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Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of 'the popular' in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of the world may best be challenged. It also addresses middlebrow cultural production, which has tended to be seen as antithetical to radical traditions, asking whether this might, in fact, form an unlikely realm from which to question, critique, or challenge colonial tropes. Examining the ways in which the imprint of colonial history is in evidence (interrogated, mythologized or sublimated) within popular cultural production, this book raises a series of speculative questions exploring the interrelation of the popular and the postcolonial.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
NADIA ATIA AND KATE HOULDEN
PART I
The Radical Popular
1 ‘Welcome to The University of Brixton’: BBC Radio and the West Indian Everyday
RACHAEL GILMOUR
2 FUTURE HISTORIES – an Activist Practice of Archiving
ALDA TERRACCIANO
3 Sequential Art in the Age of Postcolonial Production: Comics Collectives in Israel and South Africa
CHARLOTTA SALMI
PART II
The Middlebrow
4 Murder in Mesopotamia: Agatha Christie’s Life and Work in the Middle East
NADIA ATIA
5 ‘Junior Romantic Anthropologist Bore’: Colin MacInnes’s Critical Adventures in Post-war Multiracial Britain
ALICE FERREBE
6 Tarzan the Ape Man: Screening ‘the subordination of women, nature and colonies’ in the 1930s
CHRIS CAMPBELL
PART III
Commodification
7 Subcultural Fiction and the Market for Multiculturalism
SARAH ILOTT
8 Everything Must Go: Popularity and the Postcolonial Novel
SAM GOODMAN
9 Consuming Post-millennial Indian Chick Lit: Visuality and the Popular in Post-millennial India
E. DAWSON VARUGHESE
PART IV
Technology
10 Monster Mines and Pipelines: Frankenstein Figures of Tar Sands Technology in Canadian Popular Culture
MARK A. MCCUTCHEON
11 African or Virtual, Popular or Poetry: The Spoken Word Platform Word N Sound Series
RICARDA DE HAAS
12 The Postcolonial Geek and Popular Culture in a Global Era
WENDY KNEPPER
Index
About the author
Nadia Atia is Senior Lecturer in World Literature in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London, UK.
Kate Houlden
is Senior Lecturer in World Literature in the Department of English, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, UK.
Summary
Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, this collection questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, it explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change.
