The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France


Todd Shepard - 2006
    For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other--its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable tide of history, the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria--Muslims in particular--but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship--once focused on the Algerian province/colony--have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory.

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961


Christina Klein - 2003
    Meanwhile the U.S., competing with the Soviet Union for global power, extended its reach into Asia to an unprecedented degree. This book reveals that these trends—the proliferation of Orientalist culture and the expansion of U.S. power—were linked in complex and surprising ways. While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration—a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena—including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, James Michener's travel essays and novel Hawaii, and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program—Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals, created a culture of global integration that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. Her book enlarges Edward Said's notion of Orientalism in order to bring to light a cultural narrative about both domestic and international integration that still resonates today.

Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things


Ann Laura Stoler - 1995
    It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race.Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race.Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature


Terry Eagleton - 1988
    Each deals with the question of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding and analyzing the aftermath of colonization. The authors’ diverse perspectives are demonstrated by the essays’ respective titles: Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment; Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism; and Said, Yeats and Decolonization. The essays have implication beyond their immediate topics, bearing upon questions of feminism, decolonization, and modernism to illuminate problems that belong to other groups and regions.

The Peace Tree from Hiroshima: The Little Bonsai with a Big Story


Sandra Moore - 2015
    Many people die, but the Yamaki family and Miyajima survive. One day, a truck comes to take Miyajima away. The little tree is on its way to the National Arboretum in Washington as a gift of friendship from Japan to America. Miyajima is very proud, but also sad to leave the Yamaki family. At the end of the book, Masaru, the elderly grandfather of the family, and his ten-year-old grandson Akira, make a surprise visit to Washington to visit their much missed and beloved family member.

Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural


Stephen Addiss - 1985
    Includes the work of many of Japan's most brilliant artists, including Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Yoshitoshi.

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest


Anne McClintock - 1995
    Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking


Walter D. Mignolo - 2000
    In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of colonial difference into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls border thinking.Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of border gnosis, or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding.The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one civilizing process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism


Mahmood Mamdani - 1996
    Many writers have understood colonial rule as either direct (French) or indirect (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a customary mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Above Top Secret: Uncover the Mysteries of the Digital Age


Jim Marrs - 2008
    He has worked for several Texas news papers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where, beginning in 1968, he covered stories locally as well as in Europe and the Middle East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War, he became the military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative reporter. Since 1980, Marrs has been a freelance writer, author, and frequent invited public speaker.

Hammertown


Peter Culley - 2003
    In HAMMERTOWN, poet Peter Culley re-imagines his home town of Nanaimo, British Columbia, not as it is, but as it might be imagined in the mind of a Parisian who had rarely left his city. This is Culley's fifth book of poetry.