This chapter examines the legacy of the colonial governance of religion. Those struggles have inherited the nation's complex colonial history as an essentialist debate between a Muslim camp advancing a Sharia renaissance agenda and opposed to secularism and a Christian camp opposing the Sharia project and championing the secularist separation of the state from religion. That memory of the colonial experience is borne of both sides' criticism of colonial rule; however, neither the drivers of the Sharia renaissance agenda nor their Christian critics are liberated from the history of imperial rule. Both seek the governance of religion in the manner of the colonial state they despise. As with actors in the colonial state, the postcolonial camps also deploy the notions of secularist separation and religious liberty in fluid ways, belying their arguments about their unconditional fidelity to either idea. The chapter, therefore, argues that imperial secular governmentality, which has survived into the postcolonial state, is far from the untroubled mode of domination it is often criticized as being. It is instead a domain of contestation.

This chapter explores the wider contexts of how Salman Rushdie deploys myths and mythologies and critiques them in his novels. Rushdie’s work has in many ways been influenced by the secular mythology that emerges in Nehru’s seminal book, The Discovery of India. This mythology links Rushdie to ideas of ‘unity in diversity’ and a distinctively Indian form of secularism that produces equal respect for the range of religious communities that inhabit this geopolitical entity. That said, Rushdie engages with a wide range of myths and mythologies, drawn from Islamic traditions, especially Sufism, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Greek mythology, and Christianity. Rushdie also considers new myths and mythologies, especially in his engagement with popular culture, rock music, and the cult of celebrity, as well as the emergence of consumer culture and capitalism.

The rise of postcolonial literary studies is closely entwined with the publishing success of the work of Salman Rushdie; the two have fed off each other. Rushdie’s work engages with several key concepts of postcolonialism. He challenges colonial discourses and historiography, castigates the post-independence state authorities in both India and Pakistan, and portrays new forms of hybrid cultural identities and processes of global migration. While Rushdie has projected himself as an Indian writer with inside knowledge of that country, the many palpable errors in his work as well as his strong British affiliations complicate this claim. So does a comparison with some indigenous postcolonial writers who still live in the subcontinent and write in an Indian language.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept ߝ a linguistic mirage ߝ most would argue there’s something of importance there ߝ but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth ߝ as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 15 ߝ at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

Taking the First World War as an originary moment of global conflict, the chapter examines how a postcolonial approach opens up war studies in terms of perspective and methodology while asking, at the same time, how a focus on warfare puts pressure on the abstractions of postcolonial theory. What do terms such as ‘war archive’ and the ‘literary’ mean in a context where the majority of the world’s combatants and non-combatants were, till recently, largely non-literate? How does the experience of colonialism trouble the very distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in global histories and what is the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial critique? Is diversity the first step towards decolonisation? The chapter engages with these issues through a focus on the colonial dimensions of the First World War. Combining a reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ with readings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Rudyard Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and David Diop, it argues that a postcolonial approach goes far beyond challenging the colour of memory or Eurocentric assumptions into deconstructing the ideology of war itself.

Like the texts of many other major Latin American authors, those of Roberto Bolaño that deal explicitly with race and ethnicity are relatively few. However, one can mention among these such key novels as The Third Reich, published in 2010, but written in 1989, Distant Star published in 1996, The Savage Detectives (1998), By Night in Chile (2003) and his posthumous magnus opus 2666 (2004). Passages and characters in these novels seem to dialogue with contemporary theorizations on race. Underlying his narrative is an acute awareness of the imbrication between fascism, contemporary violence and racism, and the processes of colonization that helped define Latin American cultures and societies.

This chapter introduces key concepts in postcolonial studies and discusses recent developments of postcolonial criticism within biblical studies, such as empire studies, liberation hermeneutics, and cultural studies, including materialist, race/ethnicity, feminist, and queer approaches to empire and colonialism.

This chapter argues that the various forms of fallibility historically identified in the genre of the essay – the tentative, the unfinished, and the imperfect – add up to a freedom from mastery that is peculiarly conducive to the consciousness of the postcolonial subject. The author examines essays by writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, C. L R. James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arundhati Roy.

This chapter contends that international law is structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. Many of international law’s basic concepts, such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development and human rights, have evolved in trajectories unsuited to perceiving or respecting ecological limits. International law treats nature as a resource for wealth generation and environmental degradation as an economic externality to be managed through special regimes. This chapter traces the coevolution of such assumptions about nature alongside formative disciplinary concepts, arguing that such understandings have been central to making international law, and that the discipline helps universalise and normalise them. Thus, to engage with environmental challenges, disciplinary tenets would have to evolve in directions that radically transform the nature of law.

This chapter explores the relationship between human rights and the environment. It begins by asking ‘who we think we are’ to understand the forms of subjecthood and subjectivity produced by human rights. It argues that human rights normalize a series of false conceptions about our collective self that have detrimental social and ecological consequences. The chapter next examines the question of ‘where we think we are’, probing the ontological rift between humans as subjects of rights and ‘the environment’ as the repository of resources with which to satisfy human entitlements. The chapter challenges human rights as a hubristic organizing category and observes that the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions, artificially separated in the chapter, serve to show that the way humans treat each other is inextricable from the way we treat nature. To undo relationships of mastery, ownership, and violence between the subjects and objects of human rights law, projects for human wellbeing and environmental struggles need to engage with and understand each other outside the unproductive rubric of rights discourse.

Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global concerns for which peoples and states have turned to international law for solutions. This edited collection asks how international lawyers have understood the environment: What exactly is it and how do international lawyers purport to govern it? These seemingly straightforward questions have the potential to unmake our discipline through destabilizing formative assumptions about the separation between subjects and objects of governance, between the social and the natural, and between the human and non-human. We explain in this introductory chapter that reexamining international law assumptions about the natural world is not mere theoretical speculation. It is an urgent and necessary step for addressing pressing environmental challenges.

Legitimation via the representative claim is existentially critical for non-governmental organisations in the absence of meaningful consent or authorization. The need to so compensate is manifest in iterative claims to be ‘one of the people’, to be close to the people and ultimately to stand for the people, challenging state representative monopolies that have unravelled in Tanzania, as elsewhere. Claims to stand for the people, however, are fleeting and give way to the conclusive need to act for the people when situations of uncertainty and of perceived failure solicit a more authoritative stance. This chapter expounds the hybridity of contemporary representational practice, whereby state and non-state actors continually reconcile claims to stand and to act for Others. In doing so, it uniquely identifies a productive confluence in mainstream representation theory and long-established anti/postcolonial writings in understanding representational multivalency and making today, disrupting default notions of representation in the West.

Often studied as a transitory step towards the late consolidation of Italian opera in Mexico, the activities of the Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City from 1827 to 1829 call for a more nuanced analysis. The spatial reconceptualisation pursued by transnational and global histories as well as the redefinition of cultural borders triggered by postcolonial studies give us the tools to address García’s Mexican career as a key moment in terms of understanding the effects and issues raised by the spread of Italian opera in Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chapter rethinks García's activities in Mexico City as comprising one of the first (while at the same time highly problematic) cultural encounters between Europe and the young Latin American nation after its emancipation from Spain (1821). Until then, mutual perceptions between Europe and Mexico were distorted by the intrusive cultural politics of imperial Spain. After independence, such misperceptions became more marked. Perceived as a familiar expressions of Europeanness, Italian opera became the arena where issues of identity and otherness were discussed. A close reading of the operas García composed for Mexican audiences will reveal how Italian opera changed by absorbing and reflecting the multiple postcolonial tensions of Mexico City.