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Abstract
The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That the world, its presumptions and assumptions, certainly regarding civilizational apotheosis, is today in a state of befuddlement is no mystery. What is mysterious is the persistence of hollow ideas of the character of relationships among peoples, and the distribution of terminologies to refer to these—first world, third world, developed, undeveloped, colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, immigrant, expatriate—in a time when these neither make sense nor offer anything meaningful to the world. The essay finally retreats to the ‘autopsy table’ for inspiration: it imagines that the contradictions and confusions of the present era could also be read as an invitation to humanity to ‘look at itself again and really see’, and to, perhaps, this time, do so with that long-absent courage, truthfulness and humility that speak to human realities and allows for an examination of debris from unexplored past and present relationships that now disorder the human future.
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Adams, Tim. “Neil MacGregor: ‘Britain Forgets Its Past. Germany Confronts It’ ” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 Apr. 2016. Web. 17 June 2016.
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Escuchi, Amunga. “Cricket players.” 2016, JPEG.
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Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic metafiction. Parody and the Intertextuality of History” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. P. O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 3–32.
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Hoenig, Patrick. “Visualizing Trauma: The Belgian Museum for Central Africa and Its Discontents.” Postcolonial Studies 17.4 (2014): 343–366.
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MacManus, Dony. “Dony MacManus.” Dony MacManus. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 June 2016.
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Makanga, Nelson. “Mbote.” 2016. JPEG
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Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonising Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” University of Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Johannesburg. 2015. Keynote address. Available at: http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf (accessed 12 June 2016).
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Ndii, David. “Kenya Is a Cruel Marriage, It’s Time We Talk Divorce.” Nation Newspaper [Nairobi] 26 Mar. 2016:1–2. http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Kenya-is-a-cruel-marriage–it-s-time-we-talk-divorce/-/440808/3134132/-/yrd7n0/-/index.html. Web.
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Shire, Warsan “What they did yesterday afternoon”, 2015, http://amberjkeyser.com/2015/11/warsan-shire/
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Silverman, Deborah. “Chocolates-as-cultural-blind-spots-responding-to-civilization” Kaplan Institute lecture. February 2013. Available at: http://sites.northwestern.edu/akih/2013/02/21/ (accessed 10 June 2016)
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Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
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Search for other papers by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
The essay enquires into what is accepted in academic and political circles as ‘post-colonial’ reality and questions some of the assumptions about its imagination, narratives, and edifices. It does this through the lens of moments taken from lived ‘post-coloniality’, mostly out of Kenya, which, like most ‘independent nations’ presumed a cut-off point between ‘colonial’ and its ‘post’ in the solemn ritual act of swapping flags one midnight. That the world, its presumptions and assumptions, certainly regarding civilizational apotheosis, is today in a state of befuddlement is no mystery. What is mysterious is the persistence of hollow ideas of the character of relationships among peoples, and the distribution of terminologies to refer to these—first world, third world, developed, undeveloped, colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, immigrant, expatriate—in a time when these neither make sense nor offer anything meaningful to the world. The essay finally retreats to the ‘autopsy table’ for inspiration: it imagines that the contradictions and confusions of the present era could also be read as an invitation to humanity to ‘look at itself again and really see’, and to, perhaps, this time, do so with that long-absent courage, truthfulness and humility that speak to human realities and allows for an examination of debris from unexplored past and present relationships that now disorder the human future.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 555 | 72 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 70 | 7 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 99 | 5 | 0 |