In Colonial Impotence, Benoît Henriet studies the violent contradictions of colonial rule from the standpoint of the Leverville concession, Belgian Congo’s largest palm oil exploitation. Leverville was imagined as a benevolent tropical utopia, whose Congolese workers would be "civilized" through a paternalist machinery. However, the concession was marred by inefficiency, endemic corruption and intrinsic brutality. Colonial agents in the field could be seen as impotent, for they were both unable and unwilling to perform as expected. This book offers a new take on the joint experience of colonialism and capitalism in Southwest Congo, and sheds light on their impact on local environments, bodies, societies and cosmogonies.

In Colonial Impotence, Benoît Henriet studies the violent contradictions of colonial rule from the standpoint of the Leverville concession, Belgian Congo’s largest palm oil exploitation. Leverville was imagined as a benevolent tropical utopia, whose Congolese workers would be "civilized" through a paternalist machinery. However, the concession was marred by inefficiency, endemic corruption and intrinsic brutality. Colonial agents in the field could be seen as impotent, for they were both unable and unwilling to perform as expected. This book offers a new take on the joint experience of colonialism and capitalism in Southwest Congo, and sheds light on their impact on local environments, bodies, societies and cosmogonies.

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Indispensable for students of film studies, in this book Reena Dube explores Satyajit Ray's films, and The Chess Players in particular, in the context of discourses of labour in colonial and postcolonial conditions. Starting from Daniel Defoe and moving through history, short story and film to the present, Dube widens her analysis with comparisons in which Indian films are situated alongside Hollywood and other films, and interweaves historical and cultural debates within film theory. Her book treats film as part of the larger cultural production of India and provides a historical sense of the cross genre borrowings, traditions and debates that have deeply influenced Indian cinema and its viewers.

Honorable Mention, 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Argues that Ricanness operates as a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism In 1954, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón and other members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led a revolutionary action on the chambers of Congress, firing several shots at the ceiling and calling for the independence of the island. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance begins with Lebrón’s vanguard act, distilling the relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and revolutionary performance under colonial time. Ruiz argues that Ricanness—a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism through different measures of time—uncovers what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized and sexualized enduring body. Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of aesthetics, against the colonization of time. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions, illustrating how they have reformulated time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices.

Postcolonial Justice addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in “utopian ideals” of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.