Introducing postcolonial studies

Rethinking Hybridity in Postcolonial Contexts: What Changes and What Persists? The Tunisian case of Poulina’s managers

“…The fascination that Poulina’s managers expressed about the US management model exemplifies the process of whitewashing (to use Fanon’s expression). Trained in a western education system, such individuals copy everything from the dominant ideology and adopt a discourse of mimicry that dictates all interpretations and representations of organizing and managing (Bhabha, 1984; Dabashi, 2011; Lazarus, 2004; Memmi, 1957). Their attempts to dismantle existing traditional working relations based on blood or friendship and to replace them with new ways of organizing based on individual performance liken them to the definition of ‘compradors’ (literally, ‘buyers’) used by Gantman and Parker (2006), which denotes a native of a country who acts as an agent of the colonizer.…”

Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: Towards a periodization of cultural discourse about colonial legacies

“…In a different, international perspective Neil Lazarus has argued the historical significance of the fact that Postcolonial Studies emerged during the 1970s ‘in close chronological proximity to the end of the era of decolonization’ (Lazarus, 2004: 4–5). He argues that it emerged at a time when ‘the globally popular and uplifting “Third Worldist” narrative of self-determination … began to founder in the face of complementary and powerful counter-offensives’ that included ‘the global re-imposition and re-consolidation’ of now US-centred economic and political neo-imperialism (Lazarus, 2013: 327).…”

Distance between You and Your Home: The Estrangement of Postcolonial Writing

“…Although the contemporary context has its own parameters, elements of 'structural dependency' theories (eg Sullivan, 1980;Rodney, 1972) still pertain, not least those which noted the reliance of comprador ruling classes on the expropriation of state funds (Onoge, 1992), the entanglement of that class with the direct interests of transnational capital (Mitee, 1999), and the corresponding tendency to magnify religious and ethnic divisions within the local populations as a technique of rule. The liberalisation programmes followed so slavishly by Obasanjo's government in Nigeria continue to lead to a decline in living standards and, it is important to add, to a rise in vocal and well coordinated social resistance, culminating in a series of national strikes in 2003and 2004(DSM, 2003.…”

“…In the wake of the early debates between the trailblazing figures of postcolonial theory (such as the Robert Young of White Mythologies and Homi Bhabha) and their detractors (such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik) there has been a certain reconfiguration of the field. Neil Lazarus (2004: 5) is right, in this respect, to warn postcolonialism's materialist interlocutors, of which he is one of the most incisive, not to slip into an unwarranted reification of their object of criticism. Certainly the discussions that marked the inaugural volumes of the new flagship journal Interventions demonstrate an increasing attention to the politics of globalisation and the social destruction wrought by the forces of deregulated capital, just as Robert Young's Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) seems to offer a rather belated rediscovery of the historical role of socialist anti‐imperialism.…”