Search Results (137)

Rwanda has experienced the tragedy of conflict and hatred based on what was politically created as ethnicity. That bad condition grew in history with the post-colonial leaders and produced the genocide of the Tutsi population in the country in 1994. Currently, there is no open violence in Rwanda, but there are some significant elements of socio-religious crisis that are consequences of the recent past, genocide, and war. Therefore, in this article, the effort is made to examine what has been done in Society and the Catholic Church, to which 44% of Rwandans religiously belong, and what the weak points are in the Church and the State’s reconciliation efforts, that could be improved by inspiration through the concept of reconciliation of Desmond Mpilo Tutu. To carry on this research, this study adopts a comparative and hermeneutic method where the various sources on the Rwandan journey in forgiveness and reconciliation are analysed, and then, the forgiveness and reconciliation work of Desmond Mpilo Tutu. The meeting of two contexts shows that both victims and perpetrators need the restoration of their humanity and dignity, but also that there is “no future without forgiveness”. Full article

This article documents and analyzes a three-month intercultural performance collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 1992—a pivotal moment following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork methodology developed through decades of collaboration with Indigenous communities in Alaska, Southern Africa, and Siberia, the project employed trance techniques, rhythm-based training, and ritual archaeology to reconstruct pre-Christian Slavic performance practices. The resulting production, Shadows from the Planet Fire, emerged through a process that positioned ritual not as nostalgic revival but as a living technology for addressing cultural trauma and existential displacement. This account contributes to performance studies, applied theatre, and cultural heritage discourse by demonstrating how cosmocentric Indigenous methodologies can be adapted to address the spiritual and psychological wounds of post-industrial, post-colonial societies. The work establishes foundational principles for what the author terms “Techdigenous” practice—the synthesis of Indigenous wisdom traditions with contemporary performance contexts—and argues for ritual as a necessary consciousness technology in an era of ecological crisis and cultural fragmentation. Full article

This article examines how newsroom routines shape the health, safety, and professional experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) journalists in U.S. broadcast news. While journalistic norms of objectivity and neutrality often frame risk as evenly shared, this study situates safety within routine newsroom practices to show how risk and institutional support are unevenly distributed, particularly during high-stakes coverage such as protests, door-knocks, and politically charged events. The analysis draws on qualitative, in-depth interviews conducted as part of a larger study on journalists’ identities and definitions of fairness and applies a critical framework attentive to power and postcolonial influences in newsroom organizations. Findings indicate that BIPOC journalists routinely navigate tensions between production demands and personal safety, with their lived experiences in the field frequently diverging from the assumptions of white colleagues and newsroom leadership. Participants describe adapting newsroom routines by setting boundaries, asserting professional judgment, and challenging unsafe expectations. These practices illuminate how newsroom routines are both sites of constraint and negotiation. This article concludes that attention to identity and power within newsroom routines is essential for understanding how fairness, safety, and ethical practice are enacted in contemporary broadcast journalism. Full article

This article explores how young women of colour in Norway navigate everyday racism and how such negotiations are shaped by the tension between speaking out or maintaining social harmony in a society that largely perceives itself as egalitarian and non-racist. The study draws on qualitative interviews with 13 participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds—some were adopted, and others were children of immigrant parents or immigrants themselves. The analysis examines how anti-racism strategies are shaped by drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, particularly the concept of the feminist killjoy. The notion of Orientalism, and the notion of cultural repertoires. The findings show that participants demonstrated different reactions from silence to confrontation, all demanding emotional labour. Several participants described the burden of having to choose between remaining polite and educating others, while others chose silence as a protective strategy. Rather than viewing resistance as a binary between silence and confrontation, this study demonstrates that everyday anti-racism is a fluid and context-dependent practice. How women performed anti-racism was also closely linked to their social position, social support, cultural norms, and access to political perspectives. The stories show that, over time, some women became more outspoken or secure in their interpretations of racist encounters, especially when gaining distance from constraining environments. Full article

This study advances the Confucian Visual Transformation Model (CVTM) to analyse how Confucian values are visually reformulated in contemporary Malaysian Chinese art. Integrating artist interviews (n = 5), symbolic visual coding, and audience surveys (n = 227), the research addresses the lack of empirical frameworks for transcultural aesthetics. While an initial exploratory factor analysis (EFA) confirmed four dimensions—Ren (benevolence), He (harmony), WenZhi (technique-ideology), and MeiShan (aesthetic-moral)—it also revealed structural overlaps. Consequently, the study proposes CVTM 2.0, which replaces additive metrics with a tension-driven fusion mechanism. Key innovations include a Symbolic Tension Index (STI) for dynamic weighting and a fuzzy integration layer to handle overlap between WenZhi and MeiShan. Results indicate that Confucian dimensions are not static but are activated through compositional and material tensions. Theoretically, this reframes Confucian aesthetics as a context-responsive system; practically, it offers a replicable blueprint for analysing postcolonial identity negotiation in Southeast Asian art. Full article

This essay contends that Jean-Luc Godard’s late digital cinema elaborates a geopolitical aesthetics in which Europe confronts the return of its repressed histories through the very instability of the digital image. While Europe has long functioned in Godard’s work as both theme and epistemic horizon—echoing the Hegelian cartographies—Film Socialisme (2010) and The Image Book (2018) transform this Eurocentrism into a site of crisis. In these films, what Fredric Jameson terms the “political unconscious” (1981) emerges through the spectral return of Palestine and the Arab world, compelling a reckoning with colonial legacies and the limits of representation. The digital turn proves decisive. Godard mobilizes pixelation, saturation, glitch, and decomposed sound to reveal what might be called the technological unconscious of the medium. I develop the concept of “Digital Orientalism” to designate how Orientalist chronotopes persist in the digital age yet are unsettled by Godard’s experimental manipulation of audiovisual fragments. Through close readings of Film Socialisme and The Image Book, which incorporates works by Arab filmmakers including Youssef Chahine, Nacer Khemir, Ossama Mohammed, and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, I show how Godard’s fractured montages produce symptomatic cartographies of the world-system where repression, memory, and accident collide. Full article

This article examines the persistent legal invisibility of the Kashmiri Pandits within international frameworks on indigenous rights and internal displacement. Despite meeting definitional criteria under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the community remains unrecognised as either indigenous or internally displaced. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), constructivist norm diffusion and decolonial intersectional critique, this article argues that this exclusion arises not from normative ambiguity but from geopolitical selectivity and epistemic suppression. Through doctrinal analysis of India’s treaty commitments, including its accession to the Genocide Convention (1959) and its interpretative reservation to Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (1979), this study reveals how recognition is constrained by state narratives of sovereignty and secularism. Supported by evidence from the NHRC inquiry, IDMC displacement data, and comparative experiences such as Native American recognition this paper demonstrates that categories of protection in international law are applied unevenly, depending on political compatibility rather than legal principle. It calls for renewed engagement with epistemic justice and narrative accountability in rethinking indigeneity and displacement in postcolonial contexts. Full article

Eastern dance traditions have historically been shaped by the continuum of socio-political forces, including colonial encounters, and the aftermath of the Empire. An embodied repository of cultural histories, Orientalized dancer communities delineate genealogies of socio-cultural oppression, and queer resistance against dominant forces of erasure. The Oriental dancer in particular, has figured prominently in long-nineteenth century decadent literatures of the Empire, regularly fetishized as an exotic spectacle, inherently imbricated in queer traditions incomprehensible to the West. In postcolonial literature, the bodies of these Oriental dancers often become the ontological space upon which resistance against the intersecting racial and political discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-colonialist nationalism is enacted. This study interrogates the triangulated discourses of decadence, Orientalism, and anti-colonial nationalism by critically analyzing the nationalist replications and postcolonial resistance to decadent Orientalist representations of the “Oriental” dancer in British and Indian decadent poetry. Through the transnational and transhistorical study of three poems, namely, Athur O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé,” Sarojini Naidu’s “Indian Dancers,” and Kamala Das’s “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” this study explores the persistent reverberations of the nineteenth-century decadent movement in the postcolonial era. Across these three poems, I would trace the complicities and departures of fin-de-siècle decadence from the colonial discourse, to study how it can be subversively transformed into a language of resistance to the violence visited upon the subaltern dancers’ textual and sexual bodies. Full article

This conceptual article explores how the film sector within the creative industries contributes to sustainable development and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in post-socialist and postcolonial cities. It develops a framework linking the creative industries to the SDGs and applies it to the film sectors of Łódź (Poland) and Mumbai (India). The analysis shows how film production supports the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability by fostering social inclusion, strengthening urban economies, and promoting environmental responsibility. The study also highlights the sector’s role in advancing green production practices and raising public awareness of sustainability issues. Overall, the analysis demonstrate that the film industry contributes to sustainable urban transformation, illustrating how cities can leverage their cinematic heritage to build cultural resilience, stimulate local development, and enhance social well-being. Full article

This article examines the paradigm shift in Christian mission from conversion-centered models toward dialogical and justice-oriented praxis. Taking the Steyler Missionaries as a case study, this approach engages post-Vatican II theology, postcolonial critique, and Comparative Theology to demonstrate how mission can embody epistemic humility, contextual sensitivity, and theological hospitality. Based on qualitative interviews and textual analysis, the study highlights how dialogical mission reshapes Christian identity through mutual transformation rather than doctrinal transmission. The findings indicate that Comparative Theology provides a significant methodological and theological resource for interreligious engagement, enabling missionaries to move beyond hegemonic proclamation toward relational and ethically grounded witness. By integrating theological reflection with empirical insight, the article demonstrates how dialogical mission contributes to a reconfiguration of Christian witness in pluralistic and postcolonial contexts and offers a constructive framework for the future of mission practice. Full article

Hydroelectric power projects were an integral part of twentieth-century postcolonial modernisation in Ireland. In 1925, the Cumann na nGaedheal government began the Shannon Scheme, which created the then-largest dam in Europe at Ardnacrusha. Hydroelectric power stations have since emerged across Ireland, from Poulaphouca and Ballyshannon to Inniscarra and Carrigadrohid. Despite the importance of hydropower in shaping Irish environments, ecocritical scholars like Matthew Henry and Sharae Deckard have shown that depictions of hydropower are generally understudied in the environmental and energy humanities and in Irish studies. This article traces twentieth-century hydroelectric power projects in Ireland through three plays: Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River (1931), Frank Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade (1958), and Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997). Depictions of hydropower in these stage and radio dramas reveal an ongoing cultural awareness of one of modernity’s more insidious pollutants, namely, noise pollution. Exploring sound elements in representations of hydropower across diverse media and genres requires grappling with the legacy of colonialism on material environments in technocratic solutions to postcolonial national development and to planetary crises like climate change. Using postcolonial ecocritical and ecomedia studies lenses, this article analyses aural environments in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays to elucidate intersections of medium, energy extraction, and hydropower that continue to resonate across Ireland. Besides providing historical insight into changing relationships with material environments, these plays also expose environmental and multispecies injustices caused by energy extraction projects on Ireland’s rivers. The aural environments in these plays also raise questions about what kind of modernisation and infrastructure projects would support multispecies modernities for more just and decolonial futures. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how these twentieth-century literary representations of hydroelectric energy extraction imagine alternative possibilities to anthropocentric modernisation through attending to multisensory and multispecies attachments to place. Full article

Postcolonialism stands as a synergy between new and old sets of literature that have come together unevenly and in different ways. Postcolonial interventions have contended with IR core themes over the past four decades. Over the last two decades, there has also been a boom in the scholarship that examines non-Western IR, with some emerging from the contributions of critical theorists who sought to question the dominance of mainstream perspectives such as (neo)realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. How has postcolonialism influenced IR, and how does it relate to non-Western approaches of the ‘international’? This article presents a historical categorization of postcolonial interventions on world politics as postcolonial 1.0 (the anti-colonial struggles against empire); 2.0 (subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness); and 3.0 (disrupting hegemonic epistemes). It then provides a review of whether and how postcolonial approaches align with the movement towards a non-Western IR. Full article

The eighteenth century marked a peak period of globalization, during which Chinese porcelain emerged as a pivotal commodity in global material culture. This study focuses on a distinctive category, Chinese armorial porcelain, as a transcultural and hybridity artefact exchanged between High Qing China and Britain. Drawing on a multidisciplinary approach that combines close visual analysis with theoretical insights from material culture studies, postcolonial theory and consumer sociology, this study examines the evolving design language of these hybrid wares. It offers, for the first time, a systematic typology of Chinese decorative patterns on armorial porcelain and traces their compositional shifts over time. The analysis reveals a gradual Europeanization of these objects, corresponding to changing European perceptions of China—from a space of cultural fascination to a subordinated Orientalist otherness. At the same time, these porcelains register significant shifts in British social values, taste hierarchies, and consumption practices. Crucially, this study foregrounds the role of Chinese patterns, long treated as peripheral, as active agents in visual and cultural negotiation. Full article

This study examines how Windhoek’s urban form, shaped by apartheid-era planning, continues to influence neighbourhood travel behaviour, socio-economic disparity, and residential perceptions. It addresses three key questions: (1) How do socio-economic characteristics, neighbourhood perceptions, and travel patterns differ between compact and sprawled areas? (2) Which socio-economic, perceptual, and spatial factors are associated with the likelihood of neighbourhood-based shopping in compact versus sprawled urban forms? (3) What are the determinants of entertainment and recreational travel behaviour within neighbourhoods across the two urban forms? Using survey data from 1000 residents, the analysis employs chi-square tests, Mann–Whitney U tests, binary logistic regression, and multivariate regression models. Findings reveal that compact areas, characterised by higher incomes, stronger place attachment, and greater infrastructural diversity, support more frequent neighbourhood travel. By contrast, sprawled peripheries, despite higher population densities, remain marked by socio-economic marginalisation, limited amenity access, and negative perceptions that constrain neighbourhood mobility. Across both forms, long-term residence and belonging strongly predict neighbourhood travel, while concerns over traffic safety and crime consistently suppress participation. The results show that spatial proximity alone does not ensure accessibility; emotional, perceptual, and structural barriers mediate neighbourhood mobility. The study highlights the need for integrated planning that addresses both physical infrastructure and lived experience to advance equitable and sustainable mobility in post-colonial contexts. Full article

In recent decades, the concept of a so-called Dark Age in ancient Sudan at the beginning of the first millennium BCE has been called into question within the field of Nubian archaeology. This is primarily due to new archaeological findings at urban sites such as Tombos and Amara West, as well as new theoretical approaches developed during the postcolonial turn. This study aims to show that new remote sensing, surveys and excavations in the Attab to Ferka region of Sudan have also revealed important evidence of continued occupation after the end of Egypt’s colonial rule over Nubia. In particular, studies of settlement patterns and ceramics enrich our understanding of people’s lives during the period between 1070 and 750 BCE and allow us to expand on dynamic processes, local forms of resilience and innovation. This new understanding of the persistence of communities after the fall of colonial Nubia under Egyptian rule facilitates a more nuanced interpretation of the evolution of the Napatan Empire, thereby challenging the conventional concept of secondary states. The Attab to Ferka case study demonstrates that previously marginalised regions and communities are significant contributors to cultural dynamics and achievements during the first millennium BCE in Sudan. Full article