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"Reframing Postcolonial Studies addresses the urgent issues that Black Lives Matter has raised with respect to everyday material practices and the frameworks in which our knowledge and cultural heritage are conceptualized and stored. Thebook 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
"Drawing on urban theory, art history, literary analysis, environmental humanities and linguistics, this 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 College London, UK
This book constitutes a collective action to examine what foundational concepts, interdisciplinary methodologies, and activist concerns are pivotal for the future of common humanity, as we bear the weight of our postcolonial inheritance in the twenty-first century. Written by scholars of different generations, the chapters interrogate how current intellectual endeavors are in contact with individual and community-based actions outside of the academy. 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, language and immigration policies, public monuments, museum exhibitions, moral dilemmas, and political movements to deepen our contemporary postcolonial action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimentation, and scholarly activism. Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in explicitlyintergenerational, future-oriented terms.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Whither Postcolonialism? From Concepts via Methodologies to Scholarly Activisms.- I. Conceptual Vigilance.- 2. Postcolonial Utopianism: Unlocking the Future.- 3. Alternative Episteme: Thinkers from the Global South.- 4. Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing Francophonie.- II. Triangulated Methodologies.- 5. Brotherhoods of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy.- 6. Queer Forensic Traces and 3D Testimony: New Methodologies for 'Messy-Thinking and Writing' of Apartheid-Era Crimes in the Digital Humanities.- 7. "Energise!": Postcolonial Studies during the Autumn of the System.- III. Scholarly Activisms.- 8. Postcolonial Theory and Activist Interventions at Ethnology Museums.- 9. Scholarship in Solidarity? Researching Namibian-German Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide.- 10. The Violence of History: Decolonizing Visual Culture In and Out of the Museum.
About the author
David D. Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Report
"The succession of chapters and nexus of topics reflects the thoughtful and sensitive editorial effort. ... Reframing Postcolonial Studies is a collection of convincing and thoughtfully edited arguments and ideas ... . This volume provides multiple frameworks for scholarship-based activism and activist scholarship in post- and decolonial interdisciplinarity." (Nele Grosch and Anne Stellberger, Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. 7 (1), January, 2022)
