Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries, originating from all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
Homi Kharshedji Bhabha is an Indian scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. He is married to attorney and Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Bhabha, and they have three children.
Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.
Critical international relations theory is a diverse set of schools of thought in international relations (IR) that have criticized the theoretical, meta-theoretical and/or political status quo, both in IR theory and in international politics more broadly – from positivist as well as postpositivist positions. Positivist critiques include Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches and certain ("conventional") strands of social constructivism. Postpositivist critiques include poststructuralist, postcolonial, "critical" constructivist, critical theory, neo-Gramscian, most feminist, and some English School approaches, as well as non-Weberian historical sociology, "international political sociology", "critical geopolitics", and the so-called "new materialism". All of these latter approaches differ from both realism and liberalism in their epistemological and ontological premises.
Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, subalterns are the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term.
Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
Arif Dirlik was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and postcolonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in electrical engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 1973.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
David Bruce MacDonald is a Canadian political scientist who studies international relations, genocide, and political myths.
James Gee is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee most recently held the position as the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, originally appointed there in the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gee has previously been a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.
John Allan Clinton Hattie is a New Zealand education academic. He has been a professor of education and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011. He was previously professor of education at the University of Auckland, the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and the University of Western Australia.
Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was previously Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender and sexual identities and the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism.
Janet M. Wilson is a UK-based New Zealand academic who specialises in post colonial New Zealand literature.
Anthony James Carrigan was a British academic noted for his pioneering work in combining the theoretical paradigms of postcolonialism and environmental studies.
Pushkala Prasad is an Indian American academic, researcher and writer. She is the Zankel Chair Professor of Management and Liberal Arts at Skidmore College. She is best known for her book Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in the Post-Positivist Traditions and her research on workplace diversity. A great deal of her work is done in collaboration with her husband, Anshuman Prasad.
Scholarship on nationalism and gender explores the processes by which gender affects and is impacted by the development of nationalism. Sometimes referred to as "gendered nationalism," gender and nationalism describes the phenomena whereby conceptions of the state or nation, including notions of citizenship, sovereignty, or national identity contribute to or arise in relation to gender roles.
Elizabeth Ann McKinley is a New Zealand academic and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Melbourne.
Nükhet Sirman is a Turkish social anthropologist. She earned a doctorate degree from Britain's University College London in 1988, and since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. She has done academic analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey and introduced the concept of "familial citizenship" in the academic realm.
