, Marcus
Authors: Coulardeau Jacques
Published: June 2017

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, acquired his fame from his Harlem period (1916–1927) with the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World and their Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). He was the President of the first radical black nationalist mass organization in the United States and the world. He is the object today of a serious revival in Africa and the United States, after Jamaica vindicated him in 1964 as a national hero.
Gender and Sexuality
Authors: Patel Geeta
Published: June 2017

The first thing to understand about gender and sexuality, and this is one of the crucial points made by women of color, queer theorists, and subjects from the global South, is that there is nothing there. That is, genders ought to be conceived as place holders, sexualities as possibilities; both are in the constant process of being filled in or articulated, and what was contained in them mutated to suit the circumstances of their production. So, what is at stake is a riddle, one which cannot be resolved by finding anything to which one can point and say – this is what a woman is, or this is a transgender person. Rather, writers and scholars and activists imagine, image, produce, and deploy scrupulous formulations of gendered, racialized, sexualized, classed subjects to do particular sorts of labor or to salvage certain sorts of political deployments.
Anglophone World Literature
Authors: Dharwadker Vinay
Published: June 2017

Anglophone world literature is conceptualized in multiple, conflicting ways. A useful compromise is to demarcate it as literature “other than British and American” produced originally in various varieties of English in different parts of the world under colonial or postcolonial conditions. This working definition helps identify distinctive forms of realist and nonrealist writing in prose fiction, poetry in closed and open forms, and drama, which converge upon and diverge from British and American canonical practices in numerous ways. These interrelations result from the long history of the migration of English outside the Anglo‐American sphere, and the multilingual constitution of its new cultural environments. As a further consequence, the population of daily users of English and of writers in this language around the globe is immensely heterogeneous today, and their worlds and works do not merely reproduce those of British and American literature.
Hau'ofa, Epeli
Authors: Hogue Rebecca
Published: June 2017

As an anthropologist, essayist, poet, satirist, humorist, and academic, Epeli Hau'ofa (1939–2009) is one of the most prominent literary figures of Oceania and Pacific studies. Contrary to the Western conception of the ocean as a vacant, conquerable space, Hau'ofa's metaphor of the Pacific as a “Sea of Islands” revitalized connections between what had become disparate nations in the age of Western imperialism.
Japanese Imperialism
Authors: Tierney Robert
Published: June 2017

Japan was the most important non‐Western imperial power in the modern period. It emerged as an empire in Asia while it was a semi‐colony under the treaty port system. Its imperialism was mimetic of Western imperialism, both in its tactics and in its rhetoric. However, this mimesis produced a distinctive imperialism that set Japan apart from the countries it imitated. On the one hand, Japanese colonizers stated that they shared a common racial origin and civilization with those they colonized. On the other, they practiced an anti‐imperial imperialism that claimed to liberate Asians from Western domination. Like Germany in 1919, Japan lost its overseas empire as a result of military defeat in World War II. Koreans, Taiwanese, and Manchurians were liberated from Japanese rule, but were soon plunged into civil wars. The cataclysmic end to the empire facilitated a forgetting of the past, which continued to shape perceptions of Japan's imperial culture long after 1945, leading Western scholars to downplay the importance of the colonial empire. In recent years, scholars have paid a lot of attention to Japan's imperial culture, particularly the important body of literature written by both Japanese writers and colonized writers.
Julien, Isaac
Authors: Arya Rina
Published: June 2017

Isaac Julien is an internationally renowned black filmmaker who established himself in the 1980s as an avant‐garde artist who developed an experimental style combining documentary footage, archival material, and narrative in innovative ways to create a fresh perspective on British black politics that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. His contribution to British art has been immense and can be summarized by two main achievements. First, he sought to expand the definition of film by breaking down the boundaries that existed between artistic disciplines, such as film, dance, theater, painting, and photography. Second, not only did he bring homosexuality, a subject that for so long had been marginalized in black culture, into the realm of identity politics but he did so during the AIDS epidemic.
Beti, Mongo
Authors: Ekpo Denis
Published: June 2017

Mongo Beti (1932–2001) was an unrepentantly militant intellectual for whom literature was mostly another weapon of war against colonialism and its multifarious delayed consequences afflicting Africa's post‐colonies.
Kipling, Rudyard
Authors: Davies Dominic
Published: June 2017

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a prolific writer who, through extensive writings, both captured and gave shape to the ideas of his age. Widely remembered for his unpleasantly jingoistic and racist poetry, Kipling nevertheless produced nuanced, explorative, transgressive, and even resistant accounts of colonialism through his literary prose that took the form of both short stories and novels. Intimately acquainted with India, “the jewel in the Crown of the British Empire” and his place of birth, he also traveled through and across many important colonies and diverse geographical and cultural spaces, as well as developing an affection for the countryside of southern England. Kipling's resulting paradoxical attitudes, manifesting most prominently in the inconsistencies and sensitivities of his literature, offer insights into the complex layers of colonial discourse, demonstrating how literature might function subversively from within that discursive framework and demanding new and more complex methods of critical analysis.
Land in Latin America
Authors: Johnson Adriana
Published: June 2017

Land is lodged at the very heart of some of the most fundamental and violent conflicts in postcolonial Latin America and also, for that very reason, scattered through multiple inscriptions. This entry is concerned with these inscriptions and with the way the concept of land is written into the Latin American archive through three different phases: extension, intensification, and detranscendentalization.
Language Politics
Authors: Tetteh‐Batsa Bridget
Published: June 2017

To some extent, scholarship on language politics responds to the prestige the English language enjoys, not only as a world language, but in the way it enables access to globalized knowledge or market economies. While some scholars specifically decry Standard English's global influence as linguistic imperialism because it legitimizes cultural superiority for the West, others foreground the opportunities English offers for national and global participation. For scholars interested in preserving ethnic languages in the African postcolony, “varieties” of the English language, for example, are considered necessary appropriations of Standard English. Relatedly, postcolonial critics who address the significance of language choice in terms of African literature or media of school instruction consider the consequences and implications for what defines cultures, identities, and worldviews.
Mannoni, Octave
Authors: Zabus Chantal
Published: June 2017

Dominique Octave Mannoni (1899–1989) was a French intellectual and civil servant whose 20‐year stay in Madagascar shaped his ethnopsychiatric interpretations of colonialism. Using two characters from William Shakespeare'sThe Tempest, he elaborated Prospero's inferiority complex and the Caliban or dependency complex in his best‐known book,Prospero and Caliban.The Psychology of Colonizationwhile undergoing analysis with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in Paris. His theories were famously opposed by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon.
Mao Zedong and Maoism
Authors: Vukovich Daniel F.
Published: June 2017

Born to a land‐owning family in a village in Shaoshan, Hunan province, Mao Zedong went from school teacher and liberal and anarchist intellectual to paramount leader of the Chinese revolution. With others he famously Sinified Marxism and Leninism to make them, as theories and political guides, fit the Chinese and rural Third World contexts. With some brief exceptions he led the new, modern nation‐state state from 1949 to his death in 1976, a period of enormous ups and downs, of lives lost as well as saved. Maoism became arguably the dominant radical theory of politics and development for the entire era of decolonization. The reversal of his reputation and meaning has as much to do with global, rightward or liberal trends than with anything else.
Maran, René
Authors: Koffi‐Tessio Marie H.
Published: June 2017

Caribbean‐born writer René Maran (1887–1960) was the first person of color to be awarded the Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize, for
Batouala: A True Negro Novel
(1921). Maran produced a large body of work, much of which is unknown today, ranging from poetry and novels to animal fables, biographies of explorers, and newspaper articles.
Batouala
remains by far the most famous of his works. Often presented as a figure of resistance and anti‐colonialism, Maran remains, however, an ambiguous personage: as a source of political controversy on the colonial question on more than one occasion, he has prefigured the anti‐colonial struggle. Yet the stances adopted within his work and his personal letters at the beginning of his career make it difficult to assimilate the texts, and their author, into the binary logic which would clearly oppose resistant struggle to complicity with some aspects of colonial ideology.
Maroons
Authors: Cummings Ronald
Published: June 2017

This entry offers a brief outline of the origins and development of Maroon societies in the New World. It also examines some of the conditions and reasons for the survival of these communities and their function as spaces of resistance to colonial domination and the social regimentation of plantation society.
Martí, José
Authors: Saumell Rafael E.
Published: June 2017

From the onset of the twentieth century to the present, José Martí (1853–95) has been Cuba's most important and most studied author. Michel Foucault's theory elaborated in his “What is an Author?” applies to Martí. Not only was he a founder of “discourses,” he also made possible the formation of other texts produced after him. He wrote extensively on colonization, colonialism and postcolonialism, slavery, Spanish America's independence wars and its heroes, anti‐imperialism, racism, race relations, pre‐Hispanic civilizations, and cultural liberation from Euro and North America‐centered ideologies. One of his most fundamental essays on these issues is “Nuestra América” (Our America) (1891). For his book of poetry
Ismaelillo
(1882), he is also considered one of the forefathers of
modernismo
.
Masculinity
Authors: Sands Travis
Published: June 2017

Masculinity occupies a peculiar position in postcolonial studies. On the one hand, it was only consolidated as an object of analysis in the late 1980s. But on the other hand, postcolonial, Third World, and women of color feminist scholars have long recognized masculinity as a structuring dimension of imperial rule, postcolonial nationalism, and neo‐imperial domination. Analyses of masculinity in a postcolonial frame have thus followed several intersecting trajectories that each work to problematize the transparency of masculinity as an epistemological ground, while marking its usefulness for understanding gendered logics of domination and resistance. This entry offers an overview of these trajectories while marking the ways that postcolonial masculinity studies have come to define masculinity as multiple, historically contingent, and variegated by cultural, national, religious, linguistic, ethnic, racial, and economic differences.
Melville, Pauline
Authors: Renk Kathleen J.
Published: June 2017

Pauline Melville (1948– ) is a Guyanese novelist and short‐story writer. Her subjects range from political corruption to the split between magic and science during the Renaissance to contemporary terrorism. Blending a unique form of marvelous realism with sardonic wit and a cry for social and political justice, Melville's work often decries old imperialism dressed in the new garb of globalization.
Memory in Latin America
Authors: de Murcia Conesa Antonio
Published: June 2017

A critical and inevitably selective journey through the Latin American politics of memory demands an examination not only of those discourses devoted to handling memories, but also of those willing to think about forgetfulness. The latter are the same that have exchanged the centrality of a thinking subject for the subalternity of thinking about the subject, which is furthermore a theorization of the non‐subject. The politics of anti‐subjectivism is introduced as an answer to a democratic way of thinking about the violence and sacrifice claims made by the unending hypostases of power: legacy, hegemony, identity, nation, culture, or, finally, the subject. All of them, to a greater or lesser degree, are anamorphoses of the hypostasis of memory.
Mestizaje
Authors: Castro Carolina Bruna
Published: June 2017

Mestizaje can be analyzed from a biological and demographic point of view, as well as from the basis of a community's subjectification and identification. This community establishes values and customs that come into contact with other features from the different places in which it resides. In this sense, mestizaje is different from immigration. In the case of immigration, people's behavior is divided into two categories – public and social life, on the one hand, and their private, family life (habits and respect for traditional roots), on the other. In the mestizaje phenomenon, however, there is a crossover of roots which gives rise to a way of seeing the world. Mestizo people are not born; rather they become mestizo.
Middle Eastern Literature and Theory (Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Syriac)
Authors: Oruc Firat
Published: June 2017

By virtue of being one of the oldest continuously inhabited parts of the world, the Middle East has been home to the formation and development of an unparalleled variety of literatures in different languages, ranging from Sumerian, Egyptian, and Akkadian to Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac to Turkish, Persian, and Armenian. As a literary region, the Middle East is composed of a diverse range of national, ethnic, and linguistic elements that have been shaped by overlapping social histories, cultural expressions, and aesthetic forms. This composition took different shapes in ancient, medieval/Islamic, modern, and contemporary global times. In terms of studying the body of literature that emerged from the Middle East, Orientalist philologists have generally been interested in studying the first two periods (ancient and medieval), whereas postcolonial critics have been primarily preoccupied with the modern and contemporary cultural/literary transformations that the region has undergone in the aftermath of Western hegemony.
Mistry, Rohinton
Authors: Patel Tanvi
Published: June 2017

As one of the most renowned South Asian writers of the modern era, Rohinton Mistry garners high praise for realistic depictions of marginalized Indian life. His admiration for the strength and resilience of Indian people facing social and political predicaments emanates from novels like
Such A Long Journey
and
A Fine Balance
. Showcasing the tumultuous history of postcolonial India and the Parsi community in particular, Mistry resurrects traditionalist notions of human agency, nostalgia, and family.
Mofolo, Thomas
Authors: Hodapp James
Published: June 2017

Thomas Mofolo was one of the most prominent literary figures in early African literature. The most widely recognized of his work is the novel
Chaka
. Mofolo stands as a crucial link between precolonial African written and oral literature and the stage after Chinua Achebe's
Things Fall Apart
, which initiated a period dominated by the Heinemann African Writers’ Series.
Naipaul, V. S.
Authors: Rahim Jennifer
Published: June 2017

Places produce writers. The reverse is also true. Writers make places. Trinidadian writer Vidyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has spent most of his phenomenal writing career exploring the enigmatic interplay of this interdependence. Naipaul has spent as much time analyzing the writerly “I” that sees and narrates as he has creating characters and landscapes. His artistic fascination with the intersection between literary and real worlds persists in light of his formative familiarity with movement and dislocation. Writing precisely about the world that made him became self‐knowledge. In his Nobel lecture, “Two Worlds,” he identifies “background” as his primary influence. A descendant of East Indian indentured laborers of peasant origin, Naipaul was born on an ex‐plantation.
Naxalites
Authors: Majumder Auritro
Published: June 2017

The Naxalite insurgency in India has attracted national and global attention in recent times. The Naxalite adoption of revolutionary Maoism has a long history in India, starting with the Naxalbari peasant uprising in West Bengal in 1967 led by Charu Mazumdar. The combination of lower‐caste and indigenous
adivasi
resistance to neoliberal actors such as multinational mining corporations and rural land‐owning elites, in addition to the theories of subaltern and peasant armed struggle developed by the Maoist Naxalites, have made Naxalism into one of the most significant revolutionary movements in the world today.
Ogot, Grace
Authors: Stockstill Ellen J.
Published: June 2017

Grace Ogot was a successful writer from Kenya whose short fiction appeared in a number of collections. Her book
The Promised Land
(1966) was the first novel written by a woman to be published by the East Africa Publishing House. Ogot published works in Dholuo, Kiswahili, and English. Her fiction frequently wove together Luo folklore and her experiences working as a nurse. In addition to being a writer and a healthcare professional, Ogot served as a member of parliament in Kenya and as a delegate to the United Nations.
Ondaatje, Michael
Authors: Bower Rachel
Published: June 2017

Michael Ondaatje is a poet and storyteller of extraordinary energy and beauty, and one of Canada's finest writers. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, moved to England in 1952, and has lived in Canada since 1962. Ondaatje's career reflects his remarkable ability to juggle literary, editorial, academic, and critical work. Although he is internationally renowned for his novels, particularly the Booker Prize winning novel
The English Patient
, Ondaatje has also authored many highly celebrated collections of poetry, as well as screenplays and nonfiction books and essays. Ondaatje's writing is fixated by history, memory, and the physicality of human lived experience, and it powerfully forces us to re‐experience the living environments in which we live.
Pamuk, Orhan
Authors: Oruc Firat
Published: June 2017

Orhan Pamuk (1952–) is one of the most prominent Turkish writers and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. His work displays a rich variety of experiment with narrative forms and modes of storytelling. Even though Turkey has not been subjected to European colonial rule, Orhan Pamuk shares strongly the sensibilities of postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie on a number of issues pertaining to secularism, nationalism, and orientalism. In Pamuk's novels, Istanbul is represented as a hybrid contact zone, where history and modernity, East and West, old and new, the religious and the secular, Turkish and European are superimposed on one another as forces of collision or reconciliation.
Paz, Octavio
Authors: Crane Nicholas Jon
Published: June 2017

Octavio Paz (1914–98) was an award‐winning Mexican writer and a prominent figure in cultural and political debates throughout the latter two‐thirds of the twentieth century. Paz's early writings on the relationship between history, revolution, and poetry reflect his involvement in student politics and in the Marxist and anarchist left. Beginning in the late 1930s, Paz published significant work on the theme of Mexican identity, including his best‐known work
The Labyrinth of Solitude
(1950). Paz was also the founder and editor of many significant literary magazines, including
Plural
and
Vuelta
. From the 1970s until his death in 1998, Paz became critical of the politics to which he had been so committed in his youth. In these years, Paz's writing, literary magazines, and more general public engagement generated tension with the intellectual left, especially those elements of the left committed to Marxism.
Postcolonial Shakespeare Studies
Authors: Minas Steven Aaron
Published: June 2017

Over the past 200 years, Shakespeare has risen in the ranks of world authors to become the most recognized and popular author of the twenty‐first century. As his work continues to adapt to new media and attract new generations of viewers and readers, his status as
the
global author seems secure. Setting aside his aesthetic splendor, the reason for Shakespeare's modern ubiquity most likely stems from three sources of transmission: British colonialism, cinema, and translation. These sources, however, have met with considerable criticism, mainly from emergent postcolonial studies.
Rao, Raja
Authors: Jain Bhawana
Published: June 2017

Raja Rao (1908–2006) was an eminent Indian English novelist and short story writer. He is the youngest among the three founders of Indo‐English literature, alongside R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand. His writings were deeply embedded in Indian philosophy, metaphysics, and Hinduism, depicting the quest for the meaning of the real India. He began writing with anti‐colonial fervor in the first half of the twentieth century and continued writing until the turn of the twenty‐first century.
Selvon, Samuel
Authors: Nair Supriya M.
Published: June 2017

Samuel Selvon was a major figure of the post‐Windrushgeneration of Caribbean writers. He migrated to London from Trinidad in 1950 and wrote several novels, short stories, radio plays, and nonfiction. Although his work was considered pathbreaking, his talents remained undervalued when compared to other writers who followed him. However, a growing body of criticism now recognizes the complex nature of his engagement with the major issues of black British and postcolonial Caribbean identity such as nationalism, migration, social conflict, unemployment, popular culture, and modernity. Selvon migrated to Canada later and died in 1994 in Trinidad.
Senghor, Léopold
Authors: Diagne Souleymane Bachir
Published: June 2017

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on October 9, 1906, in Joal, a village southeast of Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. His ethnic group was the Serer people, and he would later celebrate the Serer homeland. He developed the concept of Négritude with fellow authors, and his work emphasizes
art nègre
. He insisted that art is not an analytical tool but a “vital knowledge” of reality. After World War II he entered politics, and in 1960 he became the first president of the independent Republic of Senegal. When he died in 2001 his legacy was that of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, of a philosopher of Négritude, and of a statesman who contributed to the advancement of democracy on the African continent.
Kureishi, Hanif
Authors: Dasgupta Rohit K.
Published: June 2017

Hanif Kureishi is one of the foremost postcolonial novelists and playwrights of the last three decades. The geographical reach of his writing seldom extends beyond London. His work is an inquiry into the complex models of nationalism and nationhood and a critique of Englishness. His screenplay
My Beautiful Launderette
(1985) explored polemical issues such as ethnic tension and sexual exploration set against the backdrop of 1980s Thatcherite Britain.
Shiva, Vandana
Authors: Singh Madhu
Published: June 2017

A renowned environmentalist, ecofeminist, social justice activist, and author from India, Vandana Shiva is a trained physicist who brings a holistic perspective to the debate around food security, environmental sustainability, intellectual property rights, ecofeminism, and biodiversity. Her key concepts of “earth democracy,” “seed globalization,” “biopiracy,” and “eco‐imperialism” have fostered a new awareness of ecology and environmental justice. Shiva believes in placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse. Ecofeminism, as she conceptualizes it, has always been the feminism of ordinary women; she has never seen ecofeminism “as essentialism in biology” but believes that “women became experts of life because they were entrusted with responsibility of becoming sustainers.” She argues that the violation of nature is linked to the violation and marginalization of women, especially in the Third World. She has campaigned against “biopiracy,” or the patenting of indigenous knowledge, and the establishment of corporate monopolies on the living resources of the poor. With a remarkable power in her grassroots activism and community engagement, Shiva inspires change and empowers others through her optimism, strength, and unwavering determination.
Silko, Leslie Marmon
Authors: Sneider Leah
Published: June 2017

Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo/Mexican/European) is one of the foremost contemporary Native American authors and considered a leading Native American literary renaissance author. Silko's body of work includes poetry, novels, short stories, a memoir, correspondence, and essays. Much of her work tends to issues of identity, justice, oppression, culture, and the land.Ceremonyis her most widely read, analyzed, and taught novel.
Socialism
Authors: Cerrato Maddalena
Published: June 2017

This entry offers a general overview of the role played by socialism in the postcolonial world. Socialism is a pivotal ideological ingredient in Asian and African countries’ struggles for independence from colonial power after World War II. In such a context, socialism is not implied in an orthodox way with respect to Marxian theory, but much more as a vague nostrum against imperialism. The entry emphasizes the fundamental connection between this use of socialism and those countries which decided to situate themselves in a third position with respect to the dichotomous geopolitical space shaped by the Cold War, the so‐called not‐aligned countries. In this perspective, it provides a broad outline of the phenomena of Arab and African socialism, and their connection with pan‐Arabism and pan‐Africanism. The last part of the entry is dedicated to Latin America, referring to the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean approach to socialism, as well as to the new versions of socialism embodied by the governments of the so‐called “pink tide.”
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
Authors: Ray Sangeeta
Published: June 2017

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a literary theorist, a postcolonial critic, a translator, feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist extraordinaire. While most scholars around the world first met her as the consummate translator of Derrida's
De la grammatologie
(Of Grammatology) and remember her brilliant introduction to the book, she probably remains most famous for introducing the phrase “strategic essentialism,” for feminist and colonial critiques based on a recuperation of the sexed and colonized subject, and for her groundbreaking essays, “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” and “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
The Empire Writes Back
Authors: Hodapp James
Published: June 2017

The Empire Writes Back
is a foundational text in the field of postcolonial studies that remains relevant 25 years after its publication. Its role in consolidating the insights of disparate disciplines was crucial to the creation of postcolonial studies as a recognized academic discourse.
Transculturation in Latin America
Authors: Brighenti Maura
Published: June 2017

In 1940 Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz introduced the category of
transculturation
to describe and explain historical, social, and cultural processes that originated from the violent colonial encounter. From that moment on, the category has had great success, often combined with concepts such as
mestizaje
and hybridity in forging national Latin American identities and cultures. Apart from the prophecy of a future harmonious synthesis, its first formulation can be understood as a radical materialistic perspective through which colonial and postcolonial modernity as a whole may be considered.
Transnational
Authors: Chakravorty Mrinalini
Published: June 2017

Transnational signals the extension of political and economic interests as well as cultural relations beyond singular national borders. Literally describing a reaching across or transcendence of discrete national boundaries, transnational is concerned with the sociocultural effects of deterritorialization, especially those enabled by globalization. It conveys that accelerated stage of late, globalized capitalism when corporations and people became more mobile, less moored to the boundaries of any single nation‐state. It is closely linked to: processes of globalization, diverse social arrangements within border zones, and migrant or diaspora cultures. It stands for a historical phenomenon unique to contemporary political and economic formations, denoting an ontological experience of these conditions. A capacious concept‐metaphor, it variously designates the phenomenal – mainly economic – conditions of late‐modernity, its political orientations toward liberal values, the sociocultural experiences thus produced (often in resistance to transnationalism's economic force), and the kinds of epistemologies or forms of knowledge arising in response.
Vera, Yvonne
Authors: Diabate Naminata
Published: June 2017

In postcolonial African feminist fiction, Yvonne Vera's novels indict colonialism, unexamined nationalism, and patriarchal configurations and their privileging of land ownership over the female body in Zimbabwe. Written in a lyrical and postmodernist prose (repetition, ethereal language, magical realism), her fiction tackles subjects that many consider taboo‐‐ rape, incest, infanticide, self‐abortion, commercial sex work, and sexual pleasure. Despite the physical and emotional strains that female protagonists experience, Vera's narratives still contain an implicit theory of social change and future possibility. In writing the biographies of unknown women, Vera manages to produce remarkable literary works, thereby molding the structures of aesthetic representations in the structures of political representations.
Wendt, Albert
Authors: Bushnell Cameron Fae
Published: June 2017

Maualaivao Albert Wendt (b. October 27, 1939, Apia, Samoa) is a foundational figure for Pacific literature. He has consistently proclaimed the right of artists from Oceania to shape their own culture. From his groundbreaking essay, “Towards a New Oceania,” through novels and anthologies, and to his current paintings, Wendt's artistic production has provided a map oriented toward a Pacific Island creative presence.
Women's Movements in the Global South
Authors: Roy Srila
Published: June 2017

This entry underscores the politics and ethics of scale in considering women's movements in the Global South – how they have always been simultaneously regional, national, and transnational in scale (materially if not always imaginatively) and consequently, viewed through the twin lens of the global and the local. Questions of scale that emphasize points of connection, proximity and intimacy – rather than separation, distance, and distinctness – might even come to displace an opposition between the local and the global as conventionally conceived in terms of a series of binaries that ultimately reproduce unequal power relations.
Young, Robert J. C.
Authors: Dora‐Laskey Prathim‐Maya
Published: June 2017

Robert J. C. Young (b. 1950 in Hertfordshire, UK) is an eminent British cultural critic and postcolonial theorist. Recently elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2013), he is widely accredited with instituting postcolonial studies as a discrete methodological and philosophical field. Much of Young's work actively embraces resistance to oppression and promotes transnational solidarity; he suggests, specifically, that a redress of postcolonial violence is impossible if we do not address global injustice.
Momaday, N. Scott
Authors: Roemer Kenneth M.
Published: June 2017

This entry offers information about Momaday's Kiowa heritage, his academic career, his major awards, and his literary canon, including the Pulitzer Prize‐winning novel,
The House Made of Dawn
(1968) and the multigenre work,
The Way to Rainy Mountain
(1969). Although Momaday's prose and poetry are deeply grounded in his Kiowa heritage, his works integrate Navajo and Jemez Pueblo worldviews, as well as Anglo‐American and international perspectives inspired by Emily Dickinson, Yvor Winters, William Faulkner, and the Danish author Isak Dinesen. He demonstrates how contemporary Native authors can be transnational writers with strong indigenous roots.
Clothing (non‐royal), Pharaonic Egypt
Authors: Hallmann Aleksandra
Published: June 2017

Egyptian clothing fulfilled many functions, from the mundane role of covering and decorating the wearer to protecting the body in a symbolic and apotropaic sense. Clothing expresses identity, gender, social status and/or the ethnicity of the wearer. The most obvious distinction between classes of Egyptian clothing is royal and non‐royal. In more general terms, Egyptian garments are divided into two groups. The first consists of untailored/wraparound garments that were usually rectangular pieces of cloth wrapped in a variety of ways, including kilts, wraparound skirts and dresses, and various outer garments, such as cloaks and shawls. The second group comprises cut‐to‐shape and/or tailored clothes such as tunics, including separate sleeves, loincloths, hip‐cloths, aprons, so‐called “penis sheaths,” and various sashes such as body‐ or neck‐sashes.

Information about Egyptian clothing is primarily based on visual sources, which are not always straightforward to decipher due to the Egyptian conceptual and non‐perspectival mode of two‐dimensional representation, which significantly affects the depiction of a clothed figure. The complex way of examining Egyptian clothing is through analysis of the same garment in two and three dimensions and juxtaposing the represented clothing with extant garments, as well as textual sources.
Keys and locks
Authors: Cervi Angela
Published: June 2017

Simple wooden indoor lockable devices arose early in different civilizations, and it is difficult to state who influenced whom, as there is little archaeological evidence.

The first well documented locking mechanism operated by a metal key from the outside is the “Homeric Lock,” in use in Greece since at least the fifth century
bce
, which was soon replaced by the “Laconian” or “Pin‐tumbler Lock,” more secure and less unwieldy. The Romans improved the mechanism, adding metal springs, and developed the “rotary lock,” the main locking mechanism used until modern times.

Keys and locks, as devices to control and limit access and to protect spaces and goods, take on symbolic value from very early times, as can be seen from the artistic representation of such objects, which reveal social and religious practices of ancient cultures.
Dorian festivals
Authors: Cuche Vincent
Published: June 2017

Dorian cities shared a wide range of religious festivals, as is demonstrated by the similarities of their calendars. The most important of these festivals were dedicated to Apollo and often had a strong military character. They also played a significant role in fostering Dorian identity, especially as they evoked their common, legendary origin.
Frank, Tenney (1876–1939)
Authors: Brennan T. Corey
Published: June 2017

Tenney Frank was a Latinist and Roman social and economic historian at Bryn Mawr College (1904–19) and Johns Hopkins University (1919–39) who was regarded as the foremost American classical scholar of his day.
Religion in contact, Germany
Authors: Spickermann Wolfgang
Published: June 2017

We have only a few mentions about Germanic religion by classic authors, mainly Caesar and Tacitus. Archaeological sources are relatively rare, and sometimes difficult to interpret. So, most of the sources for Germanic religion are archaeological and epigraphic, and originate from the period after the Roman conquest until the fall of the limes (first century to 260
ce
). In the course of Romanization with the ensuing process of reciprocal influences (
interpretatio
), a specific regional Gallo/Germano‐Roman religion emerged, at least by the second century
ce
; given the extensive resettlement and immigration of peoples, in particular of soldiers, the mixed provincial population of the Rhine was hardly able to draw on coherent traditions. Owing to these circumstances, this article lays its focus mainly on the provincial religion of the two Germanic provinces.
Najrân
Authors: Schiettecatte Jérémie
Published: June 2017

Najrân refers to an oasis settlement and pre‐Islamic tribe of southwest Arabia (Saudi Arabia). This oasis was a major place along the caravan roads linking Yemen to the Gulf and the Mediterranean. As the first Christianized settlement in south Arabia, the city of Najrân witnessed persecutions by the Himyarite kings which in return encouraged an Aksumite offensive and the subjection of the major part of the Arabian Peninsula.
Dedications (Greek and Latin)
Authors: Jacquemin Anne
Published: June 2017

For the Greeks and Romans, dedications were a way of winning the favor of the gods. Anything could be consecrated, but the word “dedication” generally indicated a permanent gift. Whatever was dedicated belonged to the gods forever. However, people knew how to escape an accusation of sacrilege when they used offerings for the well‐being of the community.
Argilos
Authors: Perron Martin
Published: June 2017

Argilos is a Greek colony of the Cycladic island of Andros located on the west bank of the Strymon River. It was founded around the mid‐seventh century
bce
on an earlier or contemporary Thracian‐Bisaltian settlement. Exploitation of the natural resources of the area rapidly brought wealth to the colony and led to significant urban development evidenced by the remains of several public and private buildings. The site was destroyed by Philip II of Macedon in 357
bce
and was shortly reoccupied until the end of the third century
bce
.
Tanit, “sign of”
Authors: D'Andrea Bruno
Published: June 2017

The so‐called sign of Tanit is a symbol characteristic of Phoenician and Punic iconography and is found from the sixth to fifth centuries
bce
to the second and third centuries
ce
. This motif is usually depicted on votive stelae from the Tophets, which are the sanctuaries dedicated to Baal Hammon and Tanit. However, it can be found also in residential and funerary contexts as well as on other artefacts (weights, pottery, seals, figurines, etc.). Its meaning, its origin and its direct (and early) connection with the goddess Tanit remain hypothetical.
Altar of Zeus, Pergamon
Authors: Hardiman Craig I.
Published: June 2017

The Altar of Zeus at Pergamon is a touchstone of Hellenistic art and culture. It is a large Ionic building that includes a high podium and superstructure around an altar. The Altar is most famous for its many sculptural elements, especially the great frieze representing the gods fighting the giants in Baroque style. The whole is a monument meant to extoll the magnificence of the Attalids at Pergamon and present the city as the new Athens and its royalty as the inheritors of Athenian art and culture.
Tróia
Authors: Limão Filomena , Maciel M. Justino
Published: June 2017

The peninsula of Tróia on the southwestern Atlantic coast of Portugal was the site of an important Roman industrial complex that developed from the first century
ce
. Today the archaeological site preserves the remains of industrial facilities such as fish‐salting factories,
balnea
,
insulae
, diverse funerary monuments, and an Early Christian basilica. Tróia slowly declined during Late Antiquity and in the late fifth to early sixth century
ce
life gave way to a vast necropolis.