| Post-colonial Studies Annotated Bibliography | |
|---|---|
|
back to identity There is so much more that I wish I had the time to read in the past year, especially by these authors. You can tell when I loved the authors, I wrote tons about them! Colonial Knowledge: Breckenridge, Carol and Peter van der Veer, ed. “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia.” Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1993. Breckenridge and van der Veer continue where Cohn finishes, applying his ideas of Colonial knowledge to the difficulties facing independent India. They posit that Orientalism has become embedded in the postcolonial situation for both India and Britain, or more broadly colonized nations and European and American colonizers. They focus on the implications of the Orientalist project of containing the Orient as it shapes the way we view both the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West.’ They raise the question that places India in the postcolonial predicament, namely why the theory of difference (within India and abroad) that the British imposed has outlasted British rule. What are the social and political reasons for this predicament? Cohn, Bernard. “Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Cohn follows the path of the British controlling Indians by learning Indian language. Their desire to learn Indian languages demonstrated both their distrust of Indian informants to handle British information, as well as establishing British supremacy over Indians. The British also used appearance as an easy means of identifying who belonged to what group, including distinguishing themselves in regal European dress from anything that could look similar to Indian garb. Cohn provides a compelling anthropological approach to the varied manners that colonialism took root in Indian society. “Every accumulation of knowledge…is useful to the state…it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence…teach us to estimate them by the measure of their own” (45) Said, Edward. “Orientalism.” New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Edward Said introduces his compelling argument that questions why we consider an obvious division between the “Eastern” and “Western” worlds. He analyzes colonial scholarship that he calls Orientalism, which legitimized European hegemony in colonial enterprises. Said argues that Orientalist scholarship reveals more about Europe than the “Orient” since it was done with imperial objectives and assumptions. It is helpful to read Said who challenges anyone interested in anthropology to constantly question that interest. His argument reminds anthropologists that they are present in their scholarship, despite attempts to be neutral observers, our experiences and expectations always shape what we see. It is better to acknowledge that than to attempt to tell a “true” story. “[I]t is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political, power intellectual, power cultural, power moral” Said 12 -“We all swim together.” New Statesman, 15 October 2001. Early Independence Movement : 1857 Rebellion Marx, Karl. “The Revolt in the Indian Army.” Marx wrote news articles for Europeans at the time of the Indian Rebellion. Its interesting to read his contemporary interpretation of the rebellion. Stokes, Eric. “The Peasant Armed: The Indian rebellion of 1857.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Stokes offers a great play-by-play of the rebellion, including some rationale and commentary on the importance of the words Britain used to describe the rebellion. He talks about the important function of the rebellion in transferring colonial rule from the British East India Company to the British Crown. Community Construction and Partition Flood, Gavin, ed. “Blackwell Companion to Hinduism.” Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. This is a great concise introduction to Hinduism. It is far from comprehensive, but it gives some grounding to someone who knows nothing about the religion. Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Construction of Communalism in north India.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. “Like tribalism and factionalism, communalism is given, endemic, inborn. Like them, it denies consciousness and agency to the subjected peoples of the colonized world.” 10 -“Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. -“Memory, History and the Question of Violence.” S.G. Deuskar Lectures on Indian History and Culture, 1995; Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. 1999 “discourse of community parallels violence; ‘community’ and ‘violence’ constitute each other; community borders are as uncertain as those of violence” (23). Hasan, Mushirul, ed. “India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization.” Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. In his introduction to the collection of essays Hasan offers a vision of Muslim-Hindu relations in the years leading up to Partition. He describes the formation of the Muslim League that contended as the mouthpiece of Indian Muslims that requested a separate state to fend off Hindu oppression. Hasan explains Partition through high politics and involves plenty of original source material to substantiate his historical claims. Other essays in the collection address the intricacies of the Muslim League’s ideological basis and the majority-Hindu Congress Party’s reactions and motivations. Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam. “India Wins Freedom (the complete version).” London: Sangam Books, 1988. Azad was the first education minister after independence, so his take on the Partition and independence movements are a great beginning to understanding how the curriculum was written about these events. Eaton, Richard M. ed. “India’s Islamic Traditions, 711-1750.” Oxford in India Readings: Themes in Indian History. -Yohanan Friedman. “Islamic Thought in Relation to the Indian Context” Friedman introduces a historical look into Islam in relation to Hinduism. He finds many parallel lines running between the two, owing to Islamic thinkers. However, often these Muslim thinkers created an order that defines Islam as a higher religion and casts Hinduism as a surface religion for the masses. Yet by agreeing that they worshiped the same God, they acknowledged an underlying common belief system with Hindus. -Cynthia Talbot. “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-colonial India.” Talbot describes Hindu interpretations of Islam’s offences as a colonial empire. Her analysis takes us back to Islam’s imperial destruction of Hindu sites that explains Partition’s historical grounding in pre-colonial Indian society. I find this article useful to understand the tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and the importance of physical sites as battlegrounds between the religions. However, Talbot points out that colonialism’s structures played a large role in drawing boundaries around the religious groups (it is helpful to read this article beside a post-colonial interpretation of Hindu-Muslim relations, like Pandey’s, to understand more about this argument). “There is a general consensus that it is questionable whether a Hindu or Muslim identity existed prior to the nineteenth century in any meaningful sense.” 84 Moraes, Frank. “Witness to an Era: India 1920-Present Day.” New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Private Ltd., 1977. Verma, Meenakshie. "Aftermath: An oral history of violence." New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004. Postcolonial Modern Nationalism Subaltern Studies Collective authors: Chatterjee, Partha. Lecture. CODESRIA, Dakar, Senegal. 1996. Partha Chatterjee argues in a lecture entitled “Our Modernity” that postcolonial nations have authority over defining their “distinctive modernity” different from a colonial notion of modernity. He disputes the often held notion in postcolonial societies that they merely learn from Europe and America. “My argument is that because of the way in which the history of our modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse, unfettered by differences of race or nationality. Somehow, from the very beginning, we had a shrewd guess that given the close complicity between modern knowledge and modern regimes of power, we would forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would be taken seriously as its producers.” 14 -“The Nation and its Fragments.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. In his introductory essay, “Whose Imagined Community?” Partha Chatterjee thinks about the space in the spiritual realm that India carved to define its modernity and specificity as a nation. “The colonial state, in other words, is kept out of the “inner”domain of national culture; but it is not as though this so-called spiritual domain is left unchanged. In fact, here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western.” 6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford, 1988. Spivak questions the subaltern studies revolutionary redefinition of the subaltern, or peasant, as a powerful voice in political history. He reminds the reader to “read against the grain” since even in the collective he points out that there is a tendency to fall into the patterns they condemn. Spivak’s introduction to the Subaltern Studies Collective is difficult to follow without post-colonial/neo-colonial theory vocabulary. Nandy, Ashis. “The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.” Oxford, 1983. Nandy introduces the idea that the introduction of “modernity” or European civilization acted as the second and most powerful form of colonialism that has remained in Indian internal dialogue. His argument is compelling to think of the power of introducing morals to another culture. Chakrabarty, Pesh. “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Contemporary India Shiva, Vandana. “India Divided: Diversity and Democracy Under Attack.” New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. Stern, Robert W. “Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent.” 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, 2003. Varma, Pavan K. “The Great Indian Middle Class.” New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999. Education Kumar, Krishna. “Political Agenda of Education: A study of colonialist and nationalist ideas.” New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991. Essays and Novels Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91.” London: Granta Books, 1992. “The Satanic Verses” “Midnight’s Children” Forster, E.M. “A Passage to India.” New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1924. Magazines, Scholarly journals, and daily newspapers Economic and Political Weekly Post-colonial Law and National Agenda Basu, Dr. Durga Das. “Introduction to the Constitution of India.” 19th ed. Nagpur: Wadhwa and Company Law Publishers, 2005. E.C. Thomas, ed., print, pub. “SC Verdict on Hindutva.” UNI Service: Backgrounder “A weekly Treasure of Topical Facts.” Vol. XXI No. 3, 18 Jan 1996. |
|