Reframing Postcolonial Studies Concepts Methodologies Scholarly Activisms David D Kim Editor All Chapter

Reframing Postcolonial Studies:
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly

Activisms David D. Kim (Editor)
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Reframing
Postcolonial Studies
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms
Edited by David D. Kim
Reframing Postcolonial Studies
“This timely volume confronts the legacies of post-colonial thinking as a set of

material and textual practices. Looking at museums, public monuments, statues,
literary texts, languages and artworks, it questions the vexed legacies of colonial
culture, as well as the theoretical and critical literature that has sought to under-
stand it. From the vantage point of the ‘post’ post-colonial (as a temporal as well
as theoretical construction), successive authors look at specific instances and medi-
ations of Imperial Europe’s global ambition: the way poetry and fiction imagine
potential pasts, the way video and film redress the harm of history, the way prov-
enance and particularity complicate the politicisation of heritage. Drawing on
urban theory, art history, literary analysis, environmental humanities and linguis-
tics, the book is ambitious and wide-ranging, asking us what it is to live creatively
and critically with the residues of colonial appropriation and sedimentation while
in open dialogue with the subjects who still live in its wake.”
—Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art,
University of College London, UK
“The attention of postcolonial studies has moved to decolonizing the colonial

archive: to the institutions that house objects, artworks, materials, even bodies culled
from the colonized world, to the corporations and universities that profited from
slavery and colonialism, and to the statues in the public sphere that even today com-
memorate the racist history of colonial plunderers. Reframing Postcolonial Studies
addresses the urgent issues that Black Lives Matter has raised with respect to every-
day material practices and the frameworks in which our knowledge and cultural heri-
tage are conceptualized and stored. The book points urgently to the many ways in
which our society must reinvent itself to enable equitable justice for all.”
—Robert J. C. Young, Julius Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
New York University, USA
David D. Kim
Editor
Reframing
Postcolonial Studies
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms
Editor
David D. Kim
Department of European Languages
and Transcultural Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-52725-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52726-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6
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To Our Teachers and Students,
Past, Present, and Emerging
Acknowledgments
Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the product of an intensely collaborative

project, which has taken nearly three years to complete. It contains the
signatures of many different interlocutors whose contributions have been
invaluable for reframing the following discussions. First of all, I owe the
contributors my utmost gratitude. All of them were excited to join this
volume from the beginning. It has been an immense privilege to learn
from our regular exchanges both in person and via email. Second, I wish
to thank Megan Laddusaw, Christine Pardue, and Arun Prasath at Palgrave
Macmillan. Their prompt and thoughtful guidance throughout the edito-
rial process has been outstanding. I could not have asked for a more sup-
portive place to publish this book. Third, I had the fortune to receive
Viola Ardeni’s meticulous editorial assistance in the beginning of this proj-
ect. Last but not least, my sincere gratitude goes to the anonymous
reviewer whose encouraging and thought-provoking comments on the
book proposal and the final manuscript have enriched the book in both
profound and subtle ways. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic
whose lasting devastation has yet to be assessed, acknowledging the
unwavering support of these colleagues surely has a new special mean-
ing for me.
May 2020 David D. Kim
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Patrimony 1
David D. Kim
Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41
2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

Bill Ashcroft
3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture 69
Susan Slyomovics
4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Francophonie 93
Dominic Thomas
Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111
5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy113
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François
ix
x Contents
6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Dilemmas in Visual Representation157
Afonso Dias Ramos
Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189
8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide191
Reinhart Kössler
9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

Katrin Sieg
10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249

Frieda Ekotto
11 Afterword261
Graham Huggan
Index269
Notes on Contributors
Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of

postcolonial theory, and the co-author of The Empire Writes Back (1989),
the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial
studies. He is the author and co-author of 21 books and over 200
articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages. He also
serves on the editorial boards of ten international journals. His latest
work is Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2016). He is an Emeritus
Professor at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor in the Departments
of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and
Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author
of ten books, the most recent scholarly monograph being What Color
is Black? Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (2011). Her early
research traced interactions between philosophy, law, literature, and
African cinema, and she works on LGBT issues, with an emphasis on
West African cultures within Africa as well as in Europe and the
Americas. She received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical
Literature in 2014 and the Benezet Award for excellence in her field
from Colorado College in 2015. In 2017, she co-produced the feature-
length documentary Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters,
which premiered at the University of Michigan. That year, she also received
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an Honorary Degree from Colorado College and in 2018 was given the
Zagora International Film Festival of Sub-Sahara Award for her work in
African cinema.
Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His
work straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and envi-
ronmental humanities, and much of his research over the past three
decades has involved individual and collaborative attempts to cross the
disciplines (literary/cultural studies, anthropology, biology, geography,
history). His most recent published book is Colonialism, Culture, Whales:
The Cetacean Quartet (2018), and he is working on a co-written study
of modern British nature writing. Other publications include The
Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), Postcolonial
Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010, co-authored with
Helen Tiffin), and the sole-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies (2013).
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is Assistant Professor of French and
Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State
University. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones
contemporains (Poetics of Violence and Contemporary Francophone
Narrative, 2017). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as
the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles
études francophones, and Lettres romanes. He has recently co-edited a spe-
cial issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping
Francophone Postcolonial Theory,” and a special issue of Cultural
Dynamics on “The Minor in Question.” Jean-François is working on
a second monograph, titled Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and
Insular Cultures. It focuses primarily on contemporary literatures and
expressive cultures from the Mascarene Archipelago.
David D. Kim is an associate professor in the Department of European
Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables: Memory and
Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (2017), as well as the co-editor
of Imagining Human Rights (2015), The Postcolonial World (2017),
Globalgeschichten der deutschen Literatur (2021), and Teaching German
Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2023). His digi-
tal humanities project is called WorldLiterature@UCLA. He is working
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
on two major projects, one of which explores the notion of beastly

citizenship, the other Hannah Arendt’s relationship with non-Jewish
alterity. His research has been supported, among others, by the
American Council of Learned Societies.
Reinhart Kössler is a sociologist and former director of the Arnold-
Bergstraesser-Institut in Freiburg, Germany. He is also a professor in the
Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, as well as an
associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Freiburg
University of Education. His research interests include theory of society,
sociology of global relations, institutional pluralism, and memory politics.
His regional focus is southern Africa where he has worked recently on
ethnicity and postcolonial reconciliation. Books include In search of sur-
vival and dignity. Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia
Under South African Rule (2005); The Long Aftermath of War.
Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, ed. with A. du Pisani and
W. Lindeke (2011); Gesellschaft bei Marx, with Hanns Wienold (2013);
Namibia and Germany. Negotiating the Past (2015); Völkermord – und
was dann? Die Politik der deutsch-namibischen
Vergangenheitsbearbeitung (2017).
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is Professor of English and Comparative
Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His areas of research cover
from Victorian to imperial, colonial, and contemporary cultures, postco-
lonial theory, crime fiction, travel writing, comparative and world literary
systems, as well as environmental theory and literature. His publications
include, among others, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a
New Theory of World-Literature (2015), Natural Disasters and Victorian
Imperial Culture: Fevers and Famines (2013), Postcolonial Environments:
Nature, Culture and Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010), and
Crime and Empire: Representing India in the Nineteenth-Century (2003).
Afonso Dias Ramos is an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum
Transregionale Studien (2018–2019) in Berlin, Germany, affiliated with
the Freie Universität Berlin. He is investigating ongoing controversies
around colonial-era monuments and artworks worldwide. He received his
PhD in History of Art from University College London. He has previ-
ously studied at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Université
Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is the co-editor of Photography in Portuguese
Colonial Africa (2019). His articles have been published in journals
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
such as New Global Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Object,

Lobby, The Burlington Magazine, and Oxford Art Journal.
Katrin Sieg is Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for
German and European Studies at Georgetown University where she is also
affiliated with the Department of German. She is the author of three
monographs on German and European theater, performance, cin-
ema, and popular culture. In addition, she has written articles in the
areas of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies. She is com-
pleting Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum,
forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. Her book Ethnic
Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002) won
two prizes in theater studies.
Susan Slyomovics is a distinguished professor in the Departments of
Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University
of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include The Merchant of Art:
An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988); The Object of Memory:
Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); The Walled Arab
City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the
Maghrib (editor, 2001); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco
(2005); Clifford Geertz in Morocco (editor, 2010); and How to Accept
German Reparations (2014). Her research project is on the fates of French
colonial statues and monuments in Algeria.
Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and Chair of the
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He is also “European Affairs
Commentator” for CNN. He is the author and editor of books, as well as
journals, on African and European culture, globalization, history, and
politics, including Black France (2007), Museums in Postcolonial Europe
(2010), La France noire (2011), Francophone Sub- Saharan African
Literature in Global Contexts (2011), Africa and France (2013), Racial
Advocacy in France (2013), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution
(2014), Francophone Afropean Literatures (2014), Afroeuropean
Cartographies (2014), The Invention of Race (2014), The Charlie Hebdo
Events and Their Aftermath (2016), Vers la guerre des identités (Towards
the War of Identities, 2016), The Colonial Legacy in France (2017), Global
France, Global French (2017), Sexe, race et colonies (2018), and Visualizing
Empire (2020). He edits the Global African Voices series at Indiana
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
University Press, which focuses on translations of African literature into

English. He has also translated works by Aimé Césaire, Sony Labou Tansi,
Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Abdourahman Waberi. He
was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2015. He has held fellowships,
residencies, and visiting professorships in Australia, France, Germany,
Mali, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 2.1 Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936) 55
Fig. 2.2 Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009) 56
Fig. 2.3 Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012) 58
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Youcef Zighoud, original sepia-toned, date unknown
(Wikipedia Commons) 73
Fig. 3.2 Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in
Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia,
personal archives of Ahmed Benyahia) 74
Fig. 3.3 The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria Caption:
“Coq de la Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa
1957, no. 105, author’s collection) 76
Fig. 3.4 Emptied plinth of the French war memorial
(Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission
of Ahmed Benyahia) 86
Fig. 3.5 Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery,
February 2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced
by permission of Ahmed Benyahia) 87
Fig. 5.1 Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by
Nirveda Alleck) 119
Fig. 9.1 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 234
Fig. 9.2 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 235
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
Action! On Reframing Postcolonial Patrimony
David D. Kim
…the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something

anew, that is, of acting.
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Arendt 1958, p. 9)
...the traditional material is transformed to fit a prevailing new
situation, or hitherto unnoticed or neglected potentialities inherent in that
material are discovered in the course of developing new patterns of action.
—Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations
(Mannheim 1952, p. 295)
Which understanding of our postcolonial patrimony is calling us to

action now?
At first glance, there appears to be an endless number of possible
answers to this momentous question, not least because it presupposes a
globally dispersed, heterogeneous “we” in solidarity. A straightforward
reply is also confounded because of the polarizing dispute that has arisen
D. D. Kim (*)
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s) 2021 1

D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_1
2 D. D. KIM
in the field between Marxist “revolutionary” thinkers and poststructuralist

“revisionary” theorists (Huggan 2013). For these reasons alone, singling
out one received legacy on which our rich body of scholarships and their
responses to the world might converge seems impossible. And yet, a cer-
tain horizon of expectations and aspirations may be discernible after all,
one that distinguishes a critical renewal of tradition from a mere contesta-
tion of the old on some untrodden territory. Reframing Postcolonial
Studies has originated in a collective action to examine this prospect, as we
bear the weight of our intellectual inheritance at the onset of another piv-
otal decade for the future of common humanity.
Except for anthropological investigations and multidirectional intersec-
tions between Holocaust memory and decolonization, the matter of pat-
rimony has figured only peripherally in postcolonial studies. However, the
time is now to concentrate on this topic because it runs through the latest
major rearrangements of the field. Several developments account for this
sea change. With the natural progression of time, there is an allegedly self-
evident reason in various parts of the world for bringing the process of
postcolonial detachment to an end once and for all. With the biological
succession of generations, various affective and ideological attachments to
the heritage of imperialism are being broken, destabilized, or reformed
not necessarily for the better. At the same time, a new generation of post-
colonial artists, writers, thinkers, and activists has come of age, contesting
such self-centered claims and differentiating itself from formative prede-
cessors—the ones credited with decolonization and, thereafter, with the
establishment of postcolonial studies—with a critical consciousness of
inheritance and legacy. What is reframing postcolonial studies today stems
from the conflict and solidarity in this acute “non-simultaneity”
(Ungleichzeitigkeit), as several generations respond similarly, differently,
and relationally to colonial fantasies and postcolonial resurrections (Bloch
1962, p. 104).1
Given the international and multidisciplinary scope of the field, it is
essential to understand to what extent this dynamic process mounts a
response to the most pressing concerns in the world, including racism,
sexism, nationalism, public health, inheritance, war, and sustainability. The
main task involves challenging the times, as they are dictated by oppressive
cultural, economic, political, and religious forces, and engendering alter-
native linkages of past, present, and future. Such transformative action is
only possible when scholars, teachers, students, activists, artists, writers,
and filmmakers recalibrate their vocabularies, which have been important
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 3
for the field, in light of the latest postcolonial struggles. For this “concept-
work” to be effective, they need to be invested in methodological innova-
tion and open up postcolonial criticism to incisive political activism (Stoler
2016, p. 17). Without such critical and creative coordination, postcolonial
inheritance would survive mostly as a self-absorbed academic discipline
without much worldly impact. That is the reason why this volume seeks to
close the loop by taking a fresh look at the three parts of contemporary
postcolonial studies: living concepts, cross-disciplinary methodologies,
and bold intersections of scholarship and activism. The following investi-
gations examine how they have recently changed through individual and
cooperative efforts to decolonize museums and public spaces marked by
colonial signposts, to cultivate community organization and transversal
affinity in times of political, ecological, and pandemic crises, and to redress
questions of reconciliation, reparation, repatriation, or retribution in pur-
suit of “a truly universal humanism” (Shih 2008, p. 1361).
To be sure, the force of “reconstructive intellectual labor” has been
transforming the field since the very beginning (Gilroy 1993, p. 45).2
With gripping references to Négritude intellectuals, other African, African
American, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and Caribbean writers, as well as
West European thinkers, the first generation of critics gave rise during the
1980s and early 1990s to postcolonial theory, which changed the aca-
demic landscape primarily in anglophone countries.3 The impetus behind
a second, more global postcolonial wave a decade later was again this inde-
fatigable sense of self-reflexivity, as more and more academics and activists,
discontent with “Europe” as “the sovereign, theoretical subject of all his-
tories,” shifted their focus from conceptual dichotomies, political imposi-
tions, and literary analyses to ambivalent translations, subversive
displacements, and material reconsiderations (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 1).4
After the field had become established first in departments of English, his-
tory, and comparative literature at North American, British, Indian, and
Australian universities, this subsequent wave reshuffled the field beyond its
concentric constellation by applying conceptual, methodological, and his-
torical findings to other cultural, disciplinary, linguistic, and national con-
texts, and by interrogating theoretical formulations with historical inquiries
into different places of alterity. In addition to scrutinizing analytic terms
whose “insight” was not deemed to travel “well across adjacent disciplines
and scholarly fields,” scholars, students, artists, and activists worked more
deliberately on non-Western, Indigenous, early modern, and minor
European ways of knowing (Scott 2005, p. 389). Their collective action,
4 D. D. KIM
enhanced by professional organizations, libraries, and other university-led

initiatives, interrogated “canonical knowledge systems”—even those
within the relatively young field—and fruitful results came directly from
far-reaching exchanges across “disciplinary boundaries and geographical
enclosures” between literary scholars, historians, and colleagues in neigh-
boring areas of study such as anthropology, geography, sociology, art his-
tory, gender, film, translation, performance and Holocaust studies, and,
more recently, international human rights, as well as environmental, digi-
tal, and urban humanities (Gandhi 1998, p. 42; Prakash 1995, p. 12).5
Roughly four decades in the making, then, the vibrant character and
diversity of postcolonial studies have been energized by a tireless spirit of
“reenactment” (Prakash 1995, p. 11). This reconstructive dynamism has
been instrumental in posing a strong opposition to skeptics who believe
that to live well in postmodernity is to bid farewell to postcolonial remains.6
With incisive investigations of archival conventions, governmental records,
photographs, paintings, films, maps, performances, memoires, travel-
ogues, letters, oral traditions, digital databases, and literary narratives,
postcolonial critics have kept their original spirit alive by revealing “inter-
related histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice,” as well
as “the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach” beyond the
transitional period of independence, especially in the lives of women and
children, victims of war, racialized ethnic minorities, people with disabili-
ties, and working-class families (Young 2012, p. 20). Alarmed by “the
duress” with which imperial formations continue to accrue in postmoder-
nity, they reaffirm arguably the most foundational lesson in postcolonial
studies that the post in postcolonial is irreducible to a temporal marker
(Stoler 2016, p. 7).7 Having identified earlier blind spots in anglocentric
literary and historical approaches to colonialism, contemporary postcolo-
nial projects illuminate how heterogeneous and interconnected illiberal
democracies are at an international scale, and why these unequal societal
structures are built upon the ruins of past imperial regimes.8
More recently, this work has engaged a new generation of critics, art-
ists, and activists who draw upon the trailblazing oeuvres of anticolonial-
ism, the political imaginaries of the Bandung period, and later postcolonial
criticisms to reshape the world in tune with their own anxiety, courage,
hope, curiosity, enthusiasm, and grievance. They are exemplifying what
Hannah Arendt calls “action.” She argues that this capacity, which comes
with the status of being “newcomers and beginners,” is inherent to each
generation and connotes both the right and the ability “to take an
initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and
eventually ‘to rule,’ indicates), to set something into motion (which is the
original meaning of the Latin agere)” (Arendt 1958, p. 177).9 Although
Arendt falls short of specifying how this beginning owes itself to what
precedes it, it is useful here for conceptualizing how the lessons of past
colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial activities are being reframed in cur-
rently transformative debates and community-based organizations. A
combination of old and new action works up and down generational lines
to revitalize resilient, forward-looking initiatives in reparative justice.
Reframing Postcolonial Studies consists of carefully selected case studies
that shed light on this action. Written by scholars of different generations,
the eleven chapters show how, under contemporary historical conditions,
preceding models of creativity, scholarship, and activism offer indispens-
able points of orientation as well as frustrating limits. They interrogate
how current intellectual endeavors are informed by individual and
community-based actions outside of the academy and they demonstrate to
what extent conceptual, methodological, and activist concerns are pivotal
for contemporary postcolonial interventions. As far as I know, Reframing
Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in
such explicitly intergenerational, future-oriented terms.10 The tripartite
organization of this volume is applicable to any scholarly topic or academic
discipline, so long it seeks to intervene in the world, but as the contribu-
tors make clear in their individual and mutually resonating case studies,
conceptual vigilance, methodological deliberation, and scholarly activism
acquire new strengths when different generations come together to reflect
on their conjoined inheritance and legacy and take action in pursuit of a
more reassuring future. Instead of being content with the truism that
every generation wrestles with its inheritance and heritage, this compen-
dium illuminates without trying to be comprehensive how foundational
concepts, hybrid methodologies, and scholarly activisms are subjected to
renewed scrutiny in the latest communication between postcolonial
scholar-citizens.
Postcolonial Patriarchy, Inclusive Patrimony

Perhaps it is best to explain at this point the motivation behind the follow-
ing collaborative undertaking, as well as the value of its tripartite organiza-
tion. Several experiences and inspirations come to my mind, but one of
them stands out above all else because it hits closest to home, so to speak.
6 D. D. KIM
In the summer of 2019, my home institution—the University of California,

Los Angeles—celebrated its centennial and the rhetoric of honoring its
past accomplishments, both communal and academic, with the call for
charting an even bolder future during the next 100 years was pervasive on
campus. It was during this period of mostly self-congratulatory festivities
that the Fowler Museum, affiliated with the university, showcased a very
different example of what it meant to look back in order to move forward.
The museum was dedicated to exploring “global arts and cultures with
emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas” and,
during these hot dry months typical for southern California, it exhibited a
tripartite installation, titled Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa
(Fowler Museum 2020). One of the three artworks was called We Live in
Silence and it projected onto a large wall screen a 37-minute-long series of
seven “chapters” where mostly black actresses portrayed different stages of
modern African history (We Live in Silence n.d.).
Visitors were asked to sit down in a completely dark room on one of
two wooden benches whose tilted orientation toward the screen seemed
to transform the cinematic production into a church-like catacomb.
Indeed, what unfolded before their eyes was hardly reassuring. It was full
of contradictions, as things familiar and foreign, historical and fabricated,
grotesque and peaceful, religious and secular commingled, thereby refract-
ing the direction of what was commonly known about Africa’s moderniza-
tion or “development” and what European Enlightenment had prophesied
about modernity (Spivak 2018). Much of this estrangement in Bertolt
Brecht’s sense of Verfremdungseffekt came from the lead character—a
young black woman—who occasionally looked into the camera and
directly addressed the audience. The video captured her radical transfor-
mation, beginning with her violent, rape-like subjugation to white colo-
nial rule and Christianity (see Fig. 1.1), and ending with her splendid
coronation in an independent nation, as the rest of society was falling
apart (see Fig. 1.2).
The final chapter showed in slow motion how the black protagonist—
now a suit-wearing man—sat like an apathetic, narcissistic despot on a
throne in the middle of a long dining table, while young women dressed
in elegant black or white clothes were joining him in the festivity. They
were celebrating the beginning of a new political era. In the foreground,
though, the scene could not be any more different: a car was burning
upside down; a fanatic black pastor was blessing a small congregation of
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
believers in a voodoo-like ritual; a black man with a gun in hand chased

someone else across the screen; and a white policeman with a German
shepherd on a leash charged another group of young black men. Those on
top did not register at all what was unraveling right before their eyes.
8 D. D. KIM
As the title of this video installation indicated, silence was determined

to be the root of societal problems in Africa, a root nourished by colonial
rule and Methodist evangelism. According to the protagonist, silence was
an abiding feature of modern African subjectivity because “whitewashing”
technologies originally in the service of colonial power exerted their spell-
binding power over those now living under the aegis of capitalist “devel-
opment.” Even with decolonization, Africans had not escaped police
brutality, religious indoctrination, economic exploitation, and gun vio-
lence because the black oligarchy in power continued to use these tools in
order to oppress them. As Neil Lazarus observed in reference not just to
sub-Saharan Africa, but to the non-Western postcolonial world at large,
this situation was illustrative of “leaders and ruling elites” who “came to
identify their own maintenance in power as being of greater importance
than the broader ‘social’ goods of democratization, opportunity and
equality, and they increasingly used the repressive apparatuses and tech-
nologies of the state (often inherited from the colonial order) to enforce
order and to silence or eliminate opposition” (Lazarus 2006, p. 12).
Consequently, speaking freely in the public sphere or participating equally
in society remained unattainable for the demos. Although the political
ruler or the religious guardian was one of them, so to speak, little had
changed in the larger deep-rooted belief—the product of long-standing
forced assimilation to white colonial rule—that both the authority and the
capacity to rule over others belonged to only one man at the head of a
self-appointed, selectively Westernized elite. As Octave Mannoni had put
it in Prospero and Caliban, this sort of “personality” as “the sum total of
beliefs, habits, and propensities” mimicked the colonizer’s psychology
instead of challenging inherited assumptions about the superiority of
European civilization or about African inferiority (Mannoni 1990, p. 25).
Of course, the depiction of an unchangingly repressive postcolonial
Africa is not rare in Western public discourse (Naipaul 2010). Both neo-
liberal and neoconservative thinkers revert to dystopian descriptors to
condemn non-Western liberation movements for having gone astray from
their original mobilizing desires for freedom, rule of law, democracy, and
sovereignty. Upholding Manichean oppositions that are constitutive of
imperialisms past and present, their steady stream of analyses resurrects
sweeping liberal principles—concepts of a strictly Western progressive and
positivist order—to explain why Africans have failed to seize their moment
of political awakening notwithstanding the departure of European colo-
nizers from their land.11 It brings to mind Kant’s iconic formulation of
Enlightenment by asserting that their fault lies in being unmündig—hav-

ing no voice, being unemancipated—out of fear or due to laziness to come
to political consciousness.12 Needless to say, postcolonial inquiries into
these conditions have revealed how misguided such a line of argument is
concerning those haunted by the specters of imperialism. Since the 1970s,
the privatization of social services, the displacement of rural populations
to urban shanty towns, the gentrification of metropolitan neighborhoods,
the extraction of natural resources without sustainable practices or robust
laws, and the passing of anti-regulatory policies have all contributed to
expanding uneven political structures and exploitative economic practices
in the former colonies. After 9/11 and the Great Recession, and with
Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States as a symptom of white
nationalist protectionism on the rise at a global scale, these developments
are emblematic of post-Cold War neoconservative American and European
foreign policies in utter disarray. Not surprisingly, Kudzanai Chiurai’s
video installation refuted their validity by showing that Africans could not
be blamed alone for their apolitical, non-democratic silence; nor did it
convey Africa as a conflict-ridden place where there was no more hope for
a different future. The key lay in a radical reconceptualization of postcolo-
nial patrimony critical of colonial patriarchy. Since women’s experiences
had repeatedly been excised from political life in this part of the world,
Chiurai placed them at the center of his artwork, leaving all other condi-
tions the same. So how exactly did he do it? What did his installation do
to take up again the problem of gender inequality in the postcolony?
Few contemporary African artists and activists orient themselves
expressly around scholarly debates in postcolonial studies, but in this case
scholarship, artistic creation, and activism genuinely go hand in hand. In
fact, the decisive factor here is action in Arendt’s sense of intergenerational
renewal. Chiurai, the artist, was born in 1981 roughly a year after
Zimbabwe’s independence. He belongs to the first generation of
Zimbabwean citizens who have no first-person experience with colonial
rule or anticolonial resistance. His familiarity with corruption, exile, cen-
sorship, disenfranchisement, and poverty is linked to a broader, transna-
tional order of black differential citizenship and resonates across time and
space with Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic phrase in the 1963 “Letter
from Birmingham Jail” that victims of racial discrimination “are caught in
an inescapable mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (King Jr.
2020). Therefore, an exacting assessment of Chiurai’s artwork requires
that we consider how this generational perspective figures as a new
10 D. D. KIM
variable in ongoing postcolonial action. To put it differently, We Live in

Silence is a reminder of Wole Soyinka’s observation during the late 1990s
that “it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must
continue to rest,” since there is “never” a way of weighing “evenly” all the
different responses to colonial violence and its aftermath (Soyinka 1999,
p. viii). Every postcolonial generation needs to confront the task of deal-
ing with the colonial present without easy recourse to a predetermined
practice of forgiveness, indemnity, reparation, or remembrance. We Live in
Silence is a bold and creative example of such action.
I would like to point out that this installation highlighted cultural, reli-
gious, political, and economic entanglements between “Africa” and
“Europe.” Signs of religious syncretism, linguistic translation, political
continuity, and cultural adoption were seen everywhere in the video. It
also made a convincing case for linking the violence under white colonial
rule to the chaos in a “whitewashed” postcolony. Still, none of these fea-
tures was really what made Chiurai’s work so innovative. Its most striking
aspect was imagining an African nation, however morally conflicted or
politically injurious it was, where women—not men—played decisive roles
in the country’s complicated history. By fabricating a class of wealthy,
emancipated, and powerful women on top of society, it showed how they
profited—like so many politicians in post-independence Africa—from
postcolonial inequities. This representation was not simply a rehearsal of a
major chord in postcolonial studies. By employing a Xhosa woman whose
violent rise to power reminded viewers uncannily of an authoritarian leader
such as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, We Live in Silence played familiar
notes in an empowering minor key. It reactivated a utopian sensibility of
what postcolonial patrimony could mean if women held leading positions
in society.13 It dared to ask questions that were considered impossible,
unrealistic, or irresponsible based on the norms of past national liberation-
ist ideologies or according to contemporary globalists and imperialists.
Would a postcolonial nation like Zimbabwe have followed the same his-
torical trajectory—from colonial oppression to independence and back to
neocolonialism—if a woman had been in power? How did Chiurai’s alle-
gory criticize contemporary life in Africa as a continuous ordeal in silence
and as an extension of patriarchal slavery? And what was the enduring
linkage it presented between violent sexual fantasies and colonial tropes?
What could visitors learn from engaging in this speculative exercise? Last
but not least, how did the installation contest what visitors commonly
encountered in museums of anthropology, art, and ethnology across
Western Europe and North America? To what extent did it overcome the
flawed process of curatorial censorship all too often carried out in the
name of postcolonial reconciliation or liberal democratic civility?
I do not want to dwell much longer on this case study, but in order to
drive home the overarching framework of the volume, it seems instructive
to compare Chiurai’s action with a fitting example from the preceding
generation. Such a comparison underscores how a younger generation
reframes what has been examined before in conceptual, methodological,
and activist terms. It also demonstrates why the contemporary world in its
cultural, environmental, economic, or political specificity is impossible to
understand without a deep postcolonial reference. These issues will be
examined closely in the following chapters.
First, the comparison. In the essay titled “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls
of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” and published in 1992, Anne McClintock
famously took issue with the term “post-colonial” and its cognates, shortly
after the field had established itself in the US academy. Her critique
focused on three conceptual coordinates—time, space, and gender—and
their inextricable connections in postcolonial studies, but she began by
observing that “the term ‘post-colonialism’” was profoundly Eurocentric
because it consigned in a sequential manner “the cultures of peoples
beyond colonialism to prepositional time,” namely the post in postcolo-
nialism (McClintock 1992, pp. 85, 86). The distinct temporality of a non-
European community was defined again in relation to, and in succession
of, European colonial history, although there was so much knowledge,
history, and experience preceding and following the colonial period. The
term “post-colonialism” set up another false “binary opposition”
(McClintock 1992, p. 85). In other words, to divide “the colonial” and
“the post-colonial” in this grammatological way was to blur the necessary
differentiation between colonizer and colonized, and between those who
benefited from colonial rule and those who were its lasting victims. These
two conceptual simplifications, McClintock argued, led to the wrong
impression that the “post-colonial” somehow captured the “multiplicity”
of historical conditions under which different countries around the globe
were struggling to deal with their colonial past, but in actuality their
responses varied widely from one polity to another: from ambivalence,
denial, and silence to naiveté, resistance, and shame (McClintock 1992,
p. 86). Such divergent attitudes could not be reduced to a single tempo-
ral prefix.
12 D. D. KIM
McClintock went on to say that the same criticism held true for the
term “de-colonization” and she singled out Zimbabwe among several for-
merly colonized countries (McClintock 1992, p. 88). She wrote:
In Zimbabwe, after a seven-year civil war of such ferocity that at the height
of the war 500 people were killed every month and 40 per cent of the coun-
try’s budget was spent on the military, the Lancaster House Agreement
choreographed by Britain in 1979 ensured that one third of Zimbabwe’s
arable land (12 million hectares) was to remain in white hands, a minute
fraction of the population. In other words, while Zimbabwe gained formal
political independence in 1980 (holding the chair of the 103-nation Non-
Aligned Movement from 1986–1989), it has, economically, undergone only
partial decolonization. (McClintock 1992, pp. 88–89)
Here, McClintock condensed into one single paragraph a great deal of

historical information about armed struggles in Rhodesia during the
1960s, followed in 1980 by the democratic election of an independent
government under Mugabe’s political leadership and the subsequent
founding of the Republic of Zimbabwe. And when referring to the
Lancaster House conference, she alluded to the fact that, in order to gain
political independence, the newly founded state had agreed to a drastically
uneven distribution of land between the white minority and the black
majority.14 Thus, Zimbabwe was a postcolonial country where the legacy of
Rhodesia’s racist administrative structure was well alive. This explained
again why McClintock also omitted the hyphen in the word “decoloniza-
tion.” In addition to blurring any strict temporal division between colo-
nialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism, she took issue with the
possibility of clearly differentiating perpetrators from victims within this
vexing context, as newly elected political leaders were complicit in preserv-
ing colonial structures and practices in postcolonialism.
Last but not least, McClintock registered how past colonial violence
had transmogrified into a new “global militarization of masculinity”
(McClintock 1992, p. 92). On the international stage, she identified her
own government—the United States—as a major post-Cold War culprit in
this “military gangsterism” (McClintock 1992, p. 94). At the same time,
she accused “the national bourgeoisies and kleptocracies” in formerly col-
onized nations of denying women hope and justice (McClintock 1992,
p. 92). These elites, she wrote, invoked “‘post-colonial’ ‘progress’” and
“industrial ‘modernization’” to conceal the violence of their own power
partly grounded in the preservation of gender inequality (McClintock

1992, p. 92). She concluded that this was the reason why she remained
skeptical of hopeful proclamations, whether they adopted the rhetoric of
anti-imperial resistance against economic globalization or the triumphalist
language of post-1989 neoconservative liberalism.
Nearly three decades separate McClintock’s essay from Chiurai’s instal-
lation, but her insights into gender inequality and multitemporality remain
as timely as ever. Nonetheless, the inversion of gender hierarchy in We Live
in Silence condemns the continuing history of sexual violence in Zimbabwe
from a resolutely contemporary perspective. Chiurai’s action calls atten-
tion to the vexing conjunction between patriarchy and patrimony by
denouncing—without being cruel toward the elders who have themselves
suffered horrendously from colonial oppression and religious indoctrina-
tion and, thereafter, in anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-
building—the ongoing violence against women’s body and spirit. While
acknowledging non-economistic things, which Pierre Bourdieu associates
with “intergenerational relations” such as “debt,” “recognition,” “a feel-
ing of obligation,” “gratitude,” “filial devotion,” and “love,” Chiurai’s
audacious negotiation construes a simultaneously critical and hopeful
space for speculating on an equitable future (Bourdieu 1998, p. 190).
There is a lot more to be said about the other chapters in We Live in
Silence where viewers find subtle references to Macaulay’s infamous
“Minute Upon Indian Education” (1835), the French-language film Soleil
Ô (Oh, Sun 1967) produced by Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, and
the mourning of a naked, lifeless matriarch against the backdrop of
Warazulwa ngenxa yami, a South African Wesleyan Methodist hymn in
isiXhosa. They remind viewers of Chiurai’s main goal, which is reframing
what counts as tradition from the latest feminist perspective. To put it
more bluntly, the recognition that colonial violence is not eradicated from
a postcolony is hardly new; it is a basic lesson that spans generations.
Accordingly, Achille Mbembe observes that every postcolony’s “age” is “a
combination of several temporalities”: precolonial, colonial, and postcolo-
nial (Mbembe 2001, p. 15). It is against this multitemporal backdrop that
Chiurai’s installation advances the debate on the postcolonial by inventing
the story of a Western-educated Xhosa woman whose violent and exploit-
ative rise to power deviates from history and her fictitious story disrupts
the dominant, progressive, male-centric narrative regarding the previous
generation’s sacrifice for national independence. On the basis of this criti-
cal gendered intervention, viewers feel challenged to raise questions about
14 D. D. KIM
historical guilt, social inequality, and political responsibility, especially with

a view to women as victims of white colonial rule and black postcolonial
patriarchy, and—not to forget—as bearers of this oppressive patrimony.
Such a potentially explosive critique emerges from the audacious position
that calling out older generations for failing to live up to their promise is
necessary for proposing a different African utopia where action lies in the
hands of women now.
At a technical level, the installation demonstrates action by reimagining
the history of Africa’s citizenry within the context of an anthropological
museum. By intermixing classificatory genres such as film, performance,
music, and photography, it transgresses the age-old “encyclopedic,” “cos-
mopolitan” rule that a chronological display of possibly looted objects,
along with black-and-white photographs, suffices as an authentic, impar-
tial, and “reasoned” form of museum curation in the twenty-first century
(Cuno 2011, pp. 102, 104). It exposes past imperial practices by which
cultural artifacts, visual documents, or even human remains have arrived in
Western institutions. It clarifies for viewers why a reconciliatory, pluralist
approach to the curatorial presentation or the archival preservation of
non-Western art is neither critical nor sufficient in the contemporary post-
colonial world. We Live in Silence sets the modern history of Africa back in
motion by carrying the postcolonial legacy forward on the basis of three
etymologically related terms: gender, generation, and genre.
Now what about its installation within the walls of an American univer-
sity? The issue of legacy has lately boiled over in all parts of the globe, not
least in the United States where corrupt college admission decisions,
Confederate memorials, monuments and statues, as well as political move-
ments such as #BlackLivesMatter, #NoDAPL, #MeToo, and Occupy Wall
Street have heightened people’s sensibility of what counts as public good,
what qualifies for shared inheritance, and why there persists an unmet
need for reparative justice. My institution has not been immune to these
soul-searching conversations, since it sits as a public land-grant institution
on a land that originally belongs to the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva
peoples. Its institutional history is inextricably linked to the pain of settler
colonialism and Christian proselytism among Native Americans.15 In rec-
ognition of this historical trauma, the Fowler Museum moved in the right
direction by curating Chiurai’s installation as a vehicle of decolonial trans-
formation in North American higher education.16 No longer committed
to the idea that museums were sites of a distinctly art historical or anthro-
pological exhibition, it emphasized the need to involve all of the visitors’
senses and reconceptualize non-Western works of art as things that were

both alive and communicating, not inert and disjoined from their places of
origin. According to Jane Chin Davidson, this significant shift in the
museum’s mission entailed a growing public duty wherein the university
museum diverged “from the Western convention” in separating art and
art history from archeology and anthropology (Davidson 2018, p. 3). It
focused on “global art” as opposed to “world art,” knowing full well that
many “ethnographical artifacts” in Western archives and museums had
been acquired under varying legal, illegal, and extralegal conditions
(Davidson 2018, p. 3). The museum also learned to exercise “an impor-
tant self-reflexive scholarly agency through constant evaluation of the pro-
cesses for representing cultures and for modes of cultural analysis” instead
of taking upon itself the whitewashing role of a universal institution
(Davidson 2018, p. 3). It fostered cross-disciplinary conversations about
locally specific classifications and definitions while pointing to false univer-
salist assumptions about identity, history, temporality, art, space, and heri-
tage. In resonance with McClintock’s concern some three decades before,
the Fowler Museum refused to represent Africa and its many notions of
inheritance as things stuck in the past. By exhibiting We Live in Silence, it
took responsibility within a larger university community in the United
States for decolonizing minds.17
Regenerating the Future of Postcolonial Studies

This case study exemplifies what is at stake in the following pages. It shows
that the latest transformative activities in postcolonial studies address con-
ceptual issues, interdisciplinary methodologies, and activist concerns—
things that have long preoccupied scholars, teachers, and practitioners in
the field. Yet, these modalities are being woven together on the current
intergenerational playing field in response to contemporary struggles
against dispossession, discrimination, displacement, and degradation.
Building upon existing concepts, methodological breakthroughs, and
imaginative coalitions, the subsequent chapters address abiding questions
about archive, memory, cultural inheritance, historical legacy, political
responsibility, and reparative action. Going beyond the perennial debates
on the tension between theory and praxis or on the disparity between
activism and scholarship, they examine literary texts, visual artworks, lan-
guage and immigration policies, public monuments, museum exhibitions,
moral dilemmas, and political movements to revitalize our postcolonial
16 D. D. KIM
action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimenta-

tion, and scholarly activism. More specifically, they push the limits of post-
colonial critique in three coordinated ways: first, through a meticulous
reconceptualization of long-standing key terminologies in the intersection
of past, present, and future; second, in cross-disciplinary, collaborative
methodologies, which serve to uncover colonial remains in contemporary
politics and society from layers of occluding debris; and third, in a combi-
nation of community-based, bottom-up engagement with political activ-
ism and critical scholarship. Rather than offer brand-new paradigms, these
nuanced reorientations model without trying to be exhaustive how post-
colonial studies are being pursued nowadays by several generations in con-
versation with one another, and how their individual and collective actions
are confronting effectively economic dispossession, political disenfran-
chisement, racism, sexism, nationalism, ecological exploitation, and his-
torical aphasia in global modernity.
The following list of queries is indicative of action in this collaborative,
intergenerational sense. What is the location of utopian thought in post-
colonial criticism? What potential does a postcolonially inflected utopia-
nism hold today? How does it connect memories of historical trauma or
anticolonial resistance to transformative visions of the future (Chap. 2)?
How does one go about assessing Algeria’s contemporary efforts in decol-
onizing public spaces with statues whose provenance reveals as much
about French colonial rule as it does about post-independence national-
ism? Which cultural and political concepts are at stake here (Chap. 3)? Or
why is a younger generation of intellectuals and writers challenging fran-
cophonie now? To what extent is this concept in need of revaluation given
its appropriation by the ruling class in France? What is required to ensure
that francophonie does not mark a superficial and reconciliatory future
mediated by the French language and dominated by the French nation
(Chap. 4)? And how do transnational writers from the Caribbean and
Mascarene islands help us imagine relationships of a minor-to-minor,
transoceanic solidarity as opposed to a continentally or territorially
grounded alliance (Chap. 5)? What insights are shareable between postco-
lonial studies and energy humanities? What conceptual benefits and meth-
odological innovations come from their emerging alliance (Chap. 6)?
What conventions and taboos rule contemporary decolonial protests and
why are visual representations so central to these controversies (Chap. 7)?
Or what sort of outreach in solidarity is possible between scholars and
activists in the aftermath of a colonial genocide? How do communal
demands for reparation, scholarly investigations, and private friendships

work side by side in such a bonding (Chap. 8)? And what hopeful inter-
ventions have recently occurred in European museums as allies of action-
based postcolonial research? How have activists put pressure on these
monumental institutions and their long-standing archival practices?18 To
what extent are such activisms supportive of larger struggles against
nationalism, racism, and xenophobia in Western Europe (Chap. 9)? Finally,
what is there to learn again from Frantz Fanon, as we confront anti-black
racism in the twenty-first century? How does the Black Lives Matter
movement carry his pioneering legacy forward without reaffirming his
patronizing, homophobic worldview (Chap. 10)? These questions are
possibly dizzying in their eclectic coverage of concepts, geographies, lan-
guages, histories, memories, and themes, but what the answers bring to
light as a whole is a critical engagement with postcolonial patrimony as a
matter of intergenerational reframing.
Reframing Postcolonial Studies is a book that recognizes the signifi-
cance of conceptual vigilance, methodological innovation, and action-
based research for figuring out what inventories of postcolonial thought
and practice need to be retooled for newcomers, as they search for their
own vectors of change in contemporary society. It explains how and why
past imperial categories, practices, systems, and norms survive as unfin-
ished formations in the twenty-first century and it reactivates the sort of
critical consciousness that takes up essential parts of its intellectual and
political heritage in a time-dependent intersection of present and future.
Let me tease out this process in reference to Edward Said. After the pub-
lication of Orientalism (1978), Said deliberated on the mechanism of
scholarly practice by highlighting “filiation” and “affiliation” as the two
types of relationship to one’s subject within the humanities. As he pointed
out in his introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983),
negotiating between these modes of relation was not to take issue “with
the activity of conserving the past, or with reading great literature, or with
doing serious and perhaps even utterly conservative scholarship as such”
(Said 1983, p. 22). The problem lay elsewhere, namely with “the almost
unconsciously held ideological assumption” in the humanities that “the
Eurocentric model” should continue to dictate what counted as “a natural
and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar” (Said 1983, p. 22).
Restricting itself to an “orthodox canon of literary monuments,” this
norm ruled out “everything that [was] nonhumanistic and nonliterary and
non-European” and its effect was to maintain an intellectual culture of
18 D. D. KIM
“continuity” in resemblance of “biological procreation” (Said 1983,

p. 22). According to Said, this sort of critic faithfully inherited what was
being passed down from one generation to another and reaffirmed human-
istic scholarship within a narrow, provincial, national, and Eurocentric
frame of reference. By contrast, a secular critic—a critic whose scholarly
attention was simultaneously focused on the real world—examined how
that other, naturalized, evolutionary model was only possible because
things were hidden through prejudicial disposal or intellectual theft. It
looked beautiful, coherent, and tranquil on the outside, but the purpose
of “secular criticism” was to expose precisely what had forcibly been made
invisible in a filiative manner. It dispelled the fantasy of pure humanistic
inquiries untainted by worldly concerns by investigating unequal colonial
encounters as well as hidden postcolonial intermixtures. This alternative
mode of criticism was empowering in a subversive sense. Thriving on
“affiliation,” it constituted “a sovereign methodology of system” in its
own right (Said 1983, p. 23).
As an American citizen of Palestinian origin whose grounding in com-
parative literature harkened back to Erich Auerbach’s cosmopolitan-exilic
tradition, Said understood that filiative relationships were inevitable in
academia, just as they were in every other community.19 However, he
argued that it was important to reform the humanities through affiliative
relations. I would like to think with Said that what travels up and down
the intergenerational chain and takes up the question of postcolonial pat-
rimony in pursuit of a more equitable future originates in such affiliative
relationships, even as filiative connections sometimes weigh heavily on our
shoulders. This dynamic process operates according to “a secular rhythm
at work in history” (Mannheim 1952, p. 286). As Karl Mannheim spells
out in a widely known essay on generation, it introduces a new pattern of
action to our “inventory” of thoughts and practices what is worth remem-
bering and what “is no longer useful” in the present moment (Mannheim
1952, p. 294).
This conceptual model lays a strong intellectual and political founda-
tion for this multiauthored anthology. It reframes the dominant language
of newness in postcolonial studies by thinking critically about the continu-
ously changing rhythm of generation and its impact on inheritance, hope,
and legacy in transmission. I understand that this framework is not with-
out risks. It appears to be out of sync with the larger postcolonial project
whose impulse is strongly retrospective. Since the primary objects of post-
colonial inquiry are colonial violence and its aftermath, critics and activists
alike seek to correct this protracted history by calling out past crimes
against colonial subjects and by exposing present forms of exploitation as
results of a continuing pattern in socioeconomic and political disparities
both within and between countries of the Global North and the Global
South. In such passionate demands for a different present and a better
future, both the past and the present are accorded intense reflection,
whereas the future receives far less speculative attention. The postcolonial
optic is by definition sensitive to recognition, reconciliation, repatriation,
retribution, or reparation and any hasty orientation toward the future risks
inflicting further pain on victims past and present.
Still, there are good reasons for being more deliberate about the future,
as the contemporary political situation makes this task necessary. Jini Kim
Watson and Gary Wilder touch upon this important point in The
Postcolonial Contemporary (2018). After making a persuasive argument in
support of the need to continue evaluating the present in postcolonial
terms, they describe what they see as the latest development—the “new”—
in the field. They write:
A new generation of critics and activists is increasingly interested in issues

that had already seemed to be outmoded when postcolonial studies first
entered the academy: anarchist tactics, socialist imaginaries, anti-imperial
internationalisms, and traditions of mass protest and popular resistance.
Twenty-first-century developments are also raising new concerns about the
urgency and possibilities for translocal solidarity, postnational democracy,
and planetary politics. (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, pp. 8–9)
This new generation, the co-editors suggest, can be differentiated from

the preceding one insofar as it has rediscovered the usefulness of earlier
decolonial movements for addressing contemporary cultural, financial,
ecological, and political challenges. Since no specific example is given, I
surmise that what Kim Watson and Wilder have in mind are political imag-
inaries of the Bandung period or earlier anticolonial solidarities such as the
ones in Egypt, India, China, and Korea during the heady months of
1919.20 The second part of their observation is less cryptic. When we
think of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, climate change, gender discrimina-
tion, data security, international war, migration, public health, and terror-
ism, border-crossing cooperation is essential and such an engagement
requires reframing existing postcolonial concepts and methodologies,
20 D. D. KIM
some of which have been available, as Kim Watson and Wilder point out,
since the 1970s.
I concur with this historical assessment in a broad sense, but it presents
several problems, which are difficult to ignore. All of them boil down to a
fuzzy notion of generation, which perpetuates the old-new or past-present
binary without being any more instructive about the future. Kim Watson
and Wilder spell out in optimistic terms that their focus on “the postcolo-
nial contemporary” both as “a proposition” and as “a question” probes
the nature of “relations between past, present, and future” (Kim Watson
and Wilder 2018, pp. 1–2). They explain that postcolonial violence calls
for a “new” set of critical tools with which scholars and activists are able to
interrogate past “colonial conditions of knowledge production, their
ongoing legacies in postcolonial periods, and their power to produce and
reproduce systems of inequality within and between nations, societies,
continents” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 3). However, they do not
specify how the future figures as an essentially utopian, political, moral, or
ethical category in reconsidering “conventional notions of past and pres-
ent and their relation” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 10). The future
quietly disappears from their view. I also take issue with the claim that
border-crossing, subversive concerns are what define such “new” critics
and activists in postcolonial studies. It implies that the immediately pre-
ceding generation has focused mostly on national and international issues
without paying much attention to anti-capitalist, bottom-up, democratic,
transnational movements at scales below and above the nation. That is not
the case. Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), Paul Gilroy’s The
Black Atlantic (1993), Sheng Hu’s From Opium War to the May 4th
Movement (1991), and Benita Parry’s essay “Resistance Theory/
Theorizing Resistance; or, Two Cheers for Nativism” (1994) were very
different examples of influential works that pursued during the 1990s
scholarly and community-based approaches to resistance and solidarity.
Graham Huggan is right to point out in this regard that Marxist revolu-
tionary vocabularies such as “‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘decolonization’”
have “never disappeared from the postcolonial lexicon in the first place,”
although critics such as Lazarus and Parry “want to reinstate” them
(Huggan 2013, p. 4). A more nuanced and less polemical portrayal of the
field shows that the concepts, theories, and strategies of past liberation
movements “are continually renegotiated in a complex revisionist process
that allows the relationship between past and present … to be productively
reassessed” (Huggan 2013, p. 4). Analogously, there are plenty of
scholars, students, and activists today who work very much at local and
national scales. Although there appears to be a clearly discernible trend in
one way or another, such an observation presupposes a particular habitus
within the discipline and is itself a symptom of institutional filiation.
Huggan’s elucidation leads me to my next comparison. With The
Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), Huggan has showcased
how the negotiation between revolution and revisionism informs many
contributions to contemporary postcolonial studies. Yet, this anthology,
too, pays little attention to the future. In fact, Huggan gives a few reasons
for this predisposition. He writes that the future is only subject to “predic-
tions and assessments,” which, in turn, attest to “the continuing signifi-
cance of the past” (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Most of his conceptual and
ideological emphases in the introductory chapter link the past and the
present, but the future is registered only as a “speculative or hypothetical”
template, which is ultimately impossible to decipher in scholarly verifiable
terms (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Huggan also contends that emancipatory
mobilizations are hopeful only to a limited extent. As revolutions have
repeatedly shown in modern history, they are prone to violence and war
and bring as much suffering as progress. These are certainly legitimate
concerns, but I argue that, if we are to close the loop between criticism
and activism as necessarily interlinked parts of the postcolonial, there will
need to be a bolder, sustained discussion about our continuously changing
relationship with postcolonial patrimony and our conviction to shape the
future through “anticipatory,” “world-improving” action (Bloch 1995,
pp. 11, 92). Action, hope, and resilience are exhausting frames of mind in
an era of illiberal austerity democracy, but let us be inspired, as Said sug-
gests, by the creative role we play as critics, writers, artists, and activists in
calling out all related forms of oppression and in re-envisioning a very
different postcolonial world.
I admit that, as co-editors of The Postcolonial World (2017), Jyotsna
Singh and I likewise fail to address this blind spot. This expansive collec-
tion is similar to The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies in the sense
that the main focus rests on a past-present dialectic and its potential for
“imagining a range of affective communities that re-think hierarchies of
difference,” and for “re-figuring modes of knowledge production in a
range of explorations—in the material, textual, visual, and digital worlds”
(Singh 2017, p. 26). Both volumes make clear that reconfiguring cur-
rently available modes of interpretation entails remembrance, retrospec-
tion, and reparation, but feelings and thoughts regarding the future hover
22 D. D. KIM
only vaguely in our shared postcolonial ethic. My own essay in The

Postcolonial World employs digital humanities methodologies to track how
“postcolonial scholars loosely share a common toolbox of theories and
strategies,” even as “their work looks different from one cultural, national,
geopolitical, or institutional context to another,” and I close by stating
that “the future of postcolonialism” is guaranteed by this “planetary and
public spirit,” which binds us in both filiative and affiliative terms to vari-
ous intellectual disciplines and non-academic communities (Kim 2017,
pp. 530, 542). However, I do not probe this optimism any further in
intergenerational terms.
Perhaps the most striking parallel I see between the book you are read-
ing and another is found in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History
(2019). This massive volume deserves a separate, in-depth discussion
given the wealth of conceptual issues, methodological innovations, and
activist strategies that populate its pages. Let it suffice here to examine,
without repeating her numerous case studies from the Belgian Congo,
Israel, Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, Germany, France, and the United States,
the extent to which her provocative work on archives, photographs, and
museum objects contributes to the same collective project. Azoulay’s
focus on the shutter as “a synecdoche for the operation of the imperial
enterprise altogether” resonates with our goal to see things in a reactivated
frame or with Kim Watson and Wilder’s use of the visual lexicon—“the
postcolonial optic”—in The Postcolonial Contemporary (Azoulay
2019, p. 2).
Azoulay begins her book with a biting critique of what she calls “the
banner of the ‘new’” (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). For her, “the new defines
imperialism,” since it operates “in a suicidal cycle” to innovate itself, and
this desire for continuous expansion, novelty, or progress is self-destructive
and leaves nothing but “debris” in collateral or direct damage (Azoulay
2019, pp. 17–18). Azoulay acknowledges, though, that this observation is
neither new nor of utmost importance; for what is truly needed is a way to
interrupt this dominant, incessant drumbeat: “The question is how to
rupture, stop, and retroactively reverse the category of the ‘new’ that
seems to have survived intact, coeval with the real, and how to undo its
facticity in and through research and scholarship” (Azoulay 2019, p. 23).
Such a reversal, Azoulay writes, comes from generating a potential histori-
cal narrative whereby political concepts and cultural institutions are
exposed as “imperial devices” instead of being mistaken for “neutral”
modes of containment or communication (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). The
targets of her critique include “‘archive,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and

‘human rights,’” as well as museums and universities (Azoulay 2019, p. 39).
Azoulay’s inquiry into “imperial visions of belonging and unbelong-
ing” turns out to be a very personal undertaking (Azoulay 2019, p. xiii).
It explains the value of “being with others, both living and dead, across
time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peo-
ples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics” (Azoulay
2019, p. 43). As she explains, her upbringing as a Palestinian Jew, first, in
the state of Israel and, then, in France has compelled her to “unlearn”
what she has been told about herself and the world in its divisibility
(Azoulay 2019, p. 3). Not only does her personal familial story intersect
with the displacement of Arab communities from Palestine beginning with
the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, but it also invokes
a much longer colonial history going as far back as the expulsion of Jews
from Spain in 1492 and, later, the French colonial occupation of Algeria
during the Vichy regime. Given this multilayered, conflicting inheritance,
Azoulay contends that “unlearning” has been central for her to mount a
forceful opposition to imperialism: “Unlearning imperialism involves dif-
ferent types of ‘de-,’ such as decompressing and decoding; ‘re-,’ such as
reversing and rewinding; and ‘un-,’ such as unlearning and undoing”
(Azoulay 2019, p. 10). As these prefixes indicate, her gaze is fixed firmly
on the imperial past whose stubborn power over the present calls for sev-
eral different modes of resistance. She refuses to identify herself, as she
puts it, “as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli,” since this national
identity is associated with the theft of “lands and the property of others”
(Azoulay 2019, p. xiii). It stands for what she has “inherited” as an impli-
cated subject of past colonial violence and present imperial injustice
(Azoulay 2019, p. xv). Last but not least, it encompasses her employment
at a “neoliberal American university” whose intellectual property and
material wealth are inseparable from the history of transatlantic slavery
and the systemic dispossession of ethnic minorities over generations
(Azoulay 2019, p. xv).
I am not in a position to criticize how Azoulay feels about her own
identity vis-à-vis Roger Azoulay, her father, whom she criticizes for not
embracing boldly or more openly their commonly shared Maghribi back-
ground.21 I am in awe of her far-reaching study and encourage readers to
go back and forth between her book and this volume. However, what
strikes me as an unsatisfactorily addressed object of inquiry in her work is
again the future. Like Huggan, Azoulay is skeptical of any vision
24 D. D. KIM
pertaining to this horizon, although her reasons are different from his. She
thinks that any future-oriented vocabulary is already predetermined by
“an imperial enterprise,” which equates future with “progress” (Azoulay
2019, p. 55). Since “rehearsal, reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing,
reacquiring, redistributing, readjusting, reallocating” are long overdue
processes, she conceptualizes the notion of “potential history” in strictly
retrospective, reparative terms (Azoulay 2019, p. 56). This explains why,
when she appeals to a future more in line with her vision of the world, she
resorts to the language of “imagination.”
Imagine a strike not as an attempt to improve one’s salary alone but rather
as a strike against the very raison d’être of these institutions … Imagine
experts in the world of art admitting that the entire project of artistic salva-
tion to which they pledged allegiance is insane and that it could not have
existed without exercising various forms of violence, attributing spectacular
prices to pieces that should not have been acquired in the first place.
(Azoulay 2019, pp. 159–160)
Azoulay’s distrust regarding the future makes sense alongside the duress
of imperialism she seems to sense everywhere, but neither the act of imagi-
nation in an individual protest nor the collective activism of artists, cura-
tors, and scholars within the context of a museum or in another public
sphere is as hypothetical or as radical as she portrays it to be. As my exami-
nation of Chiurai’s installation has shown, and this becomes clear time and
again in the following pages, imagining this sort of future is already here
and now. Azoulay’s intervention in the ongoing process of imperialism
polarizes the past in contradistinction from the future and this version of
potential history seems to be grounded less in historical accuracy than in
rhetorical persuasion.
Chapter Summaries
In Chapter Two, which opens the first section of the book on concepts,
Bill Ashcroft helps us reframe postcolonial studies at a conceptual level,
although the other vectors of change—methodology and activism—are
never lost from sight. He is the co-author of volumes that have established
the conceptual foundation of postcolonial studies, and here he discusses
how our interpretation of postcolonial narratives changes, once it is linked
to Ernst Bloch’s critical notion of utopia (Ashcroft 2017; Ashcroft et al.
1989; Ashcroft et al. 1998; Ashcroft et al. 2013). His essay is titled
“Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures” and it illus-
trates the prominence of future thinking in postcolonial creative produc-
tion, as well as the usefulness of utopian theory for postcolonial criticism
today. According to Ashcroft, a persistent failing in postcolonial criticism
has been the tendency to reduce resistance to a simple dynamic of opposi-
tion. By demonstrating the importance of future in postcolonial analysis,
he explains how a writer’s engagement with imperial power is potentially
transformative. While grounding himself in the long-standing aesthetic
and theoretical discourse on utopianism whose beginning is traceable to
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Ashcroft refers to Bloch’s notion of Vor-
Schein—or “anticipatory illumination”—as a means to imagine Heimat as
opposed to nation as a concrete place of sociopolitical relations. Thus,
postcolonial utopianism looks beyond the nation and its inheritance of
colonial structures. Its localization emphasizes the link between cultural
memory and varying visions of the future. It recalibrates the linearity of
time with a messier trajectory in which the cultural past is imprinted onto
an intimate and politically reactivated future. As Ashcroft claims, these
relationships are crucial for postcolonial studies because they consider the
incomplete process of decolonization even after national independence.
Although his case studies are principally literary and reflect his preference
for literature in postcolonial theory, the range of postcolonial writers he
examines across different continents and generations points to the undi-
minished role that future plays in every form of resistance to colonial rule
and post-independence injustice.
In Chapter Three, “On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed
Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture,” Susan
Slyomovics follows suit with a fascinating essay on the “statuomania” in
French Algeria. This term, she observes, originates in reference to the vast
number of statues, war memorials, and monuments in this colony begin-
ning in 1830. What she uncovers is an eye-opening historical, geopolitical,
and affective provenance between Algeria and France based on their post-
colonial afterlives. The historical backdrop against which she tracks the
history of a particular statue is “the ‘repatriation’ of cultural and historical
treasures [stolen] from French Algeria.” According to Slyomovics, this
conceptualization is misleading because it quietly condones the illegal
removal of looted objects from their places of origin. At the center of her
investigation is the 1972 statue commemorating the Algerian war hero
and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Sculpted by artist Ahmed
26 D. D. KIM
Benyahia for Algeria’s third largest city of Constantine, the statue’s cre-
ation, emplacement, disappearance, and reappearance recount multiple
efforts in post-independent Algeria to decolonize public space. Here,
research into postcolonial provenance goes beyond the physical location
of art and the question of legal ownership. It encompasses artist and object
biographies, artwork creativity, entangled or shared senses of heritage, as
well as a global circulation of aesthetic symbols in the making of monu-
ments to glorify the French and Algerian nation-states. Slyomovics pur-
sues this interdisciplinary work on the basis of a stunning video interview
of Benyahia available on YouTube and documenting Algeria’s “Generation
independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” Her study is exemplary of “a protean
archive,” which is neither clearly “bounded” nor successfully “policed,”
but consists of displacements, gaps, projections, and cross-references,
which are crucial for postcolonial research in the twenty-first century
(Stoler 2018, p. 49).
In Chapter Four, titled “Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and
Defrancophonizing Francophonie,” Dominic Thomas examines the close
association between language and identity in postcolonial France where
the past does not prove to be past after all. He begins with the astute
observation that President Emmanuel Macron belongs to the first genera-
tion of French citizens born after the end of French colonialism, and that
this historical marker has been used as an all too facile indicator for France’s
ability to move on and leave behind its colonial past. As Thomas shows,
though, there is more to the story. Language policy served historically to
bolster the nation’s overseas colonial ambitions and, in the postcolonial
era, the same action, guideline, and protocol have curiously re-emerged
under the aegis of francophonie. Now, it marks Macron’s renewed pro-
gram for “a happy future” in the relationship between France and its for-
mer colonies. In response, critics have highlighted how diplomatic soft
power initiatives continue to prioritize neocolonial ties. Critical of this
narrow conceptualization of francophonie, they are calling for a greater
bibliodiversity in reference to such a cultural, linguistic, and political con-
cept. They are collectively channeling efforts in reframing the symbiotic
linkage between French as language and France as nation. They are advo-
cating for the denationalization, defrancophonization, and decolonizing
of francophonie. This latest critical and creative activism underscores the
rigid association between national language and cultural identity in post-
colonial France. Last but not least, Thomas sheds light on a dangerous
cooptation by the Far Right of French foreign policy in public discourse.
The second section of this book is dedicated to methodological chal-

lenges, although again it makes insightful conceptual and politically acti-
vating observations. In Chapter Five, “Kinships of the Sea: Comparative
History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy,” Bruno Jean-
François explores Creole literatures, as well as expressive cultures from the
Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean region, to illustrate how they have
long thought in cross-cultural and intergenerational terms. They fore-
ground narratives of migration and displacement, which put diverse peo-
ples, cultures, and languages into close contact over extended historical
periods. They bring together trajectories and epistemologies that turn the
commonalities of minor-to-minor solidarities into the rhetoric of a new
humanism. In Jean-François’s attentive reading, the creative works of
Nathacha Appanah, Nirveda Alleck, Ananda Devi, and Patrick
Chamoiseau—all of them being transnational artists, writers, scholars, and
activists—generate powerful relational imaginaries and transoceanic con-
nections, which destabilize historical, geographical, and cultural divides, as
well as colonial imaginaries. Their figuration of the clandestine migrant is
generative of a new kind of kinship whereby comparative history, minor
solidarity, and human empathy are woven together in ways that render a
utopian future more graspable.
Chapter Six is a compelling investigation of energy as a new paradigm
for postcolonial studies in the wake of the Iraq War. Titled “Re-charge:
Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities,” it demonstrates Upamanyu
Pablo Mukherjee’s conception of oil not only as the main fuel for capitalist
modernization or global modernity, but also as a deep historical linkage
between energy, climate, and empire. So what precisely do postcolonial
studies and energy humanities have to say to each other? What cultural,
sociopolitical, historical, and economic insights are gained when we place
empire and energy side by side? What “history of a future” appears on the
horizon and how does it present a chance to break from the colonial pres-
ent? (Jameson 2003, p. 76). Given that postcolonial studies constitute a
well-established field and energy humanities an emergent one, we might
expect their relationship to be marked by wars of position or by anxieties
of influence. However, Mukherjee makes a stunning case for cross-
fertilization and cross-hatching. If postcolonial studies have been accused
of eliminating the matter of history from its purview, he explains how
energy humanities have suffered from insufficient attention to the dynam-
ics of empire. In his view, not only can a conversation help correct these
built-in perspectival lacunae of the two fields, but it can also help us
28 D. D. KIM
understand how empire and energy are intricately interconnected. Based

upon a nuanced analysis of terms that belong to conceptions of energy in
the postcolonial world, Mukherjee provides readers with a thrilling read-
ing of two literary texts on nineteenth-century colonial India: Dinabandhu
Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (1861) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-
Builders” (1898). The interdisciplinary results include new possibilities
for rethinking historical periodization, literary and non-literary alike, and
placing the concept of labor or energy back at the center of critical inqui-
ries into modern capitalist colonial empires.
Titled “From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial Dilemmas in
Visual Representation,” Chapter Seven presents another methodologically
innovative study, namely a transnational analysis of the two most contro-
versial decolonial protests in contemporary visual culture. First, Afonso
Dias Ramos turns his attention to the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign at the
University of Cape Town (2015) as an example of the demand to remove
public memorials celebrating imperialism and slavery outside of the
museum. Second, he examines the display of Dana Schutz’s painting Open
Casket (2017) at the Whitney Biennial in New York City where the right
to show historical images exposing the bodily violence of racial terrorism
and white supremacy within the museum is hotly contested. By consider-
ing these divisive debates side by side, Dias Ramos illuminates the reasons
why monuments and pictures—and more generally, aesthetic practices and
visual cultures—have emerged as the most controversial issues of public
history. He sensitizes readers to art and heritage as interlinked issues in
postcolonial meditations on the colonial past and the future.
The next three chapters, which comprise the third section of this vol-
ume, exemplify the extent to which contemporary postcolonial studies
resist confinement in scholarly institutions either safely housed in affluent
universities or in market-driven publishing houses around the globe.
Although they register gaps between postcolonial scholars and those
whose utopian action aims to bring an end to the colonial present, their
investigation shows how scholarship and activism go hand in hand, espe-
cially in the latest controversies pertaining to European museums and
other public reparative actions. What they explore are both individual
projects and collective movements, which have transformed attitudes
toward the colonial past by contesting long-standing categories, familiar
classifications, and outdated concepts. They illustrate solidary relations,
which are committed to making a difference in the afterlives of colonial
victims and the lives of their living descendants.
In Chapter Eight, Reinhart Kössler reflects on German postcolonial

relations with Namibia where researchers directly related to the former
colonial power engage with community partners to pursue postcolonial
justice. Titled “Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German
Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide”, his action-based
research examines moral, ethical, political, and intellectual problems that
arise in such an “outreach solidarity.” He draws upon his personal lifelong
interaction with members of Namibian communities, which seek recogni-
tion, apologies, and reparations from the German government for the
genocide of 1904–1908. As he makes clear, relations of trust and friend-
ship, which seemingly lie outside the purview of scholarship, serve as vital
preconditions for gaining relevant insights into this international negotia-
tion and for bridging the postcolonial gap between researchers and activ-
ists in the aftermath of this historical trauma.
With Chapter Nine, “Postcolonial Activists and European Museums,”
Katrin Sieg guides readers back to European museums where activist
interventions have succeeded in altering museum protocols, structures,
and representations regarding colonial histories. Against the backdrop of
pioneering works during the late 1980s and 1990s that reveal colonialist
practices in European collections, exhibitions, and museums, Sieg offers
the most comprehensive, up-to-date examination of decolonial interven-
tions in several museums of anthropology, ethnology, and history across
Europe. She focuses on evaluating the latest actions taken to make institu-
tional structures more inclusive and to bolster contemporary struggles
against the surge of nationalist, racist, and anti-immigrant movements and
political parties. According to Sieg, museums are not only prime targets
for contesting cherished myths of superior European accomplishments,
but also potential allies in fighting against racial injustice, historical amne-
sia, and political irresponsibility. Activists, as she demonstrates, put pres-
sure on monumental institutions to support minoritized communities
while mobilizing antiracist groups around museums as allies.
In Chapter Ten, “Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter,”
Frieda Ekotto emphasizes the critically future-oriented philosophy that
Négritude intellectuals, particularly Fanon, provide contemporary activists
in their struggle against racism and sexism. At the center of her examina-
tion is the Black Lives Matter movement. She investigates how this mobi-
lization constitutes a collective action, which builds upon one of the most
revered founders—or fathers—of postcolonial patrimony. For her, Fanon’s
seminal text Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is essential for understanding
30 D. D. KIM
the contemporary African American activism. In focusing on Fanon’s call

for an “active consciousness” coupled with an acute attention to the objec-
tification of black men, this chapter explains how we can understand better
the impact that perceptions of Blackness have on American society, as well
as the use of contemporary tools by black activists to combat pervasive
racism. Ekotto sheds light on the difficulty of Fanon’s foundational text in
its paradigmatic effort to develop a language for understanding the human
being in non-colonial, non-racist terms. At the same time, she identifies
how, in demanding black and gay rights, #BlackLivesMatter moves beyond
Fanon’s patrimony. Ekotto indicates how exclusionary, racist practices
remain stubborn legacies of colonial violence, and why established catego-
ries such as identity, rightfulness, and dignity need to be interrogated fur-
ther for the welfare of black and other marginalized communities. Her
study contributes to the ongoing significance of Fanon’s oeuvres for the
latest generation of activists and critics today, as they wrestle with the con-
dition of alienation and social injustice.22
Graham Huggan’s afterword, Chapter Eleven, concludes this book
with incisive reflections on the preceding chapters, and with measured
assessments of the challenges that are associated with connecting critique
to praxis. I feel very fortunate that he has agreed to share his deep knowl-
edge of the field in response to the action captured in this volume, not
least because his essay, which includes an instructive evaluation of action
research, is symbolic of the sort of intergenerational dynamics that I have
hoped to locate at the center of conceptual, methodological, and activist
concerns in postcolonial studies. To reframe postcolonial studies is to
exchange such critical and creative thoughts across generational
perspectives.
Notes
1. Ernst Bloch used this term during the first half of the 1930s when he drew
upon a preceding discussion among art historians and cultural critics about
the relationship between modernism and fascism in architecture to make a
contemporary political point: “Not all people exist in the same Now”
[Nicht alle sind im selben Jetzt da] (Bloch 1962, p. 104). According to
Bloch, people lived in different presents based on different combinations
of age, social class, and geographic location. The reference to Bloch here is
not coincidental because, first, his meditation focuses on a dialectical rela-
tionship between past, present, and future and, second, Bill Ashcroft uses
his notion of utopia in the next chapter to reflect on the futurity of postco-
lonial literatures.
2. According to Benita Parry, postcolonial studies originated as early as the
1970s, but given the transdisciplinary scope of the field today, this time-
frame seems to make sense only in anglocentric terms (Parry 2012, p. 348).
For a more interdisciplinary historicization of the field, see Boehmer and
Tickel (2015).
3. To clarify this thesis, let me mention the most notable names of this gen-
eration. There is the subaltern studies group consisting of Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and Sumit Sarkar. A far
more dispersed and eclectic group includes, among others, Edward Said,
Bill Ashcroft, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert J.C. Young.
4. Graham Huggan offers a detailed and critical account of these two “waves”
of postcolonial criticism, the first one covering “the period between,
roughly, the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s,” the second one following
thereafter (Huggan 2008, pp. 10–12).
5. Edward Said’s intellectual trajectory from Orientalism (1978) to Culture
and Imperialism (1993) is paradigmatic of this disciplinary shift. For
assessments of this change within the boundaries of existing disciplines
other than English and history, see Friedrichsmeyer et al. (1998) for
German studies, Kiberd (1997) for Irish studies, Mignolo (2000) for Latin
American studies, and Lionnet and Shih (2005) for East Asian, transoce-
anic, Caribbean, and South American studies. There is also a huge library
of scholarships that explore questions of comparison and incommensura-
bility. For example, see Melas (2007).
6. For the latest discussion about “the potential exhaustion” of postcolonial-
ism, see Agnani et al. (2007).
7. Ann Laura Stoler uses this term “to capture three principal features of
colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colo-
nial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their
durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements.” She asso-
ciates the word with “durability,” “duration,” and “endurance,” all of
which underscore the importance of revealing “the occluded histories of
empire” in the present moment (Stoler 2016, pp. 7, 14). Here, the histori-
cal referent is also a lively debate among postcolonial critics during the
early 1990s on the term “postcolonial” vis-à-vis “colonial” (McClintock
1992; Shohat 1992). There is no need to revisit this discussion because
detailed summaries are available in several publications (Huggan 2013,
p. 20; Kim 2017, p. 527; Young 2016, p. 57). What I wish to point out is
that, for Ann Laura Stoler, the prefix “post” similarly serves “as a mark of
skepticism rather than assume its clarity,” the reason for this doubt being
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[88] When that. 1559.
[89] For halfe a ryall. 1559, 63.
[90] We could by very arte haue made the black. 1559, 63.
[91] And matters of most wrong, to haue appered most right.
1559, 63.
[92] Most wise, may chance be too too weake. N.
[93] But may be brought to stand. 1578.
[94] Stanzas 5 and 6 added 1571.
[95] Behold me one vnfortunate amongst this flocke. N.
[96] Cal’d sometime. N.
[97] By discent a gentleman. 1559, 63.
[98] ‘And’ omitted. N.
[99] State. N.
[100] To whom frowarde fortune gaue a foule checkmate.
1559, 63.
[101] In all our common. N.
[102] What so wee. 1559, 63.
[103] We did conclude. N.
[104] Both life, death, lands, and goods. N.
[105] So great gaine we did get. 1559, 63.
[106] And sises. 1578. N.
[107] Still chiefe. N.
[108] We let hang the true man. 1559, 63.
[109] Doth neuer keepe. 1559, 63.
[110] Whiche though it haue enough yet dothe it not suffyse.
1559, 63. And more at no time doth suffise. 1578.
[111] And drinke they neuer so much, yet styl for more they
cry. 1559, 63.
[112] So couetous catchers toyle. 1559, 63.
[113] Gredy and euer needy, prollyng. 1559, 63.
[114] Fayth we did professe. 1578.
[115] Makyng a solempne oth in no poynt to dygresse. 1578.
[116] Wretches. 1559, 63.
[117]
Of the judge eternall, more high to be promoted,

To mammon more then God, all wholly were deuoted.
1578.
[118] We interpreted. 1559, 63.

[119] Like a. 1559, 63.
[120] Many one. 1559, 63.
[121] To serue kings in al pointes men must sumwhile breke
rules. 1559, 63.
[122] Ful nie. 1559, 63.
[123] To crepe into whose fauour we. 1559, 63.
[124] Auayle. 1578.
[125] Wurde. 1559, 63. Sense. 1578.
[126] Sence, 1559, 63.
[127] Of land. N.
[128] Wyll. 1578.
[129]
The king thus transcendyng the limittes of his lawe,

Not raygning but raging by youthfull insolence,
Wise and wurthy persons did fro the courte wythdraw,
There was no grace ne place for auncient prudence:
Presumpcion and pryde with excesse of expence,
Possessed the palays and pillage the countrye;
Thus all went to wracke vnlike of remedye. 1559, 63.
[130] Baronye. 1559, 63.

[131] Seing no reason. 1578.
[132] Maugre all. 1559.
[133] Maugre his princely mynde they. 1578. His kingly might.
N.
[134] All men vnchecked. 1578.
[135] Which. 1578.
[136] Regally. 1571, 78.
[137] That Richard. 1578.
[138] Order. 1578.
[139]
In whyche parliament muche thynges was proponed

Concerning the regaly and ryghtes of the crowne,
By reason kyng Richarde, whiche was to be moned,
Full lytell regardynge his honour and renowne,
By synister aduyse, had tourned all vpsodowne:
For suerty of whose estate,[143] them thought it did
behooue
His corrupt counsaylours, from hym to remooue. 1559,
1563.
[140] In the beginning of the parliament was called Robert

Veer, duke of Irelande, Alexander Neuell, archebishop of
Yorke, Mighell de la Poole, erle of Suffolk, sir Robert Tresilian,
chiefe iustice of Englande, to answere Thomas of Woodstock,
duke of Gloucester, Richard, erle of Arondel, Thomas, erle of
Derby, and Thomas erle of Nottyngham, vpon certaine articles
of high treason, which these lordes did charge them with. And
for as much as none of these appered, it was ordeyned by the
whole assent of the parliament that they shoulde be banished
for euer: and their landes and goodes, moueable and
vnmouable, to be forfeit and seased into the kinge’s hand, the
landes entayled onely except.
Shortly after this, was founde Robert Tresilian, chiefe
iustice, lurkyng in a poticarie’s house at Westmynster, and
there founde the meanes to have spyes daylie vpon the lordes
what was done in the parliament: for all the dayes of his lyfe
he was craftie, but at the last his craft turned to hys
destruction: for he was discouered by his owne seruant, and
so taken and brought to the duke of Gloucester, and the same
daye had to the Towre, and from thence drawen to Tyborne,
and there hanged.
The morow after, syr Nicholas Pembroke, which afore had
been maior of the citie of London, against the citezen’s will,
was brought foorth. Grafton.
This man (Tresilian) had disfigured himselfe, as if he had
beene a poore weake man, in a frize coat, all old and torne,
and had artificially made himselfe a long beard, such as they
called a Paris beard, and had defiled his face, to the end he
might not be knowen but by his speach. Stowe.
[141] Tharchbyshop of Yorke was also of our band, 1578.
[142] See Statutes at large, temp. Rich. II. viz. 11. c. I. II. III.
20. c. VI. and 31. c. XII. XIII.
[143] State, 1559.
[144] Judge. 1578.
[145] To dye there as. 1578.
[146] The fickle fee of fraud. 1578.
[147] Ye iudges now liuing. 1578.
[148] Fye on stynkyng lucre, of all vnryght the lure, Ye judges
and ye justicers let my most iust punicion. 1559, 63.
[149] Al pure. 1578. Still pure. N.
[150] What glory is more greater in sight of God. 1578.
[151] By the pathes of equytie. 1559, 63.
[152] And truely. 1578.
[153] Alwayes. 1559, 63.
[154] Lawes for to scan. N.
[155] Reward. 1559, 63. That justice may take place without
reward. 1578.
[156] Take. 1559, 63.
[157] The righteous. 1578. The most iust. N.
[158] Of mortals displeasure. N.
[159] Closde. 1578.
[160] Worldly hyre. 1559, 63. Way not this worldly mucke.
1578.
[161]
If som in latter dayes, had called vnto mynde,

The fatall fall of vs for wrestynge of the right,
The statutes of this land they should not haue defynde
So wylfully and wittingly agaynst the sentence quyte:
But though thei skaped paine, the faut was nothing light,
Let them that cum hereafter both that and this compare,
And waying well the ende, they will I trust beware. 1559,
63.
[162] George Ferrers. These initials first added, 1571.

[163] This. 1559, 63. 71.
[164] When finished was this tragedy. 1578.
[165] Syr Roger Mortimer, earle of March, and heyre
apparaunt of England, whose. 1578.
[166] Purposed matter. 1578.
[167] Of these great infortunes, and as they be more auncient
in tyme, so to place their seuerall plaintes. 1578.
[168] Two earles of the name of Mortimer. 1578.
[169] One hanged in. 1559, 63.
[170] In the tyme of king Edward. 1578.
[171] Another in Richard the seconde’s time, slayne in Ireland.
1578.
[172] Fauours. 1578.
[173] Personage of the earle Mortimer, called Roger, who full
of bloudye woundes. 1578.
[174] To Baldwin, in this wise. 1578.
[175] The dates added 1571—Fabian has given a summary of
the life of the second Roger Mortimer, and upon which the
poet relied, as of 1387, but the death of Mortimer happened
about 1398.
[176] On. 1578.
[177] Thred, vntimely death dyd reele. 1578.
[178] Brought from boote to extreme bale. 1578.
[179]
——the queene so much was stir’d,

As for his sake from honour she did scale. 1578.
[180] Merye gale. 1559, 63.

[181]
And whilest fortune blew on this pleasaunt gale,

Heauing him high on her triumphall arch,
By meane of her hee was made earle of March. 1578.
[182] Breded. 1559, 63.

[183] Pride folly breeds in. N.
[184] Hym, 1559, 63.
[185] For where he somwhat hauty was before. 1559, 63.
[186]
Whence pryde out sprang, as doth appeare by manye,

Whom soden hap, aduaunceth in excesse,
Among thousandes, scarse shal you fynde anye,
Which in high wealth that humor can suppresse,
As in this earle playne proofe did wel expresse:
For whereas hee too loftye was before,
His new degree hath made him now much more. 1578.
[187] Ne recks. N.
[188] Respecting none saue only the queene mother. 1578.
[189] Which moued malice to foulder. 1578.
[190] Which deepe in hate, before. 1578.
[191] Th’one as well as th’other. N.
[192] They did the earle attaynt. 1578. He was soone attaint.
N.
[193] Such crimes as hidden lay before. 1578.
[194] For hydden hate. 1578. For enuy still. N.
[195] Biddes small faultes to make more bad. 1578.
[196]
Causing the king to yelde vnto the Scot,

Townes that his father, but late afore had got. 1578.
[197] Had, wanting, in 1559, 63. N.

[198] Yeuen to the Scots for brybes and priuie gayne. 1578.
[199] That by. 1578.
[200] Most, wanting. 1559, 63, 71. N. Most cruelly. 1578.
[201] And last of all by pyllage. 1578.
[202] Had spoyld. 1578.
[203] Dampned he was. 1578.
[204] Syr Roger Mortymer was accused before the lordys of
the parlyament of these artycles with other; whereof v. I fynde
expressyd. And firste was layed vnto his charge that by his
meaneys syr Edwarde of Carnaruan, by mooste tyrannouse
deth, in the castell of Barkley, was murderyd; secondaryly, that
to the kynge’s great dyshonoure and dammage, the Scottys,
by his meanys and treason, escapyd from the kyng at the
parke on Stanhope, whiche then shuld haue fallen in the
kynge’s daunger, ne had been the fauoure by the sayde Roger
to them than shewyd; thyrdely, to hym was layed, that he, for
execucion of the sayd treason, receyued of the capytane of
the sayd Scottis, namyd syr Iamys Dowglas, great summys of
money, and also for lyke mede he had, to the kynge’s great
dyshonoure and hurte of his realme, concludyd a peace
atwene the kynge and the Scottis, and causyd to be delyuered
vnto theym the charter or endenture called Ragman, with
many other thynges, to the Scottys great aduauntage and
impouerysshynge of this realme of Englande. Fourtlye, was
layed to hym, that where by synystre and vnlefull meanys,
contrary the kynge’s pleasure and wyll, or assent of the lordys
of the kynge’s counceyll, he had gotten into his possessyon
moche of the kynge’s treasoure, he vnskylfully wasted and
myspent it; by reason whereof the kyng was in necessyte, and
dryuen parforce to assaye his frendys. Fyfthlye, that he also
had enproperyd vnto hym dyuerse wardys belongynge to the
kynge, to his great lucre and the kynge’s great hurt, and that
he was more secret with quene Isabell, the kynge’s mother,
than was to Godde’s pleasure, or the kynge’s honoure: the
whiche artycles, with other agayne hym prouyd, he was, by
auctoryte of the sayde parlyament, iugyd to deth, and vpon
seynt Andrewys euyn next ensuynge, at London, he was
drawyn and hangyd. Fabyan.
[205] My coosins fall might. 1578. My cosin then might. N.
[206] Brybing, adultery and pride. 1578.
[207] I wene. 1578.
[208] ‘Deare,’ omitted. N.
[209] That dyd, 1559.
[210]
——heire of Lyonell,
Of king Edward the third the second sequell. 1578.
The third king Edward’s sonne, as stories tell. N.
[211] Cald. 1578.

[212] By true. 1578.
[213] Of ladies all the. 1578.
[214] Left in me. 1559, 63.
[215]
After whose death I onely stood in plight,

To be next heyre vnto the crowne by right. 1578.
[216] Of the. N.
[217]
Touching the case of my cousin Roger,
(Whose ruful end euen now I did relate)
Was found in tyme an vndue atteindre. 1578.
[218] By lawe eche man of. 1578. By law each one of. N.
[219]
Should be heard speake before his iudgement passe,

That common grace to him denyed was. 1578.
[220] In court of. 1578.

[221] His atteindre appering erroneous. 1578.
[222]
A president worthy, in record left,

Lorde’s lygnes to saue, by lawless meanes bereft. 1578.
[223] While fortune vnto me her grace did deigne. N.

[224] The. 1559, 63.
[225] Looser. N.
[226]
Whyle fortune thus did frendly me receyue,

Rychard the king, that second was by name,
Hauing none heire after him to reigne. 1578.
[227] That vnderstoode my bent. 1578.

[228]
And me to serue was euery manne’s entent,

With all that wyt or cunning could inuent. 1578.
[229] In hope. 1578.

[230] Chaunge their hue. 1578.
[231] For whiles fortune so luld. 1578.
[232] Dame. 1578.
[233] To dash me downe. 1578.
[234] Irish kernes. 1578.
[235]
My landes of Vlster vniustly to bereaue,

Which my mother for heritage did me leaue. 1578.
[236] Whom I did not regard. N.

[237]
The wylder sort, whom I did least regard,

And therfore the rechlesse manne’s reward. 1578.
[238] By auctoryte of the same parliament [in 1585-6] syr

Roger Mortymer, erle of the Marche, and sone and heyre vnto
syr Edmunde Mortymer, (and of dame Phylyp, eldest daughter
and heyer vnto syr Lyonell, the seconde sone of Edwarde the
thyrde) was soone after proclaymyd heyer paraunt vnto the
crowne of Englande; the which syr Roger shortly after sayled
into Irelande; there to pacyfye his lordeshyp of Wulstyr, whiche
he was lorde of by his foresayde mother: but whyle he was
there occupyed abowte the same, the wylde Irysshe came
vpon in noumbre, and slewe hym and moche of his company,
Fabyan.
[239] Nor helpe of frendes. 1578.
[240] Or. 1578.
[241] No law of armes they know. 1578.
[242] No foes. N.
[243] Their booty chiefe, they coumpt a dead man’s heade.
1578.
[244]
Their chiefest boote is th’aduersarie’s head,

They end not warre till th’enemie be dead. N.
[245] Their foes when they doe faine. N.

[246]
Nor yet presume to make their match amisse,
Had I not so done, I had not come to this. 1578.
——I had been left aliue. N.
[247]
At naught I set a sort of naked men,

And much the lesse, seeming to flye away,
One man me thought was good ynough for ten,
Making small account of number more or lesse,
Madnesse it is in war to goo by gesse. 1578.
[248]
See here the stay of pompe and highe estate,

The feeble hold of this vncerteyn lyfe. 1578.
[249] Hauing fayre fruict by my belooued wyfe. 1578. Syr

Roger had issu Edmunde, and Roger, Anne, Alys, and
Elanoure. Fabyan.
[250] Cavil. The “Ca.” was first affixed in 1571, and is repeated
in all the subsequent editions, except that of 1578, where
there appears “T. Ch.” the supposed signature of Thomas
Churchyard. As from that edition we shall have to notice,
presently, another similar alteration, it makes it doubtful
whether the same can be considered a misprint, though it
does not appear in the enumeration of his own pieces made
by Churchyard. See Bibliographia Poetica. Since this note was
printed the claim of ‘Master Chaloner’ to this signature has
been discovered. See postea, p. 53, n. 1.
[251] Was, omitted. 1578.
[252] Not to be treated of, 1559, 63.
[253] In the seuententh yere (1394) came oute of Scotlonde
certayne lordes into Englonde, to gete worshypp by fayte of
armes. The earl of Morris chalenged the erle marchall of
Englonde to juste wyth hym on horsbacke wyth sharpe
speres. And soo they roode togyder certayne courses, but not
the full chalenge. For the Scottyshe erle was caste bothe
horse and man, and two of his rybbes broken wyth the same
fall, and soo borne home into his inne. And anone after was
caryed homeward in a lytier. And at Yorke he deyed. Syre
Wyllyam Darell banerer of Scotlonde, and syre Pyers
Courteney the kynge’s banerer of Englonde roode togyder
certayne courses of warre hitte and assayed. The Scottisshe
knyghte seenge that he myghte not haue the better, yaue it
ouer: and wold noo more of the chalenge. Thenne one
Cokburne, squyer of Scotlond, and syre Nicholl Hauberk,
roode fyue courses, and at euery course the Scot was caste
bothe horse and man. Polychronicon.
[254] And whan thys ryall maryage was done and fynysshed
kynge Rycharde wyth dame Isabel his quene came into
Englonde. And the mayre of London, with all his brethren,
wyth grete multytude of the comyns of the cyte and the
craftes, receyuyd hym worshypfully at Blackheth, and brought
hym to Saynt Georges barre. And there taking their leue, the
kyng and quene roode to Kenignton. And after that wythin a
whyle the quene came to the toure of London, at whose
comyng was moche harme doo, for on London bridge were ix
persones thrust to deth, of whom the priour of typre was one.
Polychronicon. The prior of Tiptor, in Essex, was one. Stowe.
[255] Muche myndyng, 1559, 63.
[256] Date, added. 1571.
[257] Is stablysht. 1559, 63. Who stablisht is in state, seeming.
1578.
[258] Turne thine eare to. 1578.
[259] Prest in presence on fortune to. 1578.
[260] Of the. 1559, 63.
[261] Who by discent was of the. 1578.
[262] Nought. N.
[263] Before, eyther since. 1559. Or since. N.
[264] Most false fayth. 1578.
[265] Marcht. N.
[266] Thus hoysted high on fortune’s whyrling wheele. 1578.
[267] For whan fortune’s flud ran with. 1559, 63.
[268] I beynge a duke discended of kinges. 1559, 63.
[269] In. 1559, 63.
[270] Esperaunce. 1559, 63, 71. Assurance. 1578.
[271] All, omitted. N.
[272] To appoynt. 1559, 63.
[273] And for to settle others in their place. N.
[274] So, omitted. N.
[275] On a bell. N.
[276] Or. 1559, 63.
[277] Haply, omitted. N.
[278] For doyng on. 1559, 63. On, omitted. N.
[279] A sore checke. 1559, 63. I vnaduised caught a cruell
checke. N.
[280] Renown’d. N.
[281] For the tale of the rats, whence originates the proverbial
observation, “Who shall bell the cat?” see the vision of Pierce
the Plowman, by Crowley, ed. 1550, fol. iii. by Dr. Whitaker,
1813, p. 9.
[282] Expound. N.
[283] To curb. N.
[284] ’Bout. N.
[285] T’obay. N.
[286] It fits not a subiect t’haue. N.
[287] Thys by wurde. 1559, 63.
[288] And, omitted. N.
[289] Erle. 1559, 63.
[290] We by our power did call a parlament. N.
[291] With our. N.
[292] Playnely we depriued him of. 1559, 63.
[293] T’vnderstand. N.
[294] Thus wrought. 1578.
[295] By subiectes thus in bondage to bee brought. 1578.
[296] His. 1559, 63.
[297] Former cause of rancour to. 1578.
[298] Accoumpt. 1578.
[299] Were by me. 1559, 63.
[300] In the twentyest yere kynge Rycharde dide holde a grete
feeste at Westmestre. Att whyche feest aryued the souldyours
that hadde kepte Breste, and satte att dyner in the halle. And
after dyner the duke of Glocestre sayd to the kynge: “Syre,
haue ye not seen those fellowes that sate at dyner in your
halle.” And the kinge demaunded who they were. And he
sayde: “Thyse ben your folke that haue serued you, and ben
come from Breste. And now wote not what to doo, and haue
ben euyl payed.” Thenne the kynge sayde that they sholde be
payed. Thenne answered the duke of Gloucetre in a grete
furye: “Syre, ye oughte fyrste to put your body in deuoyre to
gete a towne, or a castell by fayte of warre vpon youre
enmyes, er ye sholde selle or delyuer ony townes that your
predecessours, kynges of Englonde, haue goten and
conquered.” To the whyche the kynge answerde ryght angrely:
“How saye ye that?” Thenne the duke his vncle sayd it
agayne. Thenne the kynge beganne to wexe wrothe, and
sayd: “Wene ye that I be a marchaunte or a foole to sell my
londe. By saynt Iohnne Baptyst naye: but trouthe it is that our
cosyn of Brytayne hath rendred and payd to vs the somme
that my predecessours had lent vppon the sayd towne of
Breste, and syth he hath payd, it is reason that this towne be
delyuered to hym agayne.” Thus beganne the wrath bitwene
the kynge and his vncle. Polychronicon.
[301] To claime entertainment the town beyng solde. 1559, 63.
To clayme their wages. 1578.
[302]
Of hate in hys hert hourded a tresure. 1559, 63.

Fulfyld his hart with hate. 1578.
[303] Nor. 1559, 63.

[304] But frendship fayned, in proofe is found vnsure. 1578.
[305] With long sicknesse diseased very sore. 1578.
[306] I was confedered before. 1578.
[307] Such aduauntage. 1578.
[308] Eame. This word is used repeatedly in the legends by
Ferrers. In the above passage it means uncle. It was also a
term for a gossip, compeer, or friend.
[309] To goe before. 1578.
[310] Preparedst a playne waye. 1578.
[311] What measure to others we awarde. 1578.
[312] The initials of George Ferrers, first added, 1571.
[313] This. 1559, 63, 71.
[314] Tragedy of the Lord Mowbray, the chief wurker of the
duke’s distruction, 1559, 63.
[315] To the state of a duke, added. 1571.
[316] Lykely. 1559, 63.
[317] Marke, I will shew thee how I swerued. 1559, 63.
[318] A vertuous mynde. 1559, 63.
[319] The herte to evyll to enclyne. 1559, 63.
[320] Kynde. 1559, 63.
[321] I thanke her, was to me so kynde. 1559, 63.
[322] Neyther of vs was muche to other holde. 1559, 63.
[323] Misprinted ‘thought’ by Higgins and Niccols.
[324] Wrong’d. N.
[325] Of England. 1578.
[326] Bad officers. N.
[327] Afore had. N.
[328] Aye seeks. N.
[329] The kinge’s fauour. 1578.
[330] Pryde prouoketh to. 1578.
[331] To poll and oppresse. 1578.
[332] And still. N.
[333] Him to. N.
[334] For pryde prickt me first my prince to flatter. 1578.
[335] Who so euer. 1578.
[336] Nere. N.
[337] Because of holdes beyond the sea that he solde. 1578.
[338] My. 1559, 63.
[339] Though vnto all these ils I were a frend. N.
[340] The duke of Gloucester for me did send. N.
[341] From place. 1578.
[342] Bewrayed the king. 1559, 63, 71, 78.
[343] At Arundell was a counseylle of certayne lordes: as the
duke of Gloucetre, tharchebysshop of Caunterbury, the erles
of Arundeel, Warwyck, and Marchall, and other, for to
refourme the rule abowte the kynge. Whyche lordes promysed
eche to abyde by other and soo departed. And anone after the
erle Marchall, whiche was captayne of Calays, bewrayed and
lete the kyng haue knowleche of all theyr counseylle:
wherupon the xxv daye of August, the duke of Glocetre was
arested at Plassheye in Estsex, and brought to the toure of
London. And from thence sent to Caleys and there murthred
and slayne wyth out processe of lawe or justyce.
Polychronicon.
[344] Earle. 1559, 63.
[345] It out. 1559, 63, 71.
[346] The palme represse. N.
[347] Earle. 1559, 63.
[348] Earle. 1559, 63.
[349] Manteyneth. 1559, 63.
[350] An. N.
[351] Earle. 1559, 63.
[352] Warly. 1559, 63.
[353] Misprinted, brest. 1587.
[354] In the same yere (1398) fel a great debate and
dyssencyon bytwene the duke of Herforde, erle of Derby, on
that one partye, and the duke of Norfolke, erle marchall, on
that other partye. In soo moche that they waged battaylle and
caste downe their gloues whiche were take vppe before the
kynge and ensealed, and the day and place assigned at
Couentree. To whyche place the kinge came, the duke of
Lancastre, and other lordes. And whan both partyes were in
the feelde redy for to fyghte, the kyng toke the matere in his
owne honde: and forthwyth he exyled and banysshed the
duke of Herforde for ten yeres, and the duke of Norfolke for
euermore. The duke of Norfolke deyed at Venyse.
Polychronicon.
[355] Doubtfull. 1578.
[356] That. N.
[357] Shame. N.
[358] Are iust to. 1578.
[359] Is. 1559, 63.
[360] Herewyth. 1559, 63, 71, 78.
[361] Which made them thinke mee worse then any feende.
1578.
[362] For other griefe. 1578.
[363] I parted thence and. 1578.
[364] The duke of Norffolke whiche supposed to haue been
borne out by the kynge, was sore repentant of his enterprise,
and departed sorowfully out of the realme into Almaine, and at
the laste came to Venice, where he for thoughte and
melancolye deceassed. Hall.
[365] More pleasure and reliefe. 1578.
[366] Which was not longe. 1578.
[367] Loo! thus his glory grewe great, by my dispite. 1578.
[368] So enuy euer, her hatred doth acquite. 1578.
[369]
Sorrowe and false shame,

Whereby her foes do shine in higher fame. 1578.
[370] Running. 1559.

[371] T. Ch. This signature first added in the edition of 1571,
and has been uniformly believed to mean Thomas
Churchyard. However, it may be more confidently assigned to
Master Chaloner, i. e. Sir Thomas Chaloner.—In the British
Museum there is a fragment of the original edition of the Mirror
for Magistrates, as printed in folio, during the reign of Queen
Mary, and suppressed, as already noticed, by the Lord
Chancellor. The fragment consists of two leaves, and which,
unfortunately, are duplicates, commencing with the
interlocutory matter before the legend of Owen Glendower,
and ends with the eighteenth stanza of the same legend. It
begins “Whan Master Chaloner had ended thys so eloquent a
tragedy,” and therefore appears conclusive that the above was
written by Thomas Chaloner, and that the legend of Richard
the Second, by Ferrers, which now follows, was first written for
the edition of 1559.
When the legend of Jane Shore was added in 1563,
Baldwin says: “This was so well lyked, that all together
exhorted me instantly to procure Maister Churchyarde to
vndertake and to penne as manye moe of the remaynder as
myght by any meanes be attaynted at his handes:” which
compliment proves that the author was a new candidate, and
upon the signatures being first added in 1571, we find his
name affixed to “Shore’s Wife,” in full, Tho. Churchyarde, to
distinguish it from the above abbreviation for Thomas
Chaloner.
[372] About the feeste of seynt Bartholmew fell dyscension
and discorde atwene the duke of Herforde and the duke of
Norfolke, wherefore the duke of Herforde accusyd that other
that he had taken iiii M. marke of the kynge’s, of suche money
as he shulde therewith haue wagyd certeyne sowdyours at
Calays, he lefte vndon, and toke the same money to his owne
vse. But another wryter sayeth, that as the sayd ii dukys rode
vpon a tyme from the parlyament towarde theyr lodgynges,
the duke of Norfolke sayde vnto that other: “Sir, see you not
howe varyable the kynge is in his wordis, and how shamefully
he puttyth his lordes and kynnes folkys to deth, and other
exylyth and holdyth in pryson; wherfore full necessary it is to
kepe, and not for to truste moche in his wordis, for with out
dowte in tyme to come, he wyll by such lyke meanys bryng vs
vnto lyke deth and distruction.” Of which wordys the sayd duke
of Herforde accusyd that other vnto the kynge; wherefore
eyther wagyd batayle, &c. Fabyan.
[373] For where as maister Hall, whom in thys storye we
chiefely folowed, making Mowbray accuser and Boleynbroke
appellant, mayster Fabyan reporteth the matter quite contrary,
and that by the reporte of good authours, makyng
Boleynbroke the accuser, and Mowbray the appellant. Which
matter, &c. 1559, 63.
[374] Recordes of the parliament. 1578.
[375] We referre to the determinacion of the haroldes, or such
as may cum by the recordes and registers of these doynges,
contented in the mean whyle with the best allowed iudgement
and which maketh most for. 1559, 63.
[376] Richard the 2. 1578.
[377] I woulde (quoth one of the cumpany) gladly say
sumwhat for king Richarde. But his personage is so sore
intangled as I thynke fewe benefices be at this daye, for after
hys imprisonment, his brother. 1559, 63.
[378] King, omitted. 1559, 63.
[379] Thinke. 1559, 63, 71, 78.
[380] In the kinge’s behalf. 1559, 63.
[381] See him all. 1559, 63.
[382] Vpon a beere in. 1578.
[383] Makyng his mone in thys sort. 1559, 63.
[384] From his seat, and miserably murdred in prison. 1559,
63.
[385] Vertue to folow and vyces to keepe vnder. 1578.
[386] Boast of high byrth, sword, scepter, ne mace. 1578.
[387] Rayne do drops of thunder. 1578.
[388] Let kinges therfore the lawes of God embrace. 1578.
[389] That vayne delightes. 1578.
[390] Do gase vpon me. 1559, 63.
[391] Lyeth, for whom none late myght rout. 1559, 63.
[392] Princes. 1578.
[393] Loute. 1559, 63, 71. Dead and least dread, to graue is
caryed out. 1578.
[394] But earth and clay. 1578.
[395]
Behold the woundes his body all about,

Who liuing here, thought, 1578.
[396] Wilt nowe declare. 1571, 78.

[397] My vicious story, 1559, 63.
[398] They kepe not, doutles say I dare. 1559, 63.
[399] Tyll the one. 1559, 63.
[400] Without respect of. 1578.
[401]
I am a kynge that ruled all by lust,

That forced not of vertue, right. 1559, 63.
[402] But alway put false flatterers most in trust, 1559, 63.
In false flatterers reposinge all my trust. 1578.
[403] Embracinge sutch. 1578.
[404] Fro counsell sage I did alwayes withdrawe. 1578.
[405]
By faythfull counsayle passing not a strawe;

What pleasure prickt, that thought I to be iust:
I set my minde, to feede, to spoyle, to iust. 1559, 63.
[406] Of God or man I stoode no wise in awe. 1578.

[407] More. 1578.
[408]
And to augment my lecherous minde that must

To Venus’ pleasures alway be in awe. 1563.
The edition of 1559 reads “and all to augment,” &c.

[409] Which to mayntayne I gathered heapes of golde. 1578.

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Reframing Postcolonial Studies:

Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly

“This timely volume confronts the legacies of post-colonial thinking as a set of

“The attention of postcolonial studies has moved to decolonizing the colonial

ISBN 978-3-030-52725-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52726-6 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Getty / Stephanie Nnamani

Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the product of an intensely collaborative

May 2020 David D. Kim

1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41

2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111

5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189

8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249

Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of

on two major projects, one of which explores the notion of beastly

such as New Global Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Object,

University Press, which focuses on translations of African literature into

…the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something

Which understanding of our postcolonial patrimony is calling us to

© The Author(s) 2021 1

in the field between Marxist “revolutionary” thinkers and poststructuralist

enhanced by professional organizations, libraries, and other university-led

Postcolonial Patriarchy, Inclusive Patrimony

In the summer of 2019, my home institution—the University of California,

believers in a voodoo-like ritual; a black man with a gun in hand chased

As the title of this video installation indicated, silence was determined

Enlightenment by asserting that their fault lies in being unmündig—hav-

variable in ongoing postcolonial action. To put it differently, We Live in

Here, McClintock condensed into one single paragraph a great deal of

partly grounded in the preservation of gender inequality (McClintock

historical guilt, social inequality, and political responsibility, especially with

senses and reconceptualize non-Western works of art as things that were

Regenerating the Future of Postcolonial Studies

action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimenta-

demands for reparation, scholarly investigations, and private friendships

“continuity” in resemblance of “biological procreation” (Said 1983,

A new generation of critics and activists is increasingly interested in issues

This new generation, the co-editors suggest, can be differentiated from

only vaguely in our shared postcolonial ethic. My own essay in The

targets of her critique include “‘archive,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and

The second section of this book is dedicated to methodological chal-

understand how empire and energy are intricately interconnected. Based

In Chapter Eight, Reinhart Kössler reflects on German postcolonial

the contemporary African American activism. In focusing on Fanon’s call

[84] Whiche in other’s cause, coulde. 1559, 63.

Of the judge eternall, more high to be promoted,

[118] We interpreted. 1559, 63.

The king thus transcendyng the limittes of his lawe,

[130] Baronye. 1559, 63.

In whyche parliament muche thynges was proponed

[140] In the beginning of the parliament was called Robert

If som in latter dayes, had called vnto mynde,

[162] George Ferrers. These initials first added, 1571.

——the queene so much was stir’d,

[180] Merye gale. 1559, 63.

1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41

2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111

5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189

8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249