Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

Editor's Note

2025-02-06T13:51:44-05:00

Editor's note to volume 13, number 1 (Spring 2025) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.

Bridging the Cultural Divide: A Study of The Cartography of Love in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Oleander Girl

2024-09-16T09:21:48-04:00

Oleander Girl is a skilfully crafted novel in which the author, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni pens a tale that puts forth manifold expressions of love and loss against a wide geographical canvas. The book negotiates love and relationships that crisscross continents, generations, and cultures to encapsulate the personal and emotional metamorphosis of its protagonists. The beauty and venomousness of the Oleander plant symbolizes the different hues and nuances of love deftly examined in the book’s various relationships. As Korobi tell the readers her gripping story and recounts her protected and traditional upbringing, the mystery and silence about her parents, it becomes clear that there is a family secret hidden deep beneath the surface which explodes on her grandfather’s death. Her grandmother, Sarojini, admits how she and her husband Bimal had conspired to hide the news of her father being alive from Korobi all her life. This sets her off on an expedition to find him amidst all the expectations of family and society, and it subsequently changes her life forever. Consequently, she finds herself in a space filled with confusion and must either opt for a life in India with Rajat or the new found freedom in America and an opportunity to be close to her father. Oleander Girl is a multilayered story with parallel plots to connect the dots between relationships, differing cultures, and identity concerns.

Elite Power Structures in Karachi

2024-02-26T13:31:46-05:00

This study examines the elite power groups in Karachi in Bina Shah’s The 786 Cybercafé (2004) by using the lens of neocolonialism discussed by Kwame Nkrumah and Michel Foucault’s insights into the dynamics of power to evaluate the power structures rooted in this novel. By contextualizing the issue that the neocolonial powers—ethnic and political groups, while mimicking the role of the colonizers, subjugate the minorities and powerless people, bringing ethnic polarization and unprecedented social dichotomies leading to violence, disorder, anarchy, and tension among the Karachiites also labelled as “Others,” this article argues how power works through power structures manufactured by neocolonial
figures in this novel. The study is significant because it addresses the issue of ethnic and cultural contests that pose hurdles to the collective values of multiculturalism, globalization, and, above all, humanity. Consequently, this research concludes that the internal contradictions and conflicts in the form of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural conflicts deteriorate the harmony of a country and infers that the application of the practice of neocolonialism will further increase the disintegration and conflicts in Karachi and destabilize state building.

Violence, Grief, and Ghosts

2025-02-15T17:00:47-05:00

Satire has been used widely to ridicule and criticize agents of oppression using literary tools like parody, irony, and exaggeration. In the wake of 9/11 2001, American neo-imperialist and global capitalist policies, effected through war, destabilized and destroyed many parts of the Middle East. However, this particular war also fused acts of violence with benevolence and aid. Pakistani Anglophone writer Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds (2018), set in a refugee camp, uses multiple first-person narrators—representative of opposing sides—counter-realism, and multidirectional and referential satire to portray the war and its lingering aftereffects—emotional and physical—on all the actors involved. The novel satirizes the logic of war, intertwined violence and aid, and the intellectualization of destruction and grief. Importantly, while criticizing the US’s primary role in the war, the novel simultaneously also turns the gaze inwards, ultimately presenting a complex picture of varying degrees of resistance and compliance.

The Paradox of Representation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

2024-04-12T12:22:17-04:00

This paper performs a close reading of Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People to demonstrate how South Asian literary texts are entangled with unavoidable questions of representation, fetishization, and commodification. Bringing Althusser’s conception of non-vision in dialogue with Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern, I argue that Sinha’s novel performs a trenchant meta-commentary on the politics of narrativizing industrial disasters in the Global South.

The Marginalized as Conservation’s Detritus

2023-10-04T12:52:34-04:00

Colonial rule has had long-lasting impacts on large parts of the world, with direct and indirect transformations brought about in the social fabric and in the management of resources. This article takes a postcolonial perspective to examine this impact in the Indian context and traces the connection between the uneven co-option of social classes into the Western worldview and the marginalization and disregard of certain communities both by policy makers and public consciousness on the whole. It argues that not only were these communities and their traditional way of life disrupted during colonial rule, the gap between them and the elite and powerful social classes after Independence made the situation no better for them. The gaps between social classes in Indian society were further deepened during foreign rule through numerous social, political, and legal interventions. After Independence, the focus of policy makers was on national building and development, and the co-option of these classes in the Western worldview shaped not only their subscription to the models of development and modernity emerging from it, it also created a mental distance from the worldviews and way of life of other classes, with the largest distance between those who were largely left out at the margins and struggled to hold on to deeply held beliefs and traditions. Further, these groups also fell out of the consciousness of the majority of Indians who had to focus on the challenges thrown up in the environment wherein hardly any aspect was left untouched by the deep impact of colonial rule. Thus, the inequities created or exacerbated by
colonial rule were not wiped out by Independence but continued, with the benefits of development and national progress unevenly distributed. What Dipesh Chakrabarty points out about “the deeper predicament produced by both the globalization of capital and the pressures of demography in poorer countries brought about by the unevenness of postcolonial development” that pushes stateless, illegal migrants, guest workers, and asylum seekers into a condition where they struggle for survival (“Postcolonial” 7) also applies to the internally displaced or those who way of life and habitat are threatened by development, modernization, as well as—ironically enough—conservation. Those pushed out to the margins seem to have fallen out of the national narrative and remained of interest only to academics and activists.

This paper focuses on forest and wildlife conservation to contend that the interventions in this domain during colonial rule have had an impact that continued in various ways for decades after Independence due, in part, to the disconnect
between the societal strata that was created or deepened and shaped anew by the forces of colonial subjection. Not only are the elite who shape the path ahead for the ountry disconnected from the marginalized, but the larger public is also insufficiently aware of the inequities meted out to these groups who are often regarded, to use Kevin Bale’s term, as “disposable people” (Nixon 4) in developmental agendas. In correcting this disconnect, scholarly work can be complemented with journalistic writing, nonfiction, and fiction that can take these issues to the larger public. Fiction can play an especially important role in this because of its power of stirring the imagination and evoking empathy through affective identification with human characters.

An Ontology of Necropolitical Governance

2024-05-20T10:02:58-04:00

The world witnessed one of the most devastating ethnic group exoduses in Southeast Asia in August 2017, with the Rohingya at its core. Enduring generations of repression, rampant sexual assault, and organized devastation implemented by the government of Myanmar, many Rohingya people were forced to flee to adjacent Bangladesh to seek safety. Despite being an integral aspect of Myanmar’s past, the state denies the Rohingya people their rights to citizenship. This omission from citizenship perpetuates their exclusion from Myanmar’s body politic. Employing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, this paper uses Habiburahman’s memoir, First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks, to examine how the state of Myanmar has been instrumental in orchestrating a systematic marginalization of the Rohingya. This process has reduced them to what Agamben terms as “bare life,” thereby ascribing them to a position of what Judith Butler terms as precarity. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, this article theorizes how the state abuses the precarious position of the Rohingya by creating “death worlds,” relegating them to the position of “the living dead,” ultimately culminating in the teleological inevitability of genocide.

“Karnan”

2024-08-26T14:49:25-04:00

Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan represents internal colonialism—defined as regional disparities in socioeconomic development—as an element of mimicry. The fictional movie narrates the feud between two villages in Tamil Nādu and illustrates how mimicry of the British rule in the Subcontinent reinforces socioeconomic disparities, exemplified by the lack of a bus stop in one of the two villages. First, the fictional movie is put back into its historical and real-life context of caste violence in Tamil Nādu. Second, the concept of mimicry is explained through Bhabha’s writings and legacy in postcolonial studies in the context of India and its caste system through the lens of Karnan. Then, the concept of internal colonialism is explored through the lack of mobility that Karnan and his fellow villagers experience in the movie. Finally, internal colonialism is integrated into Bhabha’s conceptualization of mimicry in postcolonial studies.

Modernity in the Malay Archipelago

2024-11-11T09:25:27-05:00

At the turn of the twentieth century, the British and Dutch colonized extensive parts of the Malay Archipelago. They justified imperial expansion by a belief in their supposed responsibility, as Europeans, to disseminate “modernity.” In this article, I compare two key colonial novels set in the region: Hugh Clifford’s Sally (1904) and Louis Couperus’ De stille kracht (1900). Both depict similar practices of colonial rule, but where Sally ends with the breakdown of its Malay protagonist, De stille kracht charts the downfall of its Dutch main character. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s work on the relationship between colony, metropole, and modernity, I argue that analysing Clifford’s and Couperus’ texts reveals fundamental differences between British and Dutch conceptions of empire. Conversely, by examining diverging British and Dutch literary representations of colonialism, we can gain new insights into how these neighboring nations developed different understandings of themselves as Europeans.

Subverting the Archetype

2024-10-07T12:17:04-04:00

This article examines the heterogeneous Arab masculinities which contemporary Arab American women’s novels offer. This diversity, as this article contends, dismantles the universalizing discourses on Arab men as identical and the conventional fathering model inspired by patriarchy and social conventions as the only option. The Western hegemonic conceptualization of Arab masculinity is that of dominance, patriarchy, oppression, and the like, hence rendering Arabs identically isomorphic and denying them the possibility of change and progress. However, contemporary Arab American literature subverts this ideologically driven representation through presenting miscellaneous Arab masculinities. The dissimilarity of Arab migrant fathers in The Other Americans (2019), The Inheritance of Exile (2007), and Swimming toward the Light (2007) suggests the plurality of Arabs, the malleability of Arab masculinities, the heterogeneity of Arab fathers and their fathering models, and the invalidity of the monolithic and essentialist Western discourse.

Notes on Contributors

2025-05-14T15:35:59-04:00

Contributor biographies for volume 13, number 1 (Spring 2025) of the Journal of Global South Studies