Postcolonial Approaches to Development

Cultural geography continues to be a productive subdisciplinary area and broad interdisciplinary perspective. This is marked by the volume of published work, including new collections of recent research and critical introductions (Cook et al., 2000; Mitchell, 2000), and a new journal – Social and Cultural Geography – which supplements those already established. Much the same could be said of postcolonial studies, with its recent critical texts and introductory publications (Ashcroft et al., 1998; Gandy, 1998; Loomba, 1998; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; San Juan, 1999) and new journals – Interventions and Postcolonial Studies. As with cultural geography, the boundaries of what counts as postcolonialism are also fluid. There are obvious crosscurrents between cultural geography, postcolonial studies and other work on cultural identities, processes, practices, politics and social divisions. Debates within postcolonialism, for example, intersect with recent work on whiteness (Bonnett, 2000), and wider discussions about the nature of the ‘cultural turn’. Following my thematic strategy in these reports, I want to consider recent intersections between cultural geography and postcolonial studies, though this is an inevitably partial account focusing only on one, albeit prominent, theme within cultural geography and limited to English-language publications. As James Sidway has argued, since postcolonialism has been marked by attempts to expose and challenge western imperial practices of survey, mapping and classification, ‘any mapping of the postcolonial is a problematic and contradictory project’ (2000: 592). Yet postcolonialism as a theoretical framework and substantive direction is a significant feature of recent work in cultural geography, and critical geography more widely (Blunt and Wills, 2000). My focus is on the material and cultural geographies of colonialism and on the spatially differentiated politics of postcolonial belonging. Interestingly, both cultural geography and postcolonialism have been criticized along similar lines. Recent concerns about cultural geography’s ‘preoccupation with immaterial cultural processes, with the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems, Progress in Human Geography 26,2 (2002) pp. 219–230

The Ethical Stakes of Critique Rahul Govind (bio) THE END OF THE WEST AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES BY SEAN MEIGHOO Columbia University Press, 2018 Sean Meighoo's The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales opens with the following problematic: the concept of the West drives a certain form of Euro-centrism. However, Meighoo argues that many of the critiques of this very Euro-centrism are themselves complicit with their object of critique. The basis for this argument is that even these critiques presuppose a unitary concept and history of the West. Meighoo diagnoses this failure in a range of figures and texts from continental philosophy and postcolonial theory. While the demonstration of this failure forms a major portion of the book in the form of Parts II and III (136 pages of 222 pages) there is what might appear an unusual framing to these sections. Part I is a discussion of Martin Bernal's Black Athena and its critical reception, while the concluding part IV is a reading of "popular culture," more specifically a reading of the film Help! (starring the Beatles). Bernal's work is an apt introduction of the problematic of the West since the latter is often in-dissociable from Greece, and the concluding section on "popular culture" is meant to teach us ways to deconstruct the West, moving beyond the promises and practices of both continental philosophy and postcolonial theory. Before moving to a discussion of Meighoo's readings, it should be stated at the outset that the sections on continental philosophy and postcolonial theory (Parts II and III) are in fact readings of specific texts of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Homi Bhaba, and [End Page 151] Trinh T. Minh-ha. There is an internal logic to this sequence. Meighoo begins with the need to dismantle the concept of the West and its Greek origins—in fact, the very concept of the origin—which was to have uniquely invented "philosophy, science and democracy." As he says: "The West binds together reason, progress and freedom in a way that remains absolutely unique to itself" (3). Within continental philosophy, Meighoo traces a shift from a "historical teleology" ("a discourse that celebrates the historical and technological progress of the West") to a "negative teleology" ("a counter discourse that laments its cultural and spiritual decline") (xi, repeated on 45). While Husserl and Heidegger embody this shift, this very shift is subtly reiterated in the texts of Levinas and Derrida. "Negative teleology" is reappropriated in postcolonial theory, an appropriation that is legible in the "critique of representation" (as a unique power of the West) in E. Said and C. T. Mohanty as much as in the "valorization of difference" in H. Bhaba and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Thus, even within negative teleology and its most radical appropriations, the subtle specter of a unitary West persists. It is in the face of this challenge that Meighoo proposes, in the concluding part IV, to alternate registers by reading the film Help!, in which he finds a "hyperbolic" practice of representation that might well be more subversive than the self-consciously critical practices of continental philosophy as much as postcolonial theory. The fundamental methodological and substantive issue is not merely the accuracy and persuasiveness of the specific readings of the various texts under discussion but also whether Meighoo is successful in integrating these different texts and in diagnosing them all with a singular conceptual defect: the persistence of the "West" in their analyses. Moreover, one has to simultaneously evaluate the value of the concluding section where an alternative—unburdened by this defect—is proposed in the reading of film. On both counts, this reviewer remains unconvinced. Since the book involves readings of texts, there is simply no other way to critically engage than to closely and critically follow Meighoo's tread; needless to say, this cannot but be selective. In part I, Meighoo admits that his discussion does not contribute any historical evidence to Bernal's work and its critical reception. Rather, the interest and investment lie in the "stakes" of the debate: "The significance of Bernal's Black Athena lies not so...

Postcolonial theory emerged in the late 1970s as a paradigm for examining the consequences and legacies of colonialism. With respect to sport for development and peace (SDP) theory, research and practice, this chapter introduces postcolonial theory, examines how ‘it’ has been and could be used. The first section discusses how postcolonial theory serves as a critical ‘history of the present’ and is connected to the concept and practice of ‘development’. The second section explores five concepts in postcolonial theory – discourse, hegemony, hybridity, agency, and the subaltern – that are relevant to SDP. The third section provides examples of postcolonial analyses of contemporary sport, highlighting several major contributions, especially in the understanding of cricket. A review of scholarship that explicitly applies postcolonial theory to the realm of sport, development and peace follows. A key question is how SDP might perpetuate or challenge inequalities in power, resources and influence. The fourth section tackles critiques and problems in using postcolonial theory in SDP, particularly around appropriate indicators for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The chapter ends with suggestions for next steps, including more inclusive and accessible research as well as systematic efforts to imagine a future that both incorporates and transcends the postcolonial frame.

Politics, spirituality, and fundraising in churches’ critical development education

Introduction:Rethinking Southern Literary Studies David McWhirter (bio) Still simmering controversies surrounding the flying of the confederate flag over the South Carolina State House remind us that "southern culture" remains, forty years after desegregation, a highly charged and contested symbolic site. And "southern literature" has played a prominent role in successive constructions and reconstructions of "the South," both as a unique regional culture, and as a privileged locus—sometimes valorized, often castigated—for understanding the broader modern U.S. culture to which it stands in tense relation. In the 1920s and 30s, white southern writers and academics, concentrated in a handful of universities (Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, LSU) in some of the poorest states in the union, successfully promoted a still-influential model for understanding southern literature as a bastion of traditional values (cultural, religious, familial, communal, agrarian)—a last line of defense, or so it was argued, against a soulless, rootless, corrupt urban industrial (hence, "northern") modernity. This model—built on an elision of, sometimes an overt complicity in, the institutions and discourses of racism, on histories that depend as much on what they forget as on what they remember, and on a rigid (if highly complex) adherence to traditional gender roles—has been under fire for two decades or more by African-Americanist and feminist critics. More recently, scholars drawing on new work in cultural and postcolonial theory, social history, and cultural geography have begun to question "southern literature's" excessively U.S.-centered approach to the history and culture of the Americas, and to challenge its neglect of the cultural, linguistic, class, and social differences that fissure a purportedly unitary "South." One consequence of these new trends has been a long-overdue rethinking of our concepts of "region," "place," and the "imagined communities" they are said to embody. Interrogating the value of "place" as a category of cultural understanding, critics have increasingly wondered if discourses of southern regionalism—prone (like all regionalisms, it may be) to substitute, in Roberto Dainotto's words, "a latently ideological tool of analysis—history—with an allegedly natural one—place" —have not in fact served to construct "the South" as "the figure of an otherness that is, essentially, otherness from, and against, history."1 [End Page 1] Writing in 1952, Robert Heilman famously claimed "a deep suspiciousness of abstraction" as one of the hallmarks of "the southern temper."2 But nothing could be more abstract (or less historicized) than the idea of "the South" bequeathed to us by earlier generations of scholars, including Heilman. Permeated by the rhetoric of authenticity, even by a fetishization of authenticity, southern literary studies has long subscribed to a naïve logic of mimeticism in which southern writing is understood not only to represent, but actually to arise or emanate from, a "region" that pre-exists it—that is, from a southern soil or psyche or essence that is understood to exist prior to and independently of the languages and cultural forms in which it is represented. Thus subsumed into a unitary narrative so finished and airtight as to have forgotten its own status as narrative, the historical south, for all intents and purposes, vanishes, subsumed by a set of totalizing myths, maps, portraits, and abstractions ("the South") which, in promising the completedness of a foundation, have also blocked or frustrated our ability to generate enabling re-orientations. The South, we might say, has only recently, and reluctantly, been allowed to differ from itself, a shift suggested by the titles—No Place Like Home; South to a New Place; South of Tradition; Reconstructing Dixie—of several of the new scholarly books reviewed in this issue. "'Southern Literature'/Southern Cultures" originated in November 2002 as a symposium, held at Texas A&M University, featuring the contributors and respondents included in these pages. Representing the various critical trends that are currently transforming southern literary studies, those contributors work to reexamine, reevaluate, and dislocate past constructions of southern literature. In "Toward 'A New Southern Studies,'" Michael Kreyling gives an overview of the opportunities and risks—including recent manifestations of "calculated amnesia" —attendant upon what he calls "the present, protracted shift from southern literature (now an outdated term for what we study...

This chapter illustrates the importance and a postcolonial analysis of the Irish context. It outlines some assumptions of postcolonial psychology and considers the ways in which psychologists have described the Irish psyche, particularly through assigning attributes. Postcolonial psychology engages with contexts and concepts related to historical processes of colonisation, postcolonial development and decolonisation. It draws on early writings on the psychology of colonisation, notably those of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and on postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory elaborates concepts that are of interest to psychologists, such as culture, discourse, identity and consciousness. A recurring theme in postcolonial psychology concerns the loss or suppression of indigenous psychologies and healing practices as a result of colonisation. An approach to both psychological and political transformation utilises both traditional psychological practices and emerging indigenous or transpersonal practices. The chapter focuses on discussions that make explicit links to our history of colonisation.

This book explores the meanings and complexities of India’s experience of transition from colonial to the post-colonial period. It focuses on the first five years – from independence on 15th August 1947 to the first general election in January 1952 – in the politics of West Bengal, the new Indian province that was created as a result of the Partition. The author, a specialist on the history of modern India, discusses what freedom actually meant to various individuals, communities and political parties, how they responded to it, how they extended its meaning and how in their anxiety to confront the realities of free India, they began to invent new enemies of their newly acquired freedom. By emphasising the representations of popular mentality rather than the institutional changes brought in by the process of decolonization, he draws attention to other concerns and anxieties that were related to the problems of coming to terms with the newly achieved freedom and the responsibility of devising independent rules of governance that would suit the historic needs of a pluralist nation. Decolonization in South Asia analyses the transitional politics of West Bengal in light of recent developments in postcolonial theory on nationalism, treating the ‘nation’ as a space for contestation, rather than a natural breeding ground for homogeneity in the complex political scenario of post-independence India. It will appeal to academics interested in political science, sociology, social anthropology and cultural and Asian studies.

As American Studies, founded at Harvard and not coincidentally grounded in New England paradigms, melds into a New World Studies boasting multiple points of origin but grounded increasingly in models derived from the Caribbean, scholarly attention is, to quote the title of Houston Baker's latest book, turning south again. After all, it is not Cambridge but Oxford, translated into the seat of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, that Gabriel García Márquez has depicted as having figurative "banks on the Caribbean Sea" (52-53). As he, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, V.S. Naipaul, and Edouard Glissant have variously noted, the U.S. South is tied tightly to postplantation cultures throughout the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or global south. This observation is not new among historians; Stanley Elkins' Slavery put the U.S. South in hemispheric context forty years ago, and Fuentes and Naipaul, at least, seem to have been influenced by C. Vann Woodward's contemporaneous arguments about southern typicality: Fuentes directly, and Naipaul through the poetry of James Applewhite. U.S. literary critics have been, in contrast, slow to follow the historians' lead, but almost overnight that situation has changed dramatically. A number of recent critical works remind us that the regions share a history of colonial plantations, race slavery, race mixing, vibrant African cultural survival, disappeared [End Page 104] bodies, a predilection for the baroque (as Alejo Carpentier defines it), poverty, state-sponsored right-wing terrorism, insular communities, creole nativism, and what Woodward famously called "the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction" (Burden 190). 1 The nascent critical exploration of such commonalities is not about repositioning the U.S. South simply and predictably within a fashionable "margin" such as, for example, the "nuestra América" of José Martí. Rather, if as Ella Shohat has argued, postcolonial theory is better understood as "post-First/Third Worlds theory" (134), then the U.S. South—simultaneously center and margin, colonizer and colonized, global north and global south, essentialist and hybrid—represents a crucial locus for the development of such theory. For nearly two centuries it has shimmered—sublimely, seductively, uncannily—as both Self and Other not only before the narcissistic gaze of the imperial London or Boston metropole but also before the global-southern gaze of what Srinivas Aravamudan has recently called the tropicopolitan. As Fuentes once put it to a North American audience, Sinclair Lewis "is yours, and as such, interesting and important to us. William Faulkner is both yours and ours, and as such, essential to us" (qtd in Cohn 2).

Since Hallin and Mancini's (2004) seminal work, many scholars from around the world have proposed different models of media systems for countries and regions outside the Western world. Particular challenges have arisen when conceptualizing the systems in Latin America, where shifting liberal and polarized pluralist models have been proposed, and where media traits like clientelism and collusion remain in spite of political, economic and social changes. We contend that one obstacle to the characterization of the resilience of certain structures and practices in this region is the lack of a historical perspective to account for specific processes of media modernization. Drawing on the multiple modernization paradigm, as well as on post-colonial theories, system differentiation theories of the Global South, and theories of uneven regional development, we understand Latin American modernization processes as the appropriation, adaptation, or rejection of certain elements of Western institutions, ideals and values. In media systems, this might produce: (a) centralization of power, (b) a struggle between elites, (c) state-driven differentiation, and (d) regional or local subsystems. Our historical perspective aims to explain the prevalence of several media structures, and show how institutional legacies yield core media traits, in order to pave the way for further model inference.

In Community Development in an Uncertain World, Jim Ife draws on the principles of social justice, ecological responsibility and post-Enlightenment and Indigenous perspectives to advance new holistic approaches to community development. The book explores the concept of community development on a local and international scale in the context of globalisation and postcolonial theory. Students will gain the essential skills and practical understanding required to navigate the existing managerial environment and cultivate new community practices. This new edition incorporates current research into community development and includes important new work on 'alternative visions' for a sustainable and just future. It introduces the foundational theories of community development and explains their importance in shaping solutions to uniquely modern issues. Readers are encouraged to critically engage with the material through the accompanying discussion questions. Written in an accessible, engaging style, this text is an essential resource for students and professionals in the human services.

In Community Development in an Uncertain World, Jim Ife draws on the principles of social justice, ecological responsibility and post-Enlightenment and Indigenous perspectives to advance new holistic approaches to community development. The book explores the concept of community development on a local and international scale in the context of globalisation and postcolonial theory. Students will gain the essential skills and practical understanding required to navigate the existing managerial environment and cultivate new community practices. This new edition incorporates current research into community development and includes important new work on 'alternative visions' for a sustainable and just future. It introduces the foundational theories of community development and explains their importance in shaping solutions to uniquely modern issues. Readers are encouraged to critically engage with the material through the accompanying discussion questions. Written in an accessible, engaging style, this text is an essential resource for students and professionals in the human services.

This master’s thesis explores the encounters between international law, development and postcolonial studies. I focus in particular on how critical international legal scholarship has re-described international law and development using postcolonialism. I propose a specific body of law and development that I call postcolonial approaches to international law and development. In the first part of this thesis, I examine law and development studies and postcolonial studies separately. I revisit the debate on law and development, using five main approaches to it as proposed by Liliana Lizararo-Rodríguez: national perspectives, international perspectives, transnational approach, comparative law and development, and transnational thematic areas. Simultaneously, I propose four academic disciplines through which postcolonial studies can be understood: anti-colonial and founding moments, subaltern studies and historiographical turn, multidisciplinary voices in a postcolonial world, and Modernity/Coloniality Group and decolonial thought. I also distinguish key theoretical concepts, such as that of the Third World and Global South, that permeate both postcolonial studies and international law and development. In the second part, I use this framework to engage with specific studies of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to propose a more specific body of scholarship that I call postcolonial approaches to international law and development, using especially the studies of Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Sundhya Pahuja and Luis Eslava. For the first time, I bring three main contributions of postcolonial approaches to international law and development: first, Third World resistance as part of international law and development dynamics; second, development discourse as structure of the ideological-institutional complex of international law; and, third, international law and development as a dynamic that modifies notions of global and local in everyday lives. Finally, I propose three elements to identify postcolonial approaches to international law and development have. First, a historical-conceptual element which expands temporal borders of international law and development. Second, a geographical-spatial element which enables multidimensional analysis to international law and development. And, third, an epistemological-conceptual element which decentralizes legal and development discourses.

This paper explores the historical and contemporary status of sociological theory in the global south. In doing so, it examines three research questions. First, what social forces did contribute to making, remaking, or ending sociological theory in the global north? Next, what societal factors did impede the development of sociological theory in the global south? Third, how can sociologists in the global south build sociological theory? This article surveys northern sociological theories best known to date to examine the first question. In particular, it explores the complete trajectories (their birth, development, and crisis) of two grand theories in northern sociology called Functionalism and Marxism. In investigating the second and third research questions, this paper traces the historical status of southern sociological theory by surveying the extant sociological literature from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It deploys historical and comparative methodological approaches to scrutinize the global literature on sociological theory. One of the article’s central findings is that while northern sociological theories emerged, expanded, and ended due to the structural necessities of northern societies, southern sociological theories were unseen because of the absence of such needs in southern societies. Another finding shows that although southern sociology lacks sociological theory, it may produce new sociological theory by drawing on indigenous philosophies, postcolonial studies, and emerging global realities. Overall, this study critically examines the theoretical trajectories in western sociology and the challenges and possibilities of theory building in southern sociology. Keywords: Sociological Theory, Theory Building, Western Sociology, Southern Sociology, Functionalism, Marxism, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Postcolonial theories have been applied to different fields of knowledge - economics being among the most recent ones. Several works on social and solidarity economy (SSE) have adopted this approach to debate gender asymmetries and other social inequality issues such as the ones focusing on heterogeneity of women in the Global South. There is, however, much to be done in analytical terms, regarding the South that persists in the Global North. This entry aims to: provide an overview of the main ideas regarding postcolonial approach; reflect upon the narrative of development; and analyse how biases in interpretation might forfeit initiatives, programs and policies bridging SSE and goals such as of inclusion, resilience, participation, gender and racial equity, to name but a few. In this sense, postcolonial lenses can contribute to re-igniting the inherent value of community agency, autonomy, and power of choice for the achievement of social, economic and environmental justice.

In English Canada the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act instigated the study of ethnic, multicultural, and intercultural theatre practices.2 In Quebec the 1977 Bill 101 or The Charter of the French Language, which established the fundamental language rights of the people of Quebec and so presented “the most prominent cite of struggle over Quebecois culture and nationhood,” framed similar scholarly and artistic questions (Knowles and Mündel XVI). Today, however, with the growing number of immigrants landing in English Canada and Quebec, urban theatre audiences have become “increasingly diverse” and immigrant artists’ performances “no longer need to appeal either to the traditional white middle-class audience of Canada’s so-called ‘main stages’ [. . .] nor to communities narrowly defined by culture or interest” (XVII). This special issue takes this statement further and focuses on the cultural, personal, and artistic output of immigrant theatre artists who have been working in Canadian theatre for several decades. It argues that representation of an immigrant/immigration on stage constitutes a self-referential move in Canadian theatre. The increased presence of immigrant theatre artists actively contributing to English Canadian and Quebec theatre today invites audiences to rethink such fundamental concepts as nationalism and multiculturalism. Moreover, as this issue demonstrates, immigrant artists’ theatrical aesthetics and concerns situate questions of immigration within the wider discourse and practices of theatre as it relates to globalization and mobile identities worldwide. Hence, the articles chosen for this issue aim to measure the artistic output of Canadian immigrant theatre using the theoretical lenses of postcolonial and intercultural performance theories, studies in linguistics and cultural semiotics, psychoanalysis, and cultural geography. They continue the discussion of intercultural theatre practices in Canada and Quebec, initiated by Theatre Research in Canada and Jeu;3 and reflect the ongoing debates on theatre and immigration in Canada that took place at the 2013 and 2014 annual meetings of Canadian Association for Theatre Research; and as proposed in my own work on theatre and exile (2012).