Mark U . Stein

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts reflects that critiques of ideological formations occur within intersecting social, political, and cultural configurations where each position is in itself ‘ideological’ – and subject to asymmetrical power relations. Postcolonialism has become an object of critique as ideology, but postcolonial studies’ highly diversified engagement with ideology remains a strong focus that exceeds Ideologiekritik. Fourteen contributors from North America, Africa, and Europe focus (I) on the complex relation between postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, and conceptualizations of ideology, (II) on ideological formations that manifest themselves in very specific postcolonial contexts, highlighting the potential continuities between colonial and postcolonial ideology, and (III) on further expanding and complicating the nexus of postcolonial ideology, from veiling as both ideological practice and individual resistance to home as ideological construct; from palimpsestic readings of colonial photography to aesthetics as ideology.

Crossing boundaries is a key issue in EFL teaching and Postcolonial Studies. It is an objective not only for the foreign language classroom that is facing increasingly global influences in terms of more heterogeneous societies, but also with a view to the growing heterogeneity in the literature, media and materials used in teaching and research. Because the intersections between Postcolonial Studies and TEFL are not only manifold but also highly significant, this volume brings together papers that explore, perform and theorize various kinds of crossovers, be they disciplinary, thematic or intermedial ones.

Christiane Lütge holds the Chair for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at the University of Munich. Her research interests include media literacy, literature in the EFL classroom, inter- and transcultural learning, global education and foreign language teacher education.

Mark Stein is Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at WWU Münster. His areas of research include Afroeuropean studies, diasporic formations, porosity, ransnationalism and translocation, black and Asian British cultural production, and postcolonial literatures.

'In the 1990s, it has become protocol to distinguish "black" (that is, African Caribbean) and "Asian" groupings in Britain' Ashwani Sharma and others noted. I take this quotation as emblematic of a moment in British cultures where alliances between distinct black British groups have become more difficult and where diversity is emphasized. It stems from a study that responds to a growing presence and commodification of 'Asian' musical production in Britain such as bhangra, Southall beat, northern rock bhangra and house bhangra. This increased visibility of an 'Asian cultural presence' is true for the arts generally; think of the soaring success of the sculptor Anish Kapoor's work; think of writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, and, obviously, Rushdie, or younger ones like Bidishas or Atima Srivastava. There are the fields of fashion to be considered, or food, or TV. While limiting my inquiry to the field of writing, I'm pursuing the larger question of the politics of 'Asian' cultural production vis-a-vis the older and overarching denomination 'Black British'.
Stein, Mark U., "Cultures of Hybridity: Reading Black British Literature", Kunapipi 20(2), 1998.
download PDF: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol20/iss2/18

From President Obama's Predator drones to 'twitter litter'; from novels by Teju Cole and Mohsin Hamid to Judith Butler's concept of 'grievable lives', this essay focusses on the circulation of narratives of porosity and their modes of translocal representation. The concept of porosity is deployed here to account for spatial and textual connections which cultural products fashion, exploit, and transform at the same time. Porosity has the potential to render borders – despite their evident and frequently harmful function of division and separation – as membranes and connectors which foster and modulate traffic, connection, cross-fertilisation.

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts reflects that critiques of ideological formations occur within intersecting social, political, and cultural configurations where each position is in itself ‘ideological’ – and subject to asymmetrical power relations. Postcolonialism has become an object of critique as ideology, but postcolonial studies’ highly diversified engagement with ideology remains a strong focus that exceeds Ideologiekritik. Fourteen contributors from North America, Africa, and Europe focus (I) on the complex relation between postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, and conceptualizations of ideology, (II) on ideological formations that manifest themselves in very specific postcolonial contexts, highlighting the potential continuities between colonial and postcolonial ideology, and (III) on further expanding and complicating the nexus of postcolonial ideology, from veiling as both ideological practice and individual resistance to home as ideological construct; from palimpsestic readings of colonial photography to aesthetics as ideology.

For different reasons, both \u27New Literatures\u27 and \u27The Caribbean\u27 are not self-evident terms; the \u27New Literatures\u27 are neither as new and historyless as the name suggests, nor do they, as is implied, rely on an older body of (British) texts to achieve definition. Likewise, tile regional approach taken in this section of YWES relies on a geographical logic that the Caribbean, in particular, does not sustain unproblematically. As Peter Hulme has suggested, the unstable signifier \u27Caribbean\u27 points to an \u27Other America\u27, the Glissantian term which Michael Niblett and Kerstin Oloff deploy in their collection Perspectives on the \u27Other America\u27: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean alld Latin American Clilture. In his essay contained therein, Hulme in fact does support a regional approach to Caribbean cultural production but argues for \u27Expanding the Caribbean\u27; more specifically, he encourages comparative literary studies and area studies to engage with each other. He suggests we pay \u27much less attention to propriety\u27 (p. 43) and thus allow for consideration of early Caribbean texts, the voices of visitors born elsewllere, texts which are not easily categorized in terms of genre, and selected texts from bordering nation-states, such as Colombia and the USA. Advocating \u27imaginative mass trespass over the established boundaries of literary history\u27 (p. 45), Hulme is intent on expanding the Caribbean-not in an imperial sense, enlarging its territory at tIle expense of its neighbours, but by capitalizing on geographical, cultural, linguistic and historical overlaps

Okri’s The Famished Road, Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soliel des independences, Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Patrice Nganang’s Temps de chien, Mercedes Fouda’s Je parle camerounais, Gabriel Fonkou’s Moi Taximan, and Doris Lessing’s short story “The Antheap”) actually work in the classroom. Two articles give overviews of the stages and perspectives in oral literature research and teaching across several Nigerian university campuses; one explores the place of theory in African literary studies, arguing with some key—if rather dated—textbooks by leading theorists of the past in favor of indigenization by synthesizing Western and African aesthetic and sociological ideas; and another presents both the challenges and prospects of African literature teaching in a quintessential multicultural context such as one encounters in classrooms across colleges and universities in the United States. As one of the longest-running and most robust journals of African literature, it is not without good reason that the appearance of every single issue of African Literature Today has marked a major publishing event; remarkable for the breadth and the miscellany of its collection, though very mixed in quality, this volume is no exception. In this regard, the book reviews editor James Gibbs also deserves commendation for his valuable service; not least for the delicacy of Lalage Brown’s exhaustive and sparkling review featured in this issue, which is informed with unusual force and clarity by a rare direct acquaintance with the late Christopher Okigbo: this edition of the journal is worth the purchase for this alone, because there are so few extant sources to throw light on that enigmatic Nigerian poet’s life and work.

The sites from which postcolonial articulations emerge today and the sites at which they are consumed and in turn written about are undergoing complex and profound changes that cannot be accounted for exclusively in terms of colonization and decolonization. Cultural products emerge from ever more shifting grounds: Narrative fiction, lyric poetry, drama, and film are created with a view to being marketed in several languages and markets; authors and producers move from one geographical sphere to another; global audiences consume cultural products in different locales, creating demands in several marketplaces; national borders are fought over and redrawn, materially as well as textually, further undermining any sense of a stable location.Postcolonial scholars read contemporary and historical texts across disparate geographic and temporal spaces. In the context of globalization and neoimperialisms, not only unequal development and political instability but also violence and gender inequality continue to shape postcolonial realities. Nation and narration, place and displacement, location and migration remain major paradigms of postcolonial critique. The postcolonial lexicon, with terms such as 'dislocation', 'migration', 'diaspora', 'exile', 'hybridity', 'third space', or 'transculturation', clearly indicates the concern of the field with placement, movement, and interconnection.An early occurrence of the terms 'translocal' and 'translocalism' can be found in Don Martindale and R. Galen Hanson's Small Town and the Nation (1969),1 a sociological study which examines how traditional American ideals of far-reaching autonomy for small towns were challenged and renegotiated in relation to twentieth-century developments of increasing interdependence, economic and political centralization, and mass society. These processes are analysed through a case study of one particular small town. Martindale and Hanson use the terms 'translocar and 'translocalism' in juxtaposition with local small-town autonomy, to signify all those developments which connect the small town to the wider world and subject it to "non-local" (19), "extracommunity forces" (xv; sec also 3, 8-9). Accordingly, 'translocalism' includes not only the international but also (and perhaps especially) the national level (xv; see also xiv). This study from the 1960s also discusses (then) recent developments in sociological theories of community which can be usefully related to later developments in the conceptualization of the relationship between location and identity. One of the most interesting points is an increasing dissociation of community from territoriality: i.e. territory is reduced to a merely "secondary (even at times dispensable) attribute of community" (11; see also 12-13).More than forty years later, Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen deploy 'translocality' as an intermediary term between 'local' and 'global' which, they argue, is especially suitable for studying connections that are instituted by non-dominant social actors - or by regional, cultural or national collectivities - beyond the 'North' and 'West'. Thus, Freitag and von Oppen distinguish 'translocality' from the concepts of globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, which they consider to be too strongly associated with power elites, eurocentrism, and imperialism.2 While the connection between the translocal and the non-dominant has been related by some to postcolonial studies, with its traditional emphasis on transcending Western /Northern perspectives and on hegemonic interpretative positions, others insist on the continuing relevance and power effects of local configurations for an analysis of translocal phenomena.3The conceptual frame and the title of the present volume have their origins in an international conference which took place at the University of Munster, Germany, from 21 to 24 May 2009. As the twentieth annual conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (GNEL/ AS NEL), it aimed to investigate forms and functions of translocation in postcolonial cultural representations. …