Exposure: a postcolonial turn in urban ethnography

A diary kept during the development of Sugar, a commission of the Liverpool Capital of Culture Festival (2006–2007), was the occasion of an autoethnography. This essay reflects on the triangulation made between the architecture of slavery, contemporary discourses of ‘youth culture’ and the dissolution of the representational frame as thematics or topics liquefied into the repressed topology of the city; a direct analogy is made between the famous but inaccessible Williamson tunnels and the creative unconscious of a post-representationalist dramaturgical practice. The ghost volumetrics of this history are cathected into a movement form, assimilable to the kinetics of hip-hop culture; a new topologically identified community was felt to emerge that performed Sugar largely in the sense of channelling its concerns back into cultural traces continuously in informal production. The relationship between peripatetic dramaturg and peripherally located creative youth mapped an urban dérive quite different from that cultivated by the Situationists, a secret tracking or collaboration that linked urban ethnography to a decolonising dramaturgy.     

Cultural networks between Portugal and Brazil: a postcolonial review

This paper aims to study notable examples of transatlantic transmissions of norms, beliefs and values that have revised the sense of a Luso-Brazilian community in a global world. The so-called Atlantic Civilization understood before as essentially Anglo-Saxon, takes a new shape when seen by the South Atlantic. If the historical relationship between Portugal and Brazil was one of colonial containment, since the nineteenth century those bilateral relations have passed through a process of reconciliation and networking – first through a mutual acceptance, then through the establishment of common international goals. On the one hand, this networking between Portugal and Brazil has occurred through public symbolic demonstration and the commemoration of a common culture; on the other hand, this networking has evolved through cultural connections – music, literature, and cinema, – all of which serve to validate a postcolonial review. Cultural connections that have survived the proverbial test of time have proven to be valuable in assessing the evolving relationship between Portugal and Brazil. Therefore, the Brazilian conscientiousness of its importance in the regional and world sphere involved the preparation of a Brazilian cultural diplomacy that recognized the political desire of diplomacy between Portugal and Brazil – a diplomacy that is largely demonstrative of the importance of soft power in a world of global networks.     

Living in commodified history: constructing class identities in neotraditional neighbourhoods

This paper examines how residents of neotraditional neighbourhoods in the Netherlands socially construct a ‘classed’ place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries that have been explored here by analysing residents' narratives. Three prominent types of narratives were found: (1) residents' locational choice, (2) their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and (3) the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicised aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. However, the way of boundary drawing took several forms, based either on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by sophisticated efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged, or by conducting cultural practices shared with fellow residents by which ‘the other’ living outside the neighbourhood is ‘bracketed out’ symbolically and socially.     

Designing cultural policy in a postcolonial colony: the case of Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War. In 1952, the island became a ‘Commonwealth’ through the development and approval of a local constitution. While this political status allows Puerto Rico some degree of autonomy, it nevertheless continues to subject the island to United States federal authority. For the last 60 years, discussions on whether Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth status is a permanent or transitional status has fuelled much of the political debate and public policy of the region, and has been highly influenced by political status ideologies: to become a state of the United States, to maintain the current status, or to become independendent. Budgetary, legal, and commercial dependence on the United States causes constant conflicts in the design and implementation of Puerto Rican public policy in areas such as education, law, and economic development. Likewise, culture has not been exempt from these debates. In fact, cultural differences have caused conflict at all levels – from the theoretical conceptions of culture, to cultural policy and arts management. Moreover, the implementation of cultural policies has also been subject to political ideologies and the concept of culture has variably been seen as an obstacle or strength for specific political purposes. In the midst of a sustained economic crisis, the current Puerto Rican government has proposed the development of a comprehensive cultural policy through a participatory process. The objective of this paper is to present this process as a means of analyzing Puerto Rico’s experience through the challenges in designing and implementing cultural policy within a ‘postcolonial colony’ scenario. This paper will place emphasis on the government’s role, cultural public institutions, and cultural production.     

On the trail of social relations in the colonial Sahara: a postcolonial reading

The Atlantic coast of the Sahara Desert was belatedly colonised by Spain. The paternalistic nature of this process and the collaboration of Sahrawi tribal leaders produced a specific type of colonial relations. The military hierarchy of colonial structures overlapped with the social stratification of Sahrawi tribes. Yet outside the upper echelons of Sahrawi authorities and Spanish military officers, daily life in the colony was defined by interactions among workers who performed the less lucrative jobs, Spanish immigrants from the Canary Islands as well as members of the indigenous population. Given their similar social status, four decades after the Spanish decolonisation (1975), we can still recognise the feelings that Sahrawi people inspire among Canarian returnees and the Sahrawis’ recollections of Canarian settlers, proving that colonial relations are never simple but ambivalent and open to new interpretations, especially when they intersect with other categories such as social class. Informed by postcolonial studies, our analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in the Canary Islands and the Sahara over the last ten years reveals the affective bond shared by colonisers and colonised at the bottom of the social hierarchy, allowing us to identify colonial memory as a cornerstone of social and cultural geography.     

Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.     

Mobile diasporas,postcolonial identities: the Green Line in Cyprus

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the scope for understanding postcolonial and hybrid identities through the theory of ontological security in International Relations. It examines the circulation of identity for a dispersed postcolonial population, namely Cypriots. This circulation happens amongst a deterritorialised public, through media and movement of people. It carries meaning that is formative of the identity of the diaspora and of the identity of the home state, implicating both in a complex and relational ontological security comprising identity, memory, state and society. The Green Line dividing North from South in Cyprus represents the bifurcation of the island, rupturing the possibility of a territorially unified Cypriot identity. The line also represents a rupturing of contiguous ethnic identities, marking the creation of refugee populations and Cypriot diasporas. The Green Line is both a physical location and circulating symbol of ontological insecurity. On one hand, the Green Line marks the creation of Cypriot refugees and diasporas. On the other, it marks a gateway to Europe for asylum seekers attempting to enter the Southern part of the island. I theorise the Green Line as an emblem of ontological insecurity whose meaning is (re)constituted in the lived experience of Cypriot diaspora and migrants seeking security, revealing a hybrid and fluid identity.     

Forestry policy in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: continuity and change

Using the case of Mafungautsi Forest Reserve, this paper discusses continuities and changes in policy and practice at the communal and reserved forest interface in Zimbabwe. Colonial forestry policy in Zimbabwe has often been labelled as oppressive, as communal area citizens were not allowed to participate effectively in its formulation and implementation. Independence in 1980, it was thought, would usher in an era of greater participation within the forestry sector. However, the hope that local communities would have greater input in the forestry policies and management has largely remained unfulfilled. The state institutions responsible for managing forests have largely remained unsympathetic to the involvement of local communities in the management of forestry resources despite the pre-independence rhetoric. Alongside the co-management attempt to make local peasants citizens through their inclusion in decision-making has been the continuity of the colonial policy that treated local peasants who used resources as criminals destroying trees and forests. This paper examines how the fundamental policy perspective of forestry in Zimbabwe still perceives local peasant farmers to be unsustainable exploiters of forests. The local resource users have not remained passive recipients of the repressive forestry policies and practices based on science but have actively contested them since the 1950s.     

Neurology and the soul: from the origins until 1500

The mind-brain dichotomy recalls the soul-body duality and the tendency to individualize in the nervous system a location for the soul. In this paper, the author analyses some of the principal theories which attribute the soul to a cerebral location, from the origins until the year 1500.     

The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production

A range of recent debates in geography have considered responsibility and/or critical practice, including the connections between knowledge production, ethics and politics. Taking our cue from these debates, this paper explores the question and limits of responsibility in research across a global North–South divide. Emerging from reflections on our own research projects, we interrogate a central challenge of postcolonial knowledge production by examining two limits to, and constraints upon, responsible knowledge production across the global North–South: abstraction and representation, and learning. First, we argue that the forms of distancing that can inhere in abstraction risk sidestepping the concerns of 'the field' by decontextualising places/constituencies/ideas. This involves considering the representational economies at stake in negotiating slippages of distance or practices of learning. We argue in favour of creative and generative representations that might be produced through more participatory and uncertain practices. Second, we explore an ethical and indirect conception of learning as a basis for alternative modes of engagement with communities and researchers in research practice. In making this argument, we do not offer a kind of formula for responsibility in research nor do we argue simply for research to be more 'relevant'. Instead, and alert to our own positions of privilege, we seek to draw attention to these two limits to responsible praxis in the academic knowledge production process precisely because they can act as important registers for thinking through the politics of conducting research between different and sometimes co-constituting cultures of knowledge production.     

Images of the third world: teaching a geography of the third world

Abstract

This paper focuses on how to teach undergraduate students to analyse critically various received images of the Third World. This is achieved through the use of a detailed practical exercise which is based on poster, newspaper and map representation of the Third World. The concepts of identity, positionality and representation are reviewed and there is a discussion of how an awareness of these concepts should help students understand the influencing power of stereotypical images of distant others.     

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

The construction of memory in landscapes is a complex process which is embedded in webs of political and economic power. Often history is twisted and bended to better serve the current interests of the hegemonic forces at play. In this paper I attempt to explore how memory is at work in three different sites in Santiago Island, Cape Verde: an old fort and a historical town; a concentration camp; and a global resort. The three sites participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory in different ways, forging new forms of collective identity, which are embedded in local as well as global forces and processes. Through an analysis of the changes taking place on these sites, this paper suggests that while the country lives on foreign aid and attempts to embrace neo-liberal practices, it fails not only to provide basic services to the population but to engage critically with its history and geography.