Virtual Library

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity's potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today.

In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

How We Go Home shares contemporary Indigenous stories in the long and ongoing fight to protect Native land and life.

In myriad ways, each narrator’s life has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience—and by the struggle of how to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous.

Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada’s Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories shaped by loss, injustice, resilience, and the struggle to share space with settler nations.

These chapters by eight Korea specialists present a new approach to human rights issues in Korea. Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea’s modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of the ideas of human rights as they have developed in the Korean context. Beginning with the Independence Club of the late nineteenth century and continuing through to the constitutional and judicial structures underlying the Sixth Republic Government of Roh Tae Woo in South Korea, these papers illuminate the sometimes complex interactions between modern Korean human-rights issues and the legacies of Korean culture and colonial occupation.

The contributors provide a corrective to two common errors: one, an overemphasis on the tension between residual Confucian culture and human-rights concepts; two, the opposite error, a defensive nationalism that gives rise to ill-founded efforts to identify democratic antecedents in the Korean past. Instead, these authors allow each episode in the emergence of Korean human rights thought and action to stand in the context of its own time and of Korea’s modern history. The final sections deal with the usefulness and appropriateness of U.S. policies toward human rights in South Korea and comparatively with the overall issues raised in the volume.

Situated at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial studies, Hybrid Anxieties analyzes the intertwined and composite aspects of identities and textual forms in the wake of the French-Algerian War (1954–1962). C. L. Quinan argues that the war precipitated a dynamic in which a contestation of hegemonic masculinity occurred alongside a production of queer modes of subjectivity, embodiment, and memory that subvert norms. Innovations in literature and cinema were also directly impacted by the long and difficult process of decolonization, as the war provoked a rethinking of politics and aesthetics. The novels, films, and poetry analyzed in Hybrid Anxieties trace this imbrication of content and form, demonstrating how a postwar fracturing had both salutary and injurious effects, not only on bodies and psyches but also on artistic forms. Adopting a queer postcolonial perspective, Hybrid Anxieties adds a new impulse to the question of how to rethink hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality, thereby opening up new spaces for considering the redemptive and productive possibilities of negotiating life in a postcolonial context. Without losing sight of the trauma of this particularly violent chapter in history, Hybrid Anxieties proposes a new kind of hybridity that, however anxious and anticipatory, emphasizes the productive forces of a queer desire to deconstruct teleological relationships between past, present, and future.
 

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

In recent years, discussion of the colonial period in Korea has centered mostly on the degree of exploitation or development that took place domestically, while international aspects have been relatively neglected. Colonial discourse, such as characterization of Korea as a “hermit nation,” was promulgated around the world by Japan and haunts us today. The colonization of Korea also transformed Japan and has had long-term consequences for post–World War II Northeast Asia as a whole.

Through sections that explore Japan’s images of Korea, colonial Koreans’ perceptions of foreign societies and foreign relations, and international perceptions of colonial Korea, the essays in this volume show the broad influence of Japanese colonialism not simply on the Korean peninsula, but on how the world understood Japan and how Japan understood itself. When initially incorporated into the Japanese empire, Korea seemed lost to Japan’s designs, yet Korean resistance to colonial rule, along with later international fear of Japanese expansion, led the world to rethink the importance of Korea as a future sovereign nation.

Quatre jours de plus, et Mouloud Feraoun aurait connu l'Algérie indépendante. Il a été assassiné par l'OAS le 15 mars 1962. Son Journal, écrit durant la guerre, rend compte de ses espoirs, de sa tristesse et de ses doutes quotidiens. De l'insurrection des fellaghas à l'oppression du peuple algérien, l'écrivain se fait un devoir de témoigner des événements de son pays. Né en 1913 à Tizi Hibel, Mouloud Feraoun a été instituteur et directeur d'école en Algérie avant de devenir inspecteur des Centres sociaux. Il est notamment l'auteur de Le Fils du pauvre et LaTerre et le Sang (Prix populiste 1953). Mouloud Feraoun est mort assassiné en 1962 à Alger.

“This honest man, this good man, this man who never did wrong to anyone, who devoted his life to the public good, and who was one of the greatest writers in Algeria, has been murdered. . . . Not by accident, not by mistake, but called by his name and killed with preference.” So wrote Germaine Tillion in Le Monde shortly after Mouloud Feraoun’s assassination by a right wing French terrorist group, the Organisation Armée Secrète, just three days before the official cease-fire ended Algeria’s eight-year battle for independence from France. However, not even the gunmen of the OAS could prevent Feraoun’s journal from being published. Journal, 1955–1962 appeared posthumously in French in 1962 and remains the single most important account of everyday life in Algeria during decolonization. Feraoun was one of Algeria’s leading writers. He was a friend of Albert Camus, Emmanuel Roblès, Pierre Bourdieu, and other French and North African intellectuals. A committed teacher, he had dedicated his life to preparing Algeria’s youth for a better future. As a Muslim and Kabyle writer, his reflections on the war in Algeria afford penetrating insights into the nuances of Algerian nationalism, as well as into complex aspects of intellectual, colonial, and national identity. Feraoun’s Journal captures the heartbreak of a writer profoundly aware of the social and political turmoil of the time. This classic account, now available in English, should be read by anyone interested in the history of European colonialism and the tragedies of contemporary Algeria.

Assia Djebar L'Amour, la fantasia Nous glissons du passé lointain au passé proche, de la troisième personne à la première ; extraordinaire évocation du père, instituteur de français, de la mère, des cousines, des femmes cloîtrées vives et dont le cri et l'amour nous poursuivent.
Assia Djebar, sans conteste la plus grande romancière du Maghreb, nous donne ici son oeuvre la plus aboutie.


De l'odeur d'amour, de viol plus que de séduction, de l'émotion de la prise d'Alger, il y a cent cinquante ans, à l'arrachement d' il y a vingt ans, c'est comme si la voix d'une femme appelée Algérie venait nous crier ce qui échappe aux historiens, aux analystes, aux commentateurs, aux politiques, bref aux hommes. [...] Un beau livre comme celui-ci, entre la France et l'Algérie, écrit dans un français somptueux, tel qu'il brûle et rayonne entre nos mains, et, malgré le crime, le sang, tous les déchets de l'imposture, c'est du pain partagé.
Jean David, V.S.D.

Printemps 1956. Pour l'Algérie, c'est le temps de la guerre et de la lutte pour l'indépendance. Dans cette ville au flanc d’une montagne, ceux qui combattent risquent l'exil, la prison, la torture, la mort. Les femmes regardent le maquis où leurs maris font la révolution. Assia Djebar fait entendre les cris et les silences de ces femmes qui, tout autant que les maquisards, se sont battues pour voir leur pays libre.

Assia Djebar, one of the most distinguished woman writers to emerge from the Arab world, wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. Like the classic film The Battle of Algiers--enjoying renewed interest in the face of world events--Djebar's novel sheds light on current world conflicts as it reveals a determined Arab insurgency against foreign occupation, from the inside out. However, Djebar focuses on the experiences of women drawn into the politics of resistance. Her novel recounts the interlocking lives of women in a rural Algerian town who find themselves joined in solidarity and empower each other to engage in the fight for independence. Narrating the resistance movement from a variety of perspectives--from those of traditional wives to liberated students to political organizers--Djebar powerfully depicts the circumstances that drive oppressed communities to violence and at the same time movingly reveals the tragic costs of war.