Bringing together contributions from various disciplines and academic fields, this collection engages in interdisciplinary dialogue on postcolonial issues. Covering African, anglophone, Romance, and New-World themes, linguistic, literary, and cultural studies, and historiography, music, art history, and textile studies, the volume raises questions of (inter)disciplinarity, methodology, and entangled histories.
The essays focus on the representation of slavery in the transatlantic world (the USA, Jamaica, Haiti, and the wider Caribbean, West Africa, and the UK). Drawing on a range of historical sources, material objects, and representations, they study Jamaican Creole, African masks, knitted objects, patchwork sculpture, newspapers, films, popular music, and literature of different genres from the Caribbean, West and South Africa, India, and Britain. At the same time, they reflect on theoretical problems such as intertextuality, intermediality, and cultural exchange, and explore intersections – postcolonial literature and transatlantic history; postcolonial and African-American studies; postcolonial literary and cultural studies. The final section keys in with the overall aim of challenging established disciplinary modes of knowledge production: exploring schools and universities as locations of postcolonial studies. Teachers investigate the possibilities and limits of their respective institutions and probe new ways of engaging with postcolonial concerns.
With its integrative, interdisciplinary focus, this collection addresses readers interested in understanding how colonization and globalization have influenced societies and cultures around the world.
Contributors: Anja Bandau, Sabine Broeck, Sarah Fekadu, Matthias Galler, Janou Glencross, Jana Gohrisch, Ellen Grünkemeier, Jessica Hemmings, Jan Hüsgen, Johannes Salim Ismaiel-Wendt, Ursula Kluwick, Henning Marquardt, Dennis Mischke, Timo Müller, Mala Pandurang, Carl Plasa, Elinor Jane Pohl, Brigitte Reinwald, Steffen Runkel, Andrea Sand, Cecile Sandten, Frank Schulze-Engler, Melanie Ulz, Reinhold Wandel, Tim Watson.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier: Introduction: Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines
Interdisciplinary Reflections
Tim Watson: Postcolonial Studies and Atlantic Studies: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Slavery and Empire
Jessica Hemmings: Postcolonial Textiles: Negotiating Dialogue
Melanie Ulz: Masking the White Gaze: Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks
Andrea Sand: From Bush Talk to Nation Language: Language Attitudes in Jamaica Before and After Independence
Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt: Track Studies: Popular Music and Postcolonial Analysis
Ellen Grünkemeier: Postcolonial Cultural Studies: Writing a Zulu Woman Back Into History
Interdisciplinary Atlantic Studies
Timo Müller: Postcolonial Pursuits in African American Studies: The Later Poems of Claude McKay
Carl Plasa: “Mainly Storytelling and Play-Acting”: Theatricality and the Middle Passage in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger
Henning Marquardt: Negotiating Family Models in Jamaican Literature: Class, Race, and Religion
Anja Bandau: Transatlantic Representations of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue at the End of the Eighteenth Century and the Haitian Turn
Sarah Fekadu: Writing Off-Centre: Global Imagination and Modernism in the Short Fiction of Phyllis Shand Allfrey
Jan Hüsgen: Emancipation and Protest: Moravian Mission and the Labour Strike in St Kitts
Steffen Runkel: The Perspectives of African Elites on Slavery and Abolition on the Gold Coast (1860-1900): Newspapers as Sources
Frank Schulze-Engler: Fragile Modernities: History and Historiography in Contemporary African Fiction
Crossovers: Historiography, Fiction, Criticism
Matthias Galler: Historiographic Indian English Fiction: Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule in Midnight’s Children, The Great Indian Novel, and A Fine Balance
Cecile Sandten: Kaliyattam (The Play of God) by Jayaraj: Polymorphous and Postcolonial Poetics in an Indian Othello Adaptation
Dennis Mischke: Othering Otherness: Stephen Muecke’s Fictocriticism and the Cosmopolitan Vision
Postcolonial Studies in Research and Teaching
Ursula Kluwick: The (Inter)Disciplinarity of Postcolonial Research
Sabine Broeck: Lessons for A-Disciplinarity: Some Notes on What Happens to an Americanist When She Takes Slavery Seriously
Janou Glencross: Postcolonial Studies as a Discipline: An External Perspective on Administrative Headaches
Brigitte Reinwald: On the Challenge of De-Provincializing the University Classroom: Teaching African History from a Postcolonial Perspective
Frank Schulze-Engler: Studying Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in a World of Globalized Modernity: Notes on the ‘Frankfurt Experience’
Elinor Jane Pohl: Postcolonial Readings in German Secondary Education
Mala Panduran: Cross-Cultural Pedagogical Practices: Understanding the German Context
Reinhold Wandel: Teaching India in the German EFL Classroom: Issues and Problems
Notes on Contributors