Naming Colonialism

Naming Colonialism PDF

Author: Osumaka Likaka

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2009-12-08

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0299233634

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What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.

Names for Light

Names for Light PDF

Author: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1644451549

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Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

Place Names in Africa

Place Names in Africa PDF

Author: Liora Bigon

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3319324853

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This volume examines the discursive relations between indigenous, colonial and post-colonial legacies of place-naming in Africa in terms of the production of urban space and place. It is conducted by tracing and analysing place-naming processes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa during colonial times (British, French, Belgian, Portuguese), with a considerable attention to both the pre-colonial and post-colonial situations. By combining in-depth area studies research – some of the contributions are of ethnographic quality – with colonial history, planning history and geography, the authors intend to show that culture matters in research on place names. This volume goes beyond the recent understanding obtained in critical studies of nomenclature, normally based on lists of official names, that place naming reflects the power of political regimes, nationalism, and ideology.

The Power to Name

The Power to Name PDF

Author: Stephanie Newell

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2013-07-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0821444492

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Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers. The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.

Pollution Is Colonialism

Pollution Is Colonialism PDF

Author: Max Liboiron

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-03-29

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1478021446

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In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

Remembering Colonialism in Zimbabwe

Remembering Colonialism in Zimbabwe PDF

Author: Ivan Marowa

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1003813747

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This book examines the various ways in which colonialism in Zimbabwe is remembered, looking both at how people analyse, perceive, and interpret the past, and how they rewrite that past, elevating some players and their historical agency. Inspired by the ongoing movement on decoloniality, this book examines the ways in which generations of today question and challenge colonialism’s legacies and their role in Zimbabwe’s collective memories and history. The book analyses the memorialising of both Mugabe and Mnangagwa in their speeches and during the political transition, before going on to trace the continuing impact of colonialism across areas as diverse as dress code, place-naming, agriculture, religion, gender, and in marginalised communities such as the BaKalanga. Drawing on the expertise of Zimbabwean scholars, this book will appeal to researchers of decolonisation, and of African history and memory.

Advances in Comparative Colonial Toponomastics

Advances in Comparative Colonial Toponomastics PDF

Author: Nataliya Levkovych

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-09-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3110712474

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For the better understanding of the cultural and linguistic impact of colonialism on the shaping of the world as we know it today it is necessary to take account of the Europeanization of the map of the extra-European countries. To achieve this goal Comparative Colonial Toponomastics (CoCoTop) investigates the place names which were coined in the era of colonialism in the erstwhile possessions of European colonizer nations. This edited volume offers new insights into the toponomastic manifestations of Danish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish colonialism. The focus is on hitherto unexplored macrotoponyms and microtoponyms. Their structural and functional aspects are described. They are linked to the colonial history of the various nations involved. A general toponomastic framework beyond CoCoTop is presented additionally. Several of the papers mark the starting point of recently initiated new research projects. The volume is of special interest to onomasticians, scholars working in colonial and postcolonial linguistics, and historians of colonialism.

Colonialism on the Prairies

Colonialism on the Prairies PDF

Author: Blanca Tovias

Publisher: Apollo Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9781845195403

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Colonialism on the Prairies spans a century in the history of the Blackfoot First Nations of present-day Montana and Alberta. Now available in paperback, the book maps out specific ways in which Blackfoot culture persisted amid the drastic transformations of colonization, with its concomitant forced assimilation in both the United States and Canada. It portrays the strategies and tactics adopted by the Blackfoot in order to navigate political, cultural, and social change during the hard transition from traditional lifeways to life on the reserves and reservations. Cultural continuity is the thread that binds the book's four case studies, encompassing Blackfoot sacred beliefs and ritual, dress practices, the transmission of knowledge, and the relationship between oral stories and contemporary fiction. Blackfoot voices emerge forcefully from an extensive array of primary and secondary sources, resulting in an inclusive history wherein both Blackfoot and non-Blackfoot scholarship enter into dialogue. Colonialism on the Prairies combines historical research with literary criticism, a strategy that is justified by the interrelationship between Blackfoot history and the stories from their oral tradition. Chapters are devoted to examining cultural continuity, discussing the ways in which oral stories continue to inspire contemporary Native American fiction. This interdisciplinary study is a celebration of Blackfoot culture and knowledge that seeks to revaluate the past by documenting Blackfoot resistance and persistence across a wide spectrum of cultural practice. The book is essential reading for all scholars working in the fields of Native American studies, colonial and postcolonial history, ethnology, and literature. (Series: A Sussex Library of Study - First Nations and the Colonial Encounter)

Colonialism in Global Perspective

Colonialism in Global Perspective PDF

Author: Kris Manjapra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108425267

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A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory PDF

Author: Katherine Blouin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-29

Total Pages: 701

ISBN-13: 1040022367

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This handbook explores the ways in which histories of colonialism and postcolonial thought and theory cast light on our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and the discipline of Classics, utilizing a wide body of case studies and providing avenues for future research and discussion. It brings together chapters by a wide, international, and intersectional range of scholars coming from a variety of backgrounds and sub-disciplinary perspectives, and from across the chronological and geographical scope of Classics. Chapters cover the state of current research into ancient Mediterranean and South, Central, and West Asian histories. They provide case studies to illustrate both how postcolonial thought has already illuminated our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, as well as its potential for the future. Chapters also provide opportunities for reflection on the current state of the discipline. An introduction by the volume editors offers a survey of the development of postcolonial theory, its relationship to other bodies of theory, and its connections to Classics. Toward the end of the book, three scholars with different career and disciplinary perspectives provide short reflections on the themes of the volume and the directions of future research. The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory offers an impressive collection of current research and thought on the subject for students and scholars in classical studies understood in its larger sense as well as in related disciplines such as Archaeology, Ancient History, Imperial History and the History of Colonialism, Reception Studies, and Museum Studies. For anyone interested in classical antiquity, it provides an engaging introduction to a potentially bewildering, but ultimately vital and enriching, body of thought and theory.