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Postcolonial Networks brings together scholars, activists, and leaders with the urgency of a movement to foster decolonized relationships, innovative scholarship, and social transformation.

Postcolonial Networks Board

Postcolonial Networks Board

Monthly Archives: September 2011

Review of Walter Gam Nkwi, Voicing the Voiceless: Contributions to Closing Gaps in Cameroon History, 1958 – 2009 (Bamenda: Laanga Research and Publishing CIG, 2010), 200 pp.

September 16th, 2011|

Subaltern status has everything to do with the politics of (mis)representation and (mis)recognition. Attending to the marginalized ought to involve attending to conditions of marginality, which include how and by what means the marginalized have been (and ought to be) represented. Therefore, robust resistance to the historiographical status quo and its inattention to the subaltern entails a reimagining of methodology that holds dear the manifold ways in which marginalized peoples give voice to their existence. Non-textual sources are therefore indispensable to postcolonial historiographical work.

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Whitney Bauman, author of Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics, Responds to His Reviewers

September 14th, 2011|

It is precisely because western understandings of “discovery” and “property” are underwritten by theological assumptions that we must continue to wrestle with them! Though the theological side may have lost meaning for many, private property is being exported around the globe in the process of what Derrida refers to as “globalatinization” (noting that globalization is not an equal sharing of resources by all cultures and places but that it is largely a monological process of proliferating a way of being and thinking across the entire globe).

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From Baptist Pastor to Chickamauga Traditional

September 13th, 2011|

To Christian people who want to help with the decolonization and restoration of indigenous cultures, I say this: First, be honest enough to lay aside all claims to exclusive ownership of ultimate truth, for such claims are bigoted and, in the end, lead to violence (i.e. spiritual and cultural cannibalism). Look above and around, and know that the good news of Creator is everywhere heard and everywhere followed.

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NEGOTIATING PUS RIVER, WHILE MAKING A NEST IN XIBALBÁ

September 10th, 2011|

Dear beloved friends, I am Emilie Teresa Smith, an Argentine-Canadian Anglican priest, theologian, mother, writer, and community member of the town, Santa Cruz del Quiché, in the western highlands of Guatemala. I have been a companion of Guatemala, since 1984, though I have lived in this particular town for only two years. Here with dear […]

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Review of Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, eds. Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 309 pp.

September 6th, 2011|

The book, an edition in the “Deleuze Connections” series from Edinburgh University Press, “forges connections between Deleuze and the postcolonial, in the form of conversations, negotiations and meditations” (16). Twelve essays, from a wide range of scholars, seek new creative paths through a reexamination of Deleuze’s work (as well as his collaborations with Félix Guattari) in a variety of postcolonial modes. Indeed, the book seeks to articulate...

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Jea Sophia Oh, “Watching Avatar through Deleuzian 3D, Desire, Deterritorialization, and Doubling: A Postcolonial Eco-Theological Review.” Journal of Postcolonial Networks Vo1. 1, Issue 1 (September 2011): 1-27.

September 5th, 2011|

By employing Deleuzian conceptualizations of “desire,” “deterritorialization,” and “doubling,”1 this study examines Avatar (James Cameron’s 2009 film) as a hybridity of becoming the Other. I will sketch the contours of an oppositional politics within the figure of Empire (or the American capitalist empire which is almost always transcendental). The binary structure of the movie oscillates between two utterly opposing modalities (deploying high-tech military force against eco-friendly indigenous culture, weapons against trees, killing to healing, earth to space, human to nonhuman-nature, white skin against blue skin, etc.) This dualistic tension seems...

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Review of Whitney Bauman, Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York: Routledge, 2009), 260 pp.

September 4th, 2011|

Reviewer: Deane Curtin, curtin@gustavus.edu Whitney Bauman’s primary claim is audacious: the Christian theology of creatio ex nihilo (God has the power to create something out of nothing), is the historical cause of the colonial doctrine of terra nullius (that land God gave to humans in common was originally “empty,” and therefore available to be claimed, morally, by European invaders). In addition to this negative critique, the latter half of the book offers a second, positive argument, that the contemporary response to this sorry history should be a new “viable agnostic theology,” a revived Christianity, without the hegemonic God, growing from a theology of creatio continuo, or continuous creation...

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