Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethinking Whiteness," "Redefining the 'Third World' Subject," "Sexuality and Sexual Rights," "Harem and the Veil," and "Gender and Post/colonial Relations." A bibliography complements the wide-ranging essays. This is the ideal volume for any reader interested in (...) the development of postcoloniality and feminist thought. (shrink)

This book illustrates how postcolonial theory can be put to work in education. It offers an accessible and handy overview and comparison of postcolonial theory and other theoretical debates related to critiques of Western ethnocentrism and hegemony. It also offers examples that illustrate how a discursive strand of postcolonial theory has been applied successfully in the contexts of educational research/critique and in pioneering pedagogical projects. This book supports educators and researchers in education to engage (...) with postcolonial theoretical frameworks and their implications for research and educational practice. (shrink)

In recent years there have been several calls in professional and academic journals for healthcare personnel in Canada to raise the profile of postcolonial theory as a theoretical and explanatory framework for their practice with Indigenous people. In this paper I explore some of the challenges that are likely to confront those healthcare personnel in engaging with postcolonial theory in a training context. I consider these challenges in relation to three areas of conflict. First I consider (...) conflicts around paradigms of knowledge, wherein postcolonial theory operates from a different base from most professional knowledge in health care. Second I consider conflicts of ideology, wherein postcolonial theory is largely at odds with Canada’s political and popular cultures. And finally I consider issues around the question of Canada’s legitimacy, which postcolonial theory puts in doubt. I suggest ways in which these conflicts might be addressed and managed in the training context, and also identify potential positive outcomes that would be enabling for healthcare personnel, and might also contribute to an improvement in Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The knowledge that for more than a century has been disseminated by universities, and mobilized by states to govern populations, first emerged in the early modern period in Europe. It subsequently became globalized through colonialism and Western global dominance; despite the historical and cultural specificity of its origins, it was claimed to have transcended these particularities such that, unlike pre-modern and non-Western knowledges, it could be assumed to be 'universal', that is, true for all times and places. Beyond Reason traverses (...) many disciplines, including debates in science studies, social history, art and music history, political science and anthropology, to demonstrate that the presuppositions underpinning and enabling modern Western knowledge are under sustained challenge, and that defences of a singular and universal Reason are no longer persuasive. Drawing upon and deriving its critical energies principally from postcolonial theory, Beyond Reason argues that modern knowledge and the social sciences are a product of Western modernity claiming a spurious universality: and that they embody a form of reasoning, rather than Reason itself. It proceeds to focus on History and Political Science for the further elaboration of its argument. If the social sciences are not explained and validated simply by the fact that they are 'true', it becomes possible to ask what they 'do'. Beyond Reason asks what representations and relations with the past and with politics the disciplines of history and political science enable, and what possibilities they foreclose. (shrink)

Does a philosopher have an 'identity'? What kind of 'identity' is mobilized when the work of a philosopher becomes a major reference for certain schools of thought, as in the case of Gilles Deleuze and postcolonial theory? Have the promoters of a generalized Deleuzeanism taken care their usage of his specialized work does him justice? Few exponents of postcolonial and subaltern theories now dispute the influence that Deleuze's work exerted on the intellectuals and theorists who developed those (...) theories. However, this book contends that postcolonial and subaltern theorists have engaged with Deleuzean thought in ways that have perhaps produced a long series of misunderstandings – for which Deleuze himself is not responsible. By engaging with recent innovations in North African culture and by examining the dissemination of Deleuze's identities across a broad range of postcolonial theory, Réda Bensmaïa shows that the 'encounter' between Deleuze and the postcolonial movement can only be understood through the idea of a 'transcendental' field, in which Deleuze and his postcolonial followers find themselves captured. (shrink)

Postcolonial theory, particularly in its poststructuralist variant, presents important challenges to sociology's self-image, and open debate on these attempts to `unsettle' the modernist, Westernized disciplines is both conceptually and politically interesting. However, the postcolonial unsettling of sociology has to be actively extracted and reconstructed from the key texts of postcolonial theory - it is not transparently available as such - and this is the first main goal of the article. Particular attention is paid to the (...) framings of these issues by Stuart Hall, Homi Bhahba and Robert Young. Second, the article offers the elements of a counter-critique, pointing out where the anti-sociological impulses of postcolonialism are exaggerated or unfounded, and also indicating serious internal problems for postcolonial theory when it is pitched as a direct and superior alternative to the modernist sociological `imaginary'. The continuing centrality (and difficulty) of questions on the nature of and purpose of explanatory social theory and postcolonial cultural studies are discussed. (shrink)

Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethinking Whiteness," "Redefining the 'Third World' Subject," "Sexuality and Sexual Rights," "Harem and the Veil," and "Gender and Post/colonial Relations." A bibliography complements the wide-ranging essays. This is the ideal volume for any reader interested in (...) the development of postcoloniality and feminist thought. (shrink)

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored (...) in three sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan, as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remapping geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker, each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing Universality:Postcolonial Theory and the Quandary of Ethical AgencyEsha Niyogi De (bio)Living in colonial India, the Bengali thinker and creative writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) often meditated on ways that "concord" (milan) and "harmony" (sāmanjasya) could be established between persons and cultures [BIC 450-51]. Noting that "ruptures in balance and harmony" (bhār sāmanjasyer abhāv) that once were more localized now affected the whole world, he maintained that these (...) reinforced the progressive message of the modern age that the local "problems of a people are a part and parcel of humankind's" (swajātir samasyā samasta mānusher samasyār antargata) [RC 279]. In his view, the means to reestablish harmony in this unequal world lay in social practices and ideas conducing "freedom" (mukti) rather than enforcing "power" (shakti) and "coercive discipline" (shāsan) [SaS 408-09]. He argued that such progressive trends of practice and thought would be found not in one culture alone but through traveling across different cultural "seas of knowledge (jnān)" [SwSm 699]. For only through such conceptual journeys would we enkindle in ourselves "arguments with and doubts about" (yukti tarka o sandeher udbhav) our own cultures, and also learn from all the "voyagers in the path of progress" (unnatipather yātri) who emerge in different locations and times [SJ 39-40].As these comments reveal, Rabindranath maintained that inequalities could be rectified by making individual and collective norms and actions accountable to and measurable in terms of a speculative notion of universal humanity. While alert to the injustices proliferating from European colonization, he insisted that coercive practices and imbalances of power could not be entirely localized, and that in order to correct multiple forms of coercion we must seek across cultures and societies for (partial) achievements of human freedom and harmony. In so viewing transcultural negotiations of a common humane proclivity as the means to decolonize the world, Rabindranath did not stand alone but in a diverse company of anti-imperialist thinkers who adapted modern humanism to their ends: W. E. B. Dubois—who lauded Rabindranath's appropriation of [End Page 42] such liberal notions as democracy and equal opportunity "for greater ends" than were allowed by the "inconsistencies" of a racist European perspective [74]—Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and from Rabindranath's own colonial context, the Bengali Anarchist poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (to name but a few). Reflecting upon worldwide experiences of subjection, these radical modern intellectuals tried above all to avoid reinventing separatism by declaring non-Western cultures to be unilaterally superior to Western imperialist culture. Driven by an activist ethics, they attempted instead to correct the roots of separatism through objectively evaluating, against a common frame of reference, right and wrong, relatively successful or failed practices of human empowerment and community.In this essay, I consider if and how we could characterize as "postcolonial" these evaluative ethics that rationally seek to correct coercive relations between persons and societies through referring to an affirmative idea of a human nature shared by all. If we take postcolonial agency to rest on a thorough critique of and resistance to all political and epistemic maneuvers that subordinate or exclude people and cultures, might this form of resistant agency reside in the ethical normativity of anti-imperialist humanism? This question elicits conflicting responses from contemporary postcolonial theorists.The argument, on the one hand, is that if postcolonial theory is to ethically address the multiple and interlocked hierarchies of a postimperial world, it indeed must take into account how people mobilize against separatism by working through critiques of ethnic divisiveness to negotiate a common human ground. Commenting on the universalism of thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore and W. E. B. DuBois, Edward Said, for example, suggests that "vital" critiques of chauvinistic separatism arise only from viewing "local identity as not exhaustive" but as elaborating in reference to "larger, more generous realities of community between cultures, peoples, and societies" [Culture and Imperialism 217, 229]. His implication is that only through evaluating ourselves on the basis of a notion of noncoercive universality are we able to think against the identity politics that pervade our world, stemming at once from a nativist... (shrink)

This essay draws upon Namita Goswami’s 2019 book Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory for the insights she brings to an ethics of archival encounters, particularly regarding the files of those whose only record is their judgment and/or objectification by existing dominant institutions. First, I briefly summarize some key insights, with attention to Goswami’s careful exegesis of Spivak. In the next section, I consider these postcolonial feminist questions about infamous women in conjunction with Saidiya Hartman’s (...) 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” and in the third section, I explore the resonances of Goswami’s book with Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a text also published in 2019 that shares Goswami’s commitment to the heterogeneous complexity of lives that overflow their often-dismissive records. In conclusion, I suggest some alternative formulations of subjectivity and agency suggested by this line of inquiry between Goswami and Hartman. (shrink)

Argues for postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. In this ambitious book, Namita Goswami draws on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African American and postcolonial feminisms to offer postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. Moving among and between texts, traditions, and frameworks, including the work of Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Barbara Christian, Paul Gilroy, Neil Lazarus, and Hortense Spillers, among others, she charts a journey that takes us beyond Eurocentrism by understanding postcoloniality (...) as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Recognizing that philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory share a common concern with the concept of heterogeneity, Goswami shows how postcoloniality empowers us to engage more productively the relationships between these disciplines. Subjects That Matter confronts the ways Eurocentrism, an identity politics that considers difference as inherently oppositional, relegates minority traditions to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint to prevent their general implications from playing a critical and transformative role in how we understand subjectivity and agency. Through unexpected, often surprising, and thought-provoking analytic connections and continuities, this book’s interdisciplinary approach reveals a postcolonial pluralism that expands philosophical resources, confounds and limits our habitual disciplinary lexicons, and opens up new areas of inquiry. “This is a groundbreaking contribution to a number of distinct but intersecting fields.” — Amy Allen, author of The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. (shrink)

This book analyzes the concept of democracy and its practical application in the twenty-first century from a philosophical and postcolonial perspective.

In this book, Abraham argues that a theological imagination can expand the contours of postcolonial theory through a reexamination of notions of subjectivity, gender, and violence in a dialogical model with Karl Rahner. She raises the question of whether postcolonial theory, with its disavowal of religious agency, can provide an invigorating occasion for Catholic theology.

Leading scholars bring together eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory to analyze the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial projects and aspirations.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary creation susceptible both (...) to “anxieties of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

Postcolonialism and decolonising campaigns are expressions of human pain on the level of identity confusion (inferiority), ideological abuse (cultural discrimination) and structural oppression (imperialistic exploitation). The slogan ‘Black Pain is a White Commodity’ in the #MustFall campaigns is critically analysed within the framework of postcolonial theory and imperialistic power categories. The basic hypothesis of the article is that in early Christianity, pantokrator images of God were influenced by iconography stemming mostly from the Roman Emperor cult and Egyptian mythology. (...) The power (omnipotence) and dominiumship of God directly and indirectly played a role in Christian imperialistic thinking regarding the expansion of the Kingdom of God and missio Dei strategies during times of European and colonial expansionism. In order to address the quest for ‘moving beyond’ in postcolonial theory, the impact of pantokrator-images of God on ecclesial thinking is researched. In order to contribute to sustainability and stability within the complexity of cultural diversity and current civil unrest on campuses in South Africa, the paracletic notion of compassionate being-with is developed within the framework of practical theological thinking. Instead of a Caesar-depiction, the theological notion of passio Dei is proposed: the decolonialising (post-imperialising) God. (shrink)

This article seeks to reassess the potential merits and weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project through the prism of Vivek Chibber’s much-publicised and controversial bookPostcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. By critically examining Chibber’s work, the article aims to better pinpoint exactly what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with the Subaltern Studies project, while drawing out some productive points of engagement between Marxism and postcolonial theory more generally. In particular, we argue that an understanding of the origins (...) of capitalist modernity remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought that problematises their broader project of ‘provincialising Europe’. Against this backdrop, the article explores the affinities between Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development and postcolonialism, demonstrating how the former can provide a theoretical solution to the problem of Eurocentrism that the Subaltern Studies project correctly identifies but inadequately conceptualises. (shrink)

Teo describes two centuries of challenges to mainstream psychological thinking along with the mainstream's reactions.

What can psychoanalysis offer contemporary arguments in the fields of Feminism, Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism? Jan Campbell introduces and analyses the way that psychoanalysis has developed and made problematic models of subjectivity linked to issues of sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and history. Via discussions of such influential and diverse figures as Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Dollimore, Bhabha, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Campbell uses psychoanalysis as a mediatory tool in a range of debates across the human sciences, while also arguing for (...) a transformation of psychoanalytic theory itself. (shrink)

In this essay, the author presents the Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation in a new frame by reading his text as it accomplishes a type of grand-scale theorizing. The notion of Relation in Glissant is followed in its various connections to a Marxian notion of dynamic totality. The Marxian/Hegelian subtext of Poétique is seen as productively revealing for reading Glissant both historically and theoretically. Glissant's theorizing of difference is shown to be an important contribution to contemporary revisions (...) of Marxian-informed thought. (shrink)

This article deals with some earlier applications of psychology for the analysis of the colonial condition offered by three thinkers—Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon and recent applications of Freudian psychoanalytical theory in the poststructuralist approach of Homi K. Bhaba. An attempt is made to compare their standpoints and reflect more broadly on what their implications mean for the future of psychoanalysis’ place in postcolonial critique. Also to answer a vital question in the theoretical project of postcolonial studies: Is (...) psychoanalysis a universally applicable theory for psychic disruption in the colonial context? What are differences in the application of psychological theory for studies of colonial discourse? The conclusion of the paper is: Despite the problematic inheritance of racializing thinking psychoanalysis has proved to be an important and reoccurring methodology in colonial critique and postcolonial theory. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that psychoanalysis itself is a colonial discipline and must become an object of colonial discourse analysis. (shrink)

The framing problematic of this dissertation is the political and epistemological relationship between metropolitan theory and post-colonial narrative. By providing multiple determinations to that problematic, I seek to situate the inventions of post-colonial identity. Using "detour" both as a privileged figure of contemporary theory and as the lived socio-historical experience of post-colonials, I examine the theoretical and political consequences using the former to translate the latter. Placing my own discourse at the limits of theory, I show that (...) the predicament in which contemporary theory finds itself is a result of the reduction of narrative to theory . ;I stage the negotiation between metropolitan theory and post-colonial narratives as an allegory of the post-colonial predicament. Finally, through a critique of certain post-colonial theorists , I plot the limits of the post-colonial space in the First World. I conclude that to invent the post-colonial space as a signifying space, we need to develop a poetics of retour which will be as complex and as ambiguous as the poetics of detour that the post-colonials have been living, narrating, and theorizing. ;Chapter I sets the theoretical context for posing the problem of post-colonial self-fashioning. In Chapter II, I sketch the trajectory of post-colonial detour through a close reading of V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. In Chapter III, I interrogate Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity as a version of the poetics of detour. In Chapter IV, I offer a characterization of the predicament of theory. In the final chapter, I discuss the uses of theory by post-colonial intellectuals and offer a critique of their politics of cultural description and self-description. I argue that post-colonial theorists have evaded the question of inventing the post-colonial space as a signifying space by rewriting the narrative of their detour as a narrative of diplacement, as immigritude. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 417-418, June 2012.

Rather than ‘superbugs’ signifying recalcitrant forms of life that withstand biomedical treatment, drug resistant infections emerge within and are intricate with the exercise of social and medical power. The distinction is important, as it provides a means to understand and critique current methods employed to confront the threat of widespread antimicrobial resistance. A global health regime that seeks to extend social and medical power, through technical and market integration, risks reproducing a form of triumphalism and exceptionalism that resistance itself should (...) have us pause to question. An alternative approach, based on a postcolonial as well as a ‘post-colony’ approach to health and microbes, provides impetus to challenge the assumptions and norms of global health. It highlights the potential contribution that vernacular approaches to human and animal health can play in altering the milieu of resistance. (shrink)

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of (...) posthumanist feminist theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender-focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species-based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture. (shrink)

A number of genealogical lines of influence are being drawn, connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory–Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak–to an earlier generation of ...

In a provocative essay, Sarah Kamens recommends the literature of postcolonial theory as a remedy for some of the limitations of current psychiatric theory and practice. Her provocation lies not advocating engagement with this literature, which certainly has much to offer psychiatry, but in the way she chooses to energize her argument by contrasting two very different phenomena: the experience of hearing voices and the use of ghost-writing in the psychiatric literature. Although Ka-mens acknowledges these phenomena come (...) from “distant teleological and experiential realms,” in both cases, she suggests, there are hidden authors who may be experienced or understood as hauntings. In this brief commentary, I will... (shrink)