Beginning Postcolonialism: (Beginnings)

Forty years before COVID-19, socialists in Britain campaigned for workers to have the right to make ‘socially useful’ products, from hospital equipment to sustain the NHS to affordable heating systems for the impoverished elderly. This movement held one thing responsible above all else for the nation’s problems: the burden of defence spending. In the middle of the Cold War, the left put a direct challenge to the defence industry, the Labour government and trade unions. The response it received revealed much about a military-industrial state that prioritised the making and exporting of arms for political favour and profit. Looking at peace activism from the early 1970s to Labour’s landslide defeat in the 1983 general election, this book examines the conflict over the cost of Britain’s commitment to the Cold War and asserts that the wider left presented a comprehensive and implementable alternative to the stark choice between making weapons and joining the dole queue.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - beginning, postcolonialism?, a note on terminology. Part 1 From "Commonwealth" to "postcolonial": colonialism and decolonization; the emergence of "Commonwealth literature"; theories of colonial discourses - Frantz Fanon and Edward Said; the turn to "theory" in the 1980s; the empire "writes back"; postcolonialism at the millennium; postcolonialism -definitions and dangers; selected reading on "what is postcolonialism?". Part 2 Reading colonial discourses: reading and politics; reading "orientalism"; the shape of orientalism; stereotypes of the Orient; criticisms of "Orientalism"; "ambivalence" and "mimicry" in colonial discourses; "stop and think"; colonial discourses and Rudyard Kipling - reading "The Overland Mail". Part 3 Nationalist representations: imagining the nation - forging tradition and history; "stop and think"; national space and time; national liberation vs. imperial domination; negritude; "stop and think"; Frantz Fanon and national culture; nationalism and literature; constructing national consciousness -Ngugi wa Thiongo's "A Grain of Wheat". Part 4 The nation in question: the disenchantment with nationalism; nationalism - a derivative discourse?; "stop and think"; nationalism, representation and the elite; nationalism, "race" and ethnicity; "stop and think"; nationalism, gender and sexuality; the nation and its margins; "stop and think"; the problems of using English; "stop and think"; the nation in question - Chinua Achebe's "Anthills of the Savannah"; "stop and think". Part 5 Re-reading and re-writing English literature: colonialism and the teaching of English; colonial texts; "stop and think"; reading literature "contrapuntally"; "stop and think"; re-reading Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre"; "stop and think"; "Jane Eyre" - a postcolonial text?; "stop and think"; postcolonial rewritings - Jean Rhys, "Wide Sargasso Sea"; re-writings - possibilities and problems; "stop and think". Part 6 Postcolonialism and feminism: some definitions; the "double colonization" of women; "stop and think"; postcolonial critiques of "first world" feminism; "stop and think"; can the subaltern speak?; "going a piece of the way" - creative dialogues in postcolonial feminism; representing women in Sally Morgan's "My Place". Part 7 Diaspora identities: what is a "diaspora"?; living "in-between" - from "roots" to "routes"; hybrid identities at the "in-between"; "stop and think"; new ethnicities; "stop and think"; cultural diversity, cultural difference and the "Black Atlantic"; moving pictures - Beryl Gilroy's "Boy-Sandwich". Part 8 Postcolonialism and the critics: problematizing postcolonialism; from "Commonwealth" to "postcolonial" and back again?; postcolonialism and neo-colonialism; so where do we go from here?; further reading.

About the Author :
John McLeod is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds