Post Colonial Identities revisits issues regarding the newer literature within the expansive African heritage of diverse regional and national groupings. It is poised at substantiating the uniformity of Africa in terms of literary and cultural movements, and lending some inter-disciplinary insights on the whole body of literature through twentieth century history.

Making a break with conventional wisdom in post-colonial discourse, this book explores contemporary African identities in transition. The contributors look at the colonial legacy and how colonial identities are being reconstructed in the face of deepening social inequality across the continent.

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, grade: 1.0, Martin Luther University (Deutsche Sprache und Literatur), course: Introduction to Postcolonial Theory, Literature, and Film, language: English, abstract: Postcolonial studies aim at stripping away conventional thoughts and examine what kind of identity emerges in postcolonial subject. The first problem when I set out to work on postcolonial literatures is to confirm its scope. This word scope that I put forward here can be explained as follows, on the one hand, postcolonial literature is apparently vague and general. It’s such a multinational and multicultural case that it is hard to define which country falls under the rubric. Except what we always mentioned as “postcolonial countries” such as Nigeria, India and Pakistan, some writers include also countries like Canada, Ireland and Australia. So when we read the literatures about postcolonial, it is apparent for us to discover, that they include two parts, on the one hand, it is based on the dominant or colonizer society, on the other hand, it talks also about the dominated or colonized society. On the other hand, there are a large number of relevant themes or aspects around the topic postcolonialism: migration, race, gender, resistance, slavery and so on. Trying to cover all the countries and aspects in one essay seems not so specific. In my essay, I will focus on the question “Who am I ?”. This kind of doubt about one’s identity is a “derivative product” of colonialism and a very important topic in postcolonial world. When we read literatures, we are able to seek out, what the indigenous voice want to express, how should the indigenous people see themselves, once their place and identity were forced to change? Is the dual identity always ambivalent? These questions are what I’m going to explain hereinafter.

This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times. Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning. By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development--heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation--have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

This book offers the first comparative study of two highly significant anti-colonial nationalisms.

Violence and Belonging explores the formative role of violence in shaping people's identities in modern postcolonial Africa.

This title was first published in 2002.Presenting a fresh understanding of the construction of Post-Colonial national identity in the new context of globalization, this text looks at the dilemmas of the requirement to compete in the global economy and the political demands of human rights and cultural differences. The authors are concerned with the ways in which a modern state attempts to mould the identities of its citizens and the ways in which the myriad of identities in a multiethnic, multicultural and multi-religious population give rise to intense contradictions. This important research will have implications beyond the Filipino case and will be of great interest to a wider audience as a reference for courses on Asian studies, political science and history.