Bibliographic record
Abstract
The injunction 'always historicise' reverberates like a mantra in postcolonial literary criticism.For a variety of reasons, it is an injunction that all too often remains a gesture, with postcolonial histories relegated to peremptory footnotes.The ambition of this Companion is to provide detail of the many histories of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and to encourage critical reflection on the relation between postcolonial literary works and their historical contexts.To this end, we have assembled just over 220 entries written by 166 postcolonial scholars that survey major events, ideas, movements, and figures that constitute the historical contexts of postcolonial literatures.The Companion focuses principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world -Africa (East, Southern and West), Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, the Middle East, New Zealand, the Pacific, South Asia, and South-east Asia.For each of these parts of the former British Empire, in addition to entries on specific events, there are long survey entries on their respective historiographies and women's histories.There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have claimed the title 'postcolonial', notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States.The entries cover the period after the end of colonial rule, but as many postcolonial literary works revisit the pre-colonial and colonial periods, the Companion includes many entries on these earlier periods too.Certain events that fall outside the Anglophone world, but which have had an impact on postcolonial literatures in English, are also included.A supplementary volume to this Companion on the postcolonial literatures of Continental Europe is underway, and will elaborate these events in much more detail.We remain conscious that much of Britain's postcolonial history has inevitably been left out, but believe that within the constraints of one volume, the vast complexity of this history is conveyed.Each entry provides a summary of the historical event/ idea/ movement/ figure, as well as bibliographies of postcolonial literary works and histories for further reading.The Companion is extensively cross-referenced and indexed.All related entries are cross-referenced, and there are two indexes at the back: the first index lists all the literary works mentioned in the Companion, and the second is a general index of names and subjects.What the Companion demonstrates vividly is the variety of historical experiences under colonialism and neo-colonialism.While certain imperial patterns of economic, political and cultural domination might have been imposed in broadly similar fashion, local conditions have guaranteed very different outcomes.These differences continue to mark contemporary postcolonial writing, as common critical terms assume different shades of meaning in the different post-colonies.Does 'subaltern agency' mean the same thing in Canada as it does in West Africa or South-east Asia?What are the connotations of the term 'settler' in the Middle East, East Africa and New Zealand?Does 'hybrid identity' mean the same thing in the Caribbean as it does in Britain or the United States?Does 'nationas-imagined-community' have the same resonance in Pakistan as Nigeria or the Pacific?Does reclaiming pre-colonial cultures mean the same thing in Australia and India?Do
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".