Representation matters : (re)articulating collective identities in a postcolonal world / editors, Anette Hoffmann and Esther Peeren.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : Representation matters / Anette Hoffmann and Esther Peeren -- 1. Concepts of postcolonial identity : contingent articulations. Alterity and identities : the paradoxes of authenticity / Sudeep Dasgupta ; Insularity and identity at odds in Martinique: 1973 to 2004 / Marc Brudzinski ; The West between culture(s) and collective identity : notes for a present problematic / Nimrod Ben-Cnaan ; Ubuntu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and South African national identity / Hanneke Stuit ; Resistance or compliance? The problem of Orientalism in Osman Hamdi's paintings / Gülru Çakmak -- 2. Relational histories. Romani identity formation and the globalization of Holocaust discourse / Huub van Baar ; Similarity and difference : The appearance of suffering at the Strokestown Famine Museum / Niamh Ann Kelly -- 3. Rethinking origins and indigeneity. Resignifying genesis, identity, and landscape : routes versus roots / Anette Hoffmann ; From Salsipuedes to Tabaré: race, space, and the Uruguayan subject / Vannina Sztainbok ; Bolivian indigenous identities : reshaping the terms of political debate, 1994-2004 / Claret Vargas -- 4. Reinventing tradition. Performative constructions of female identity at a Hindu ritual : some thoughts on the agentive dimension / Beatrix Hauser ; "We are like fish that were reeled in" : peasant understandings of modernity in Zimbabwe / Guy Thompson ; Silence, absence, loss : Chineseness in post-authoritarian Indonesia / Sonja van Wichelen ; Moving identities : mythology and metaphor in André Brink's Praying mantis / Saskia Lourens.

Print version record.

In the twenty-first century, the terms "representation" and "identity" seem to have gone out of fashion. The essays collected here, however, seek to demonstrate the extent to which they continue to matter in the social, political and cultural struggles waged by marginalized communities across our postcolonial and globalizing world. The volume starts by offering contingent readings of prominent identity-related concepts -- hybridity, insularity, the west, ubuntu, and orientalism -- which ask how these concepts translate into practical, situated ways of grappling with the legacies of colonialism. It continues by exploring the relational articulation of collective identities and their histories (as shared rather than competing), and the way origin narratives and notions of indigeneity, in contexts as diverse as Namibia, Uruguay and Bolivia, function not as fixed roots, but as constructed representations that are manipulated according to the demands of the present. Finally, tradition, too, emerges as open to continuous strategic re-invention in contributions dealing with female agency in a Hindu ritual, peasant understandings of modernity in Zimbabwe, the resurgence of Chinese culture in Indonesia, and André Brink's rewriting of South African history.

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