ABSTRACT

Drawing together the insights of postcolonial scholarship and cultural studies, Popular Postcolonialisms questions the place of ‘the popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm. Multidisciplinary in focus, this collection explores the extent to which popular forms are infused with colonial logics, and whether they can be employed by those advocating for change. It considers a range of fiction, film, and non-hegemonic cultural forms, engaging with topics such as environmental change, language activism, and cultural imperialism alongside analysis of figures like Tarzan and Frankenstein. Building on the work of cultural theorists, it asks whether the popular is actually where elite conceptions of the world may best be challenged. It also addresses middlebrow cultural production, which has tended to be seen as antithetical to radical traditions, asking whether this might, in fact, form an unlikely realm from which to question, critique, or challenge colonial tropes. Examining the ways in which the imprint of colonial history is in evidence (interrogated, mythologized or sublimated) within popular cultural production, this book raises a series of speculative questions exploring the interrelation of the popular and the postcolonial.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

part I|62 pages

The Radical Popular

chapter 1|22 pages

‘Welcome to The University of Brixton’

BBC Radio and the West Indian Everyday

chapter 3|17 pages

Sequential Art in the Age of Postcolonial Production

Comics Collectives in Israel and South Africa

part II|60 pages

The Middlebrow

chapter 4|21 pages

Murder in Mesopotamia

Agatha Christie’s Life and Work in the Middle East

chapter 5|22 pages

‘Junior Romantic Anthropologist Bore’

Colin MacInnes’s Critical Adventures in Post-War Multiracial Britain

chapter 6|17 pages

Tarzan the Ape Man

Screening ‘The Subordination of Women, Nature and Colonies’ in the 1930s

part III|64 pages

Commodification

chapter 8|23 pages

Everything Must Go

Popularity and the Postcolonial Novel

chapter 9|18 pages

Consuming Post-Millennial Indian Chick Lit

Visuality and the Popular in Post-Millennial India

part IV|65 pages

Technology

chapter 10|27 pages

Monster Mines and Pipelines

Frankenstein Figures of Tar Sands Technology in Canadian Popular Culture

chapter 11|15 pages

African or Virtual, Popular or Poetry

The Spoken Word Platform Word N Sound Series