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: Postcolonialism

Shakespeare travelling

If your interests lie with the postcolonial, Shakespeare might seem like an unlikely port of call. Or rather, he might seem representative of a lot of the things a postcolonial approach would be interested in working against. He could, for instance, represent what needs to be removed in calls to ‘decolonize the university’: a dead […]

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Postcolonialism and a Critique of Humanism

In discussing humanism, one is talking about the dignity of human beings and the moral imperative for humane actions. As much as we can justly perceive these hard-earned principles as standards to be maintained, we, as advocates committed to these universally conceived principles, must equally admit their historically ambivalent and abusive role.

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Max Lobe
Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities)

In Max Lobe‘s novel Vertraulichkeiten (Confidentialities, not yet translated into English), a nameless first-person narrator who lives in Switzerland travels to Cameroon, where he grew up, and in a village somewhere on the road between Duala and Jaunde, an old woman tells him about the Cameroonian struggle for independence.

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Cottbus City Tour: postcolonial meets postsocialist

When you think of Cottbus, its (post)colonial entanglements might not be the first thing that come to mind. But a small group affiliated to the local university have taken up the task of confronting just these aspects of the city’s history. At the tail end of August, on a broiling late summer day, I was lucky enough to be allowed to tag along on this tour in Cottbus, which bills itself not just as postcolonial, but as postcolonial-and-postsocialist.

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Decolonization is not (just) a metaphor

One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the key ideas in and around postcolonial studies. In this post, we take a look at an article called “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, published by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in 2012.

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