Download or read book The White Spaces of Kenyan Settler Writing written by Terrence L. Craig and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The White Spaces of Kenyan Settler Writing provides an overview of Kenyan literature by white writers in the half-century before Independence in 1964. Such literature has been over-shadowed by that of black writers to the point of critical ostracism. It deserves attention for its own sake, as the expression of a community that hoped for permanence but suffered both disappointment and dispossession. It deserves attention for its articulation of an increasingly desperate colonial and Imperial situation at a time when both were being attacked and abandoned in Africa, as in other colonies elsewhere, and when a counter-discourse was being constructed by writers in Britain as well as in Africa. Kenya was likely the best-known twentieth-century colony, for it attracted publicity for its iconic safaris and its Happy Valley scandals. Yet behind such scenes were settlers who had taken over lands from the native peoples and who were trying to make a future for themselves, based on the labour, willing or forced, of those people. This situation can be seen as a microcosm of one colonial exercise, and can illuminate the historical tensions of such times. The bibliography is an attempt to collect the literary resources of white Kenya in this historically significant period.
Download or read book Difficult Reading written by Jason R. Marley and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Difficult Reading offers a new approach to formal experimentation in Caribbean literature. In this insightful study, Jason Marley demonstrates how the aggressive, antagonistic elements common to the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novel foster emotional responses that spark new forms of communal resistance against colonial power. Marley illustrates how experimental Caribbean writers repeatedly implicate their readers in colonial domination in ways that are intended to unsettle and discomfort. In works such as Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation, Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, and Vera Bell’s overlooked prose poem Ogog, acts of colonial atrocity—such as the eradication of Indigenous populations in Guyana, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the disenfranchisement of Afro-Jamaican communities—become mired in aesthetic obfuscation, forcing the reader to confront and rethink their own relationship to these events. In this way, new literary forms engender new forms of insight and outrage, fostering a newly inspired relation to resistance.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Kenyan History written by Wanjala S. Nasong'o and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-25 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers Kenya’s history, society, culture, economics, politics, and environment from precolonial times through the first years of independence. The book comprises twenty-one chapters divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the long precolonial moment, detailing the nature of precolonial Kenyan societies and their economics, politics, gender dynamics, and social organization. Part II examines Kenyan societies’ encounters with British colonialism, critically outlining the impact and implications of these encounters. The volume concludes with an examination of political consolidation after the country’s attainment of political independence and the subsequent foundations for political authoritarianism.
Download or read book Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa written by Fassil Demissie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonial architecture and urbanism carved its way through space: ordering and classifying the built environment, while projecting the authority of European powers across Africa in the name of science and progress. The built urban fabric left by colonial powers attests to its lingering impacts in shaping the present and the future trajectory of postcolonial cities in Africa. Colonial Architecture and Urbanism explores the intersection between architecture and urbanism as discursive cultural projects in Africa. Like other colonial institutions such as the courts, police, prisons, and schools, that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played s pivotal role in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, it is the cultural destination of colonial architecture and urbanism and the connection between them and colonialism that the volume seeks to critically address. The contributions drawn from different interdisciplinary fields map the historical processes of colonial architecture and urbanism and bring into sharp focus the dynamic conditions in which colonial states, officials, architects, planners, medical doctors and missionaries mutually constructed a hierarchical and exclusionary built environment that served the wider colonial project in Africa.
Download or read book A Third University Is Possible written by la paperson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Download or read book Getting Heard Re claiming Performance Space in Kenya written by Kimani Njogu and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2008 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Getting Heard: (Re)claiming Performance Space is the third in a series of publications on art, culture and society released by Twaweza Communications. The aim is to bring to the fore conversations taking place in Kenya about identity, creativity, nationalism and the generation of knowledge. The series is also about the pursuit of freedom through arts, media and culture. In Getting Heard the performance space is shown to offer wider possibilities for knowledge creation. It shows that in post-colonial Africa political leaders have consistently performed over their subjects at local and national levels. There is discussion of: Kenya National Theatre, Story Telling, Radio Theatre, Translation, African Languages, Music, Media and Mungiki This volume opens a window to our understanding of post-colonial Africa through performances.
Download or read book Settler Ecologies written by Charis Enns and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-05-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Settler Ecologies tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selectively repeopling wilderness to create seemingly more inclusive wild spaces and capitalize on biocultural diversity; rescuing injured animals and species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending settler ecologies through landscape approaches to conservation that scale wild spaces. Settler Ecologies serves as a cautionary tale for future conservation agendas in all settler colonies. While urgent action is needed to halt global biodiversity loss, this book underscores the need to continually question whether the types of nature being preserved advance settler colonial structures or create conditions in which ecologies can otherwise be (re)made and flourish.
Download or read book Unsettled written by Janet McIntosh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending nearly seventy years of white colonial rule. While tens of thousands of whites relocated outside Kenya for what they hoped would be better prospects, many stayed. Over the past decade, however, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them of the tenuousness of their Kenyan identity. In this book, Janet McIntosh looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in postindependence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to embracing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, McIntosh focuses on their discourses and narratives, asking: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claims to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anticolonial sentiment, phrasing and rephrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable? With her respondents straining to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry and autochthony, McIntosh explores their contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind spots, denial, and self-doubt. Ranging from land rights to language, from romantic intimacy to the African occult, Unsettled offers a unique perspective on whiteness in a postcolonial context and a groundbreaking theory of elite subjectivity"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Unsettled written by Janet McIntosh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention for the 2018 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize Honorable Mention for the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing presented by the American Anthropological Association In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending decades of white colonial rule. While tens of thousands of whites relocated in fear of losing their fortunes, many stayed. But over the past decade, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them that their belonging is tenuous. In this book, Janet McIntosh looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in post-independence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to pronouncing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, McIntosh focuses on their discourse and narratives to ask: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claim to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anti-colonial sentiment, phrasing and re-phrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable? McIntosh explores contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind-spots, denials, and self-doubt as her respondents strain to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry.
Download or read book Primitive Normativity written by Elizabeth W. Williams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.
Download or read book Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English written by Poddar Prem Poddar and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-07 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first reference guide to the political, cultural and economic histories that form the subject-matter of postcolonial literatures written in English.The focus of the Companion is principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world - Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Canada. There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have also claimed the title 'postcolonial', notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States. The Companion contains:*220 entries written by 150 acknowledged scholars of postcolonial history and literature;*covers major events, ideas, movements, and figures in postcolonial histories*long regional survey essays on historiography and women's histories. Each entry provides a summary of the historical event or topic and bibliographies of postcolonial literary works and histories. Extensive cross-references and indexes enable readers to locate particular literary texts in their relevant historical contexts, as well as to discover related literary texts and histories in other regions with ease.
Download or read book Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia written by P. Lorcin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.
Download or read book Global Literature and the Environment written by Matthew Whittle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Literature and the Environment analyses literatures from across the world that connect readers to the localized impacts of the climate and ecological emergencies. The book contextualizes ecological breakdown within the history of imperialist-capitalism, exploring how literature helps us to imagine and create a habitable and just world for all forms of life. The four chapters are organised according to the elements of the climate system that are at risk. ‘Earth’ examines Caribbean, American, South African, and British literatures that explore how dominant human groups have exploited soils, minerals, metals, and oil in pursuit of economic aims. ‘Water’ engages with poetic representations of, and responses to, extraction, pollution, and global warming in the fresh- and saltwaters of Nigeria and the icescapes of Alaska. ‘Air’ analyses prose and poetry that depicts atmospheric pollution caused by gas flaring in the Niger Delta and the production of pesticides in India. ‘Life’ attends to the ways in which literature contextualizes the drivers of, and proposed solutions to, mass species extinction across North America, Africa, Australasia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This accessible and engaging book explores novels, plays and poetry by writers including Octavia Butler, C.L.R. James, dg nanouk okpik, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Imbolo Mbue, Indra Sinha, Witi Ihimaera, J.M. Coetzee, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, amongst many others. It introduces readers to the concept of the Anthropocene alongside perspectives that challenge the assumption that the climate crisis is caused by an undifferentiated humanity. In doing so, the book draws on, and combines, a range of theoretical approaches, including postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, cultural materialism, and animal studies.
Download or read book Colonial Strangers written by Phyllis Lassner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title aims to revolutionize modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the postcolonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust. Lassner's analysis reveals how writers such as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning, Rumer Godden, Phyllis Bottome, Elspeth Huxley and Zadie Smith insist that World War II is critical to understanding how and why the British Empire had to end. to the end of fascism. Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage and film adaptations, the book explores the critical perspectives of women who are passionately engaged with Britian's struggle to yield the last vestiges of imperial power. British women as agents of imperialism by questioning their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. The authors discussed take centre stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.
Download or read book Transgressing Boundaries written by Elizabeth F. Oldfield and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white (post)colonial women writers emerging from an African–European cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for conveying how African women’s literature is situated in relation to colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are not accommodated by the genre of ‘expatriate literature’. The present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women’s narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap. Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the ‘Other’, the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting and intercultural influences. The ‘African’ woman’s creation of textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the configuration of a voice and identity for the female ‘Other’ and writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the face of patriarchal traditions.
Download or read book The Intimate Empire written by Gillian Whitlock and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By means of contextualized readings, this work argues that autobiographic writing allows an intimate access to processes of colonization and decolonization, incorporation and resistance, and the formation and reformation of identities which occurs in postcolonial space. The book explores the interconnections between race, gender, autobiography and colonialism and uses a method of reading which looks for connections between very different autobiographical writings to pursue constructions of blackness and whiteness, femininity and masculinity, and nationality. Unlike previous studies of autobiography which focus on a limited Euro American canon, the book brings together contemporary and 19th-century women's autobiographies and travel writing from Canada, the Caribbean, Kenya, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. With emphasis on the reader of autobiography as much as the subject, it argues that colonization and resistance are deeply embedded in thinking about the self.
Download or read book Roses from Kenya written by Megan A. Styles and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book prize The potential of floriculture grows at Lake Naivasha Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial. More than half the flowers are grown near the shores of Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake northwest of Nairobi recognized as a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance. Critics decry the environmental side effects of floriculture, and human rights activists demand better wages and living conditions for workers. In this rich portrait of Kenyan floriculture, Megan Styles presents the point of view of local workers and investigates how the industry shapes Kenyan livelihoods, landscapes, and politics. She investigates the experiences and perspectives of low-wage farmworkers and the more elite actors whose lives revolve around floriculture, including farm managers and owners, Kenyan officials, and the human rights and environmental activists advocating for reform. By exploring these perspectives together, Styles reveals the complex and contradictory ways that rose farming shapes contemporary Kenya. She also shows how the rose industry connects Kenya to the world, and how Kenyan actors perceive these connections. As a key space of encounter, Lake Naivasha is a synergistic center where many actors seek to solve broader Kenyan social and environmental problems using the global flows of people, information, and money generated by floriculture.
