BiblioVault - Books about Colonial

Asian Cities

Colonial to Global

Edited by Gregory Bracken

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

When people look at success stories among postcolonial nations, the focus almost always turns to Asia, where many cities in former colonies have become key locations of international commerce and culture. This book brings together a stellar group of scholars from a number of disciplines to explore the rise of Asian cities, including Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and more. Dealing with history, geography, culture, architecture, urbanism, and other topics, the book attempts to formulate a new understanding of what makes Asian cities such global leaders.

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Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam

Continuities and Ruptures

Edited by Marcel Maussen, Veit Bader, and Annelies Moors

Amsterdam University Press, 2012

This comprehensive collection examines a broad spectrum of Islamic governance during colonial and postcolonial eras. The book pays special attention to the ongoing battles over the codification of Islamic education, religious authority, law and practice while outlining the similarities and differences in British, French and Portuguese colonial rule in Islamic regions. Using a shared conceptual framework the contributors to this volume analyze the nature of regulation in different historical periods and geographical areas. From Africa and the Middle East to Asia and Europe, Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam opens up new vistas for research in Islamic studies

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Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata

From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City

Siddhartha Sen

Amsterdam University Press, 2017

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata offers an extended analysis of the architecture and urban planning of Kolkata from the earliest days of colonialism through independence and on into the twenty-first century, all set in the larger context of Indian cities’ architecture and urban planning. What Siddhartha Sen shows is the transformation of a colonial city into a Marxist one — and ongoing attempts to further transform Kolkata into a global city. Richly illustrated, the book carefully situates architecture, design, and urban planning within Kolkata’s political economy and social milieu.

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Formations of Ritual

Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil

David Scott

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Formations of Ritual was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Yaktovil is an elaborate healing ceremony employed by Sinhalas in Sri Lanka to dispel the effects of the eyesight of a pantheon of malevolent supernatural figures known as yakku. Anthropology, traditionally, has articulated this ceremony with the concept metaphor of "demonism." Yet, as David Scott demonstrates in this provocative book, this use of "demonism" reveals more about the discourse of anthropology than it does about the ritual itself. His investigation of yaktovil and yakku within the Sinhala cosmology is also an inquiry into the ways in which anthropology, by ignoring the discursive history of the rituals, religions, and relationships it seeks to describe, tends to reproduce ideological-often, specifically colonial-objects.

To do this, Scott describes the discursive apparatus through which yakku are positioned in the moral universe of Sinhala, traces the appearance of yakku and yaktovil in Western discourse, evaluates the contribution of these figures and this ceremony in anthropology, and attempts to show how the larger anthropology of Buddhism, in which the anthropology of yaktovil is embedded, might be reconfigured. Finally, he offers a rereading of the ritual in terms of the historically selfconscious approach he proposes.The result points to a major rethinking of the historical nature not only of the objects, but also of the concepts through which they are constructed in anthropological discourse.

David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Jean Rhys at "World's End"

Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile

By Mary Lou Emery

University of Texas Press, 1990

The Caribbean Islands have long been an uneasy meeting place among indigenous peoples, white European colonists, and black slave populations. Tense oppositions in Caribbean culture—colonial vs. native, white vs. black, male conqueror vs. female subject—supply powerful themes and spark complex narrative experiments in the fiction of Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys. In this pathfinding study, Mary Lou Emery focuses on Rhys's handling of these oppositions, using a Caribbean cultural perspective to replace the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that have served to misread and sometimes devalue Rhys's writing.

Emery considers all five Rhys novels, beginning with Wide Sargasso Sea as the most explicitly Caribbean in its setting, in its participation in the culminating decades of a West Indian literary naissance, and most importantly, in its subversive transformation of European concepts of character. From a sociocultural perspective, she argues persuasively that the earlier novels—Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight—should be read as emergent Caribbean fiction, written in tense dialogue with European modernism. Building on this thesis, she reveals how the apparent passivity, masochism, or silence of Rhys's female protagonists results from their doubly marginalized status as women and as subject peoples. Also, she explores how Rhys's women seek out alternative identities in dreamed of, magically realized, or chosen communities.

These discoveries offer important insights on literary modernism, Caribbean fiction, and the formation of female identity.

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Making Words Matter

The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

Ambreen Hai

Ohio University Press, 2009

Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self–reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature.

Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self–imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Hai’s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.

This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser–known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.

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Men at Home

Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Gyanendra Pandey

Duke University Press, 2025

The Privilege of Crisis

Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography, and Film

Elahe Haschemi Yekani

Campus Verlag, 2011

Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith—to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.

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This Happy Land

The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston

James William Hagy

University of Alabama Press, 1993

This Happy Land charts the history of the Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina, from the arrival of the first Jewish settlers in the 1690s until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Charleston was the preeminent city of the South for many decades, and its Jewish community was the largest in North America from about the time of the American Revolution until around 1820. American Reform Judaism, one of the three major divisions of the faith, first appeared in Charleston in 1824 when the Reformed Society of Israelites was established. What happened among the Jews in Charleston thus affected the development of Judaism throughout America.

The Jews who lived in the city from the 17th century to 1861 are identified in Hagy’s comprehensive volume, which includes information on their places of origin, marriages, children, and deaths. From Hagy’s exhaustive research into published and archival sources, patterns emerged that allowed him to draw conclusions about the life of the people in the city and to develop both a social and religious history. Hagy shows that the Jews who lived in Charleston quickly adapted to Southern ways of life, including dueling and the ownership of slaves and plantations. Jewish residents gained full economic and political rights long before other communities in the western world, which led to their full participation in the town’s public, financial, intellectual, and social life. The also lived where they chose, followed the professions they wanted, and generally participated in the affairs of the city. Most viewed America as this “happy land” and Charleston as their “New Jerusalem.”

This book breaks new ground in the history of Jewish communities by providing such analyses as the origins of residents, the roles that women played in business, the causes of mortality, the antebellum Jewish family, the common aspects of life, and relations between Jews and African-Americans. It also provides a thorough analysis of the Reformed Society of Israelites that originated at Beth Elohim synagogue, and which became the first reform movement in America. The volume concludes with an appendix containing a list of all the known Jewish residents of Charleston for this period with selected biographical information.

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