Skip to main content

Lisa Lau

Followers

23

Following

4

Co-author

1

Public Views

I am a postcolonial scholar who pioneered re-orientalism theory. My work also includes gender studies, issues of representation, class, power, identity politics. My areas of research span social-cultural and literary geographies, drawing primarily from a dataset of South Asian writings in English. I also work in the confluence of gender-disaster-development. My recent publications include topics such as precarity, surrogacy, hospitality, romance, anger, urban India.

less

David Martin-Jones

University of Glasgow

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Kyung Hee University

Nicholas D Hartlep

Berea College

University of Edinburgh

Ronak K Kapadia

University of Illinois at Chicago

Viacheslav Kuleshov

Stockholm University

Aurelia Martín-Casares

University of Málaga

Jadavpur University

University of California, Berkeley

David Scott Diffrient

Colorado State University

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Lisa Lau

Precarity as a Mode of Enquiry

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, 2022

Meeting grounds: perceiving and defining interdisciplinarity across the arts, social sciences and sciences

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2004

... I am a Malaysian of Chinese descent; Malay is my national language, and Chinese my mother ton... more

A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India

Interventions, 2018

various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian au... more various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India's ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.

Decolonizing the Global North university: Host-guest dynamics and the limits of hospitality

by Ana Cristina Mendes and Lisa Lau

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2024

This article critically assesses the hospitality premise on which the project-practice of decolon... more This article critically assesses the hospitality premise on which the project-practice of decolonizing the curriculum rests, investigating the texture and limitations of the hospitality that Global North universities seem willing to offer their many Others, including students, staff, and stakeholders, particularly in the form of knowledges and pedagogies. It investigates how the guests-strangers are treated within the Global North Universities, their knowledges posited as a separate category within the epistemic system rather than integrated into being a part of the system; guests relegated to unpaid servants when obliged to shoulder the lion's share of the work in addressing the unfair, racist systems which devalue them and their knowledges. Embedding the discourse of decolonizing the university in and with postcolonial concepts, the article highlights the profoundly unequal power relationships between hosts and guests that continue to inform even the bestintentioned Global North higher education institutions, self-declaredly dedicated to decolonization efforts. It argues for pressing need on the part of the Global North universities to deepen their awareness of the historical legacies of coloniality and its matrix of power, and consequently reflect on the treatment of Global South guests and knowledges. This long, hard look at their role of host is necessary for a true committment to decolonising the university spaces and rendering them genuinely hospitable, and to transforming the unequal power dynamics and the impacts on guests-stranger Others.

Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality

Interventions

Amnesty continues several of the social justice themes of precarity and subalternity (at times, a... more Amnesty continues several of the social justice themes of precarity and subalternity (at times, a violent subaltern agency) of Aravind Adiga’s fiction, and its literary narrative centres again on criminal acts and the moral dilemma the protagonist faces over whether to report a murder and expose his illegality to do “the right thing.” Offering a postcolonial reading of Amnesty supported by concepts from migration, citizenship, and human rights studies, this essay discusses the novel’s representation of the inhospitable conditions experienced by migrants victimized by the precarity of their status, whether discursively categorized as illegal, irregular, undocumented, unauthorized, or unlawful; by the consequent exploitations and abuse without recourse to justice; and by the suspension of their human rights. The theme of illegality is approached in Adiga’s narrative from a more radical perspective of liminality – the state of “legal liminality” in which irregular migrants find themselves when longing to belong in the host country, or at least be legalized, while gripped and besieged by myriad daily fears and anxieties that their legal status will be discovered, compounded by a resolute refusal to leave the host country. Adiga forces this theoretical question of legal liminality to an extreme by presenting a protagonist who, as an irregular migrant, has committed the political crime of illegally overstaying in the host country. The central question of amnesty is raised when the protagonist faces the dilemma of stepping up to civic responsibilities without having been conceded participatory rights.

Introducing re-Orientalism: a new manifestation of Orientalism: Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes

Routledge, May 23, 2012

Contextualising Book Covers and Their Changing Roles

Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation, 2015

This chapter reviews the move from book jackets (as packaging) to book covers (as marketing devic... more This chapter reviews the move from book jackets (as packaging) to book covers (as marketing devices), tracking how the design of book covers has shifted from representing the text between the covers, to representing literary genres and brands. It maps the movement of publishing from being a gentlemanly pursuit, to its current commodification as large-scale commerce controlled by conglomerates. The chapter takes into account the many roles of publishing houses, especially as gatekeepers, and their power and influence in determining availability, access, and audience. It also notes how book covers now have to jostle for space, attention, and sales, concerned less with author intention or artistry, and more with branding and marketing. Book covers continue to play their roles in representation, but of different parties and concerns. This chapter considers books as material objects rather than literary ones, focusing on the corporeality of books and book covers.

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Gender, Place & Culture, 2013

Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose... more Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.

Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English

Decolonising medical knowledge – The case of breast cancer and ethnicity in the UK

Journal of Cancer Policy

Wither the plurality of decolonising the curriculum? Safe spaces and identitarian politics in the arts and humanities classroom

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: Wha... more Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of ‘safe’? Prompted by a real-life ‘n-word incident’ in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with the enactment of the ‘wounded attachments’ of identitarian politics and the playing of ‘Privilege or Oppression Olympics’. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom.

Twenty-First-Century Antigones: The Postcolonial Woman Shaped by 9/11 in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

Studies in the Novel, 2021

Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market

Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, 2014

Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comme... more Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comment on the meteoric success of Indian writing in English (IWE): ‘[T]he English novel was parochial in the 80s. Indian writers have given us the colour. We badly needed it.’2 Amis’s claim puts a questionmark on the whole issue of the UK’s reception of IWE as, according to him, IWE was given a warm welcome because of its ability to provide what Graham Huggan has termed ‘exotic’ features and what Francesca Orsini discusses as ‘fantastical’ writings, rather than necessarily being welcomed for its literary merit. Anis Shivani also makes a similar accusation against IWE as it is disseminated in the USA when he says that ‘American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange’.3 The same can be applied to contemporary IWE, marketed and circulated throughout the world today. Lisa Lau rightly links this commodification of IWE, catering to Western readers, to the adoption of re-Orientalist4 strategies. The situation in terms of the Western reception of IWE has reached such a state that Tabish Khair even argues that ‘the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage’.5

The Male South Asian Domestic Servant: Master-Servant Relationships, Class Chasms, and Systematic Emasculation

Sri Lanka Journal of Humanities, 2014

The Re-Orientalising Strategy of the Unreliable Narrator

Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English

This chapter demonstrates the development of a novel re-Orientalising strategy in 21st century In... more This chapter demonstrates the development of a novel re-Orientalising strategy in 21st century Indian writing in English (IWE). Through detailed formal textual interpretation of the works of Jeet Thayil (Narcopolis), Akhil Sharma (The Obedient Father), Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger), and Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia), the employment of the unreliable narrator is deconstructed and unpacked to ascertain its role, effect, and impact. The case studies contain a range of unreliable narrators, from the deceitful to the unbalanced, from the alternative to the untrustworthy. It is argued that by employing unreliable narrators, IWE can subvert the problems of re-Orientalism to some degree, requiring of readers more contextual knowledge, more critical judgement, and more sceptical scrutiny, thus altering the reception and the literary marketplace.

The language of power and the power of language

Power and Narrative, 2007

This article will discuss the complexity of positionality and the implications of writing in the ... more This article will discuss the complexity of positionality and the implications of writing in the English language in a South Asian context. Given the postcolonial heritage of South Asia, contemporary authors producing literature in English find themselves confronted with both tremendous opportunity as well as tremendous controversy. Literature has become a product in the circuit of culture, and the concluding sections will therefore discuss and explore how writers, and particularly diasporic writers, using English (as opposed to the other languages in India) are able to seize a disproportionate amount of world attention and consequently, through their choice of language, gain the power to make their presentations and representations dominant and prevalent in terms of distribution and influence.

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

This article brings the concept of anger, particularly gendered anger, to bear on a postcolonial ... more This article brings the concept of anger, particularly gendered anger, to bear on a postcolonial and intersectional reading of the apparent ragelessness of working-class Indian women who act as surrogates in the international commercialgestational surrogacy (ICGS) industry in India. We explore how rage—the robust expression of the primary emotion of anger—can be silenced, how anger can be disallowed out of existence. Despite being given little information and say over the surrogacy process from start to end, taking high risks with their immediate and long-term mental and physical health (as well as risking social stigmatization and the welfare of their own families), and the lack of rights they are permitted during pregnancy over their own bodies and lives, Indian surrogates are not usually seen as either articulating or experiencing anger, resentment, or outrage over the situation. They seem to be singularly “rageless” at their victimization. This article frames the silencing and s...

Geology Uprooted! Decolonising the Curriculum for Geologists

Geology is colonial. It has a colonial past and a colonial present. Most of the knowledge that we... more Geology is colonial. It has a colonial past and a colonial present. Most of the knowledge that we accept as the modern discipline of geology was founded during the height of the post-1700 European empire's colonial expansion. Knowledge is not neutral, and its creation and use can be damaging to individuals and peoples. The concept of "decolonising the curriculum" has gathered attention recently, but this concept can be misunderstood or difficult to engage with for individuals who are not familiar (or trained to work) with the literature on the issue. This paper aims to demystify decolonising the curriculum, particularly with respect to geology. We explain what decolonising the curriculum is and then outline frameworks and terminology often found in decolonising literature. We discuss how geology is based on colonised knowledge and what effects this may have. We explore how we might decolonise the subject and, most importantly, why it matters. Together, through collaborative networks, we need to decolonise geology to ensure our discipline is inclusive, accessible to all, and relevant to the grand challenges facing diverse world societies.

Resisting re-orientalism in representation: Aman Sethi writes of Delhi

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018

Urban redevelopment, the new logics of expulsion, and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower

cultural geographies, 2019

Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tow... more Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower (2011), this article is concerned with the impact on individuals and communities of forms of impersonal, systemic violence resulting from neoliberal accumulation and the reproduction of mobile capital, extending existent precarities as well as opening up new precarities. We examine the experiences of the previously less precarious – that is, members of the middle classes in Recife, Brazil, and Mumbai, India – now rendered newly precarious. We frame the temporality of these precarities via themes of memory, presentism and futurity in order to depict how sites in the Global South are targeted by mobile capital, and how individuals and communities are impacted by the growing extent of precarities, eroding long-established systems of social and communal protection, and undermining social loyalties and securities. Through the narratives of a novel and a film, we analyse cultural representa...

Precarity as a Mode of Enquiry

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, 2022

Meeting grounds: perceiving and defining interdisciplinarity across the arts, social sciences and sciences

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2004

... I am a Malaysian of Chinese descent; Malay is my national language, and Chinese my mother ton... more

A postcolonial framing of international commercial gestational surrogacy in India

Interventions, 2018

various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian au... more various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India's ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.

Decolonizing the Global North university: Host-guest dynamics and the limits of hospitality

by Ana Cristina Mendes and Lisa Lau

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2024

This article critically assesses the hospitality premise on which the project-practice of decolon... more This article critically assesses the hospitality premise on which the project-practice of decolonizing the curriculum rests, investigating the texture and limitations of the hospitality that Global North universities seem willing to offer their many Others, including students, staff, and stakeholders, particularly in the form of knowledges and pedagogies. It investigates how the guests-strangers are treated within the Global North Universities, their knowledges posited as a separate category within the epistemic system rather than integrated into being a part of the system; guests relegated to unpaid servants when obliged to shoulder the lion's share of the work in addressing the unfair, racist systems which devalue them and their knowledges. Embedding the discourse of decolonizing the university in and with postcolonial concepts, the article highlights the profoundly unequal power relationships between hosts and guests that continue to inform even the bestintentioned Global North higher education institutions, self-declaredly dedicated to decolonization efforts. It argues for pressing need on the part of the Global North universities to deepen their awareness of the historical legacies of coloniality and its matrix of power, and consequently reflect on the treatment of Global South guests and knowledges. This long, hard look at their role of host is necessary for a true committment to decolonising the university spaces and rendering them genuinely hospitable, and to transforming the unequal power dynamics and the impacts on guests-stranger Others.

Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality

Interventions

Amnesty continues several of the social justice themes of precarity and subalternity (at times, a... more Amnesty continues several of the social justice themes of precarity and subalternity (at times, a violent subaltern agency) of Aravind Adiga’s fiction, and its literary narrative centres again on criminal acts and the moral dilemma the protagonist faces over whether to report a murder and expose his illegality to do “the right thing.” Offering a postcolonial reading of Amnesty supported by concepts from migration, citizenship, and human rights studies, this essay discusses the novel’s representation of the inhospitable conditions experienced by migrants victimized by the precarity of their status, whether discursively categorized as illegal, irregular, undocumented, unauthorized, or unlawful; by the consequent exploitations and abuse without recourse to justice; and by the suspension of their human rights. The theme of illegality is approached in Adiga’s narrative from a more radical perspective of liminality – the state of “legal liminality” in which irregular migrants find themselves when longing to belong in the host country, or at least be legalized, while gripped and besieged by myriad daily fears and anxieties that their legal status will be discovered, compounded by a resolute refusal to leave the host country. Adiga forces this theoretical question of legal liminality to an extreme by presenting a protagonist who, as an irregular migrant, has committed the political crime of illegally overstaying in the host country. The central question of amnesty is raised when the protagonist faces the dilemma of stepping up to civic responsibilities without having been conceded participatory rights.

Introducing re-Orientalism: a new manifestation of Orientalism: Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes

Routledge, May 23, 2012

Contextualising Book Covers and Their Changing Roles

Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation, 2015

This chapter reviews the move from book jackets (as packaging) to book covers (as marketing devic... more This chapter reviews the move from book jackets (as packaging) to book covers (as marketing devices), tracking how the design of book covers has shifted from representing the text between the covers, to representing literary genres and brands. It maps the movement of publishing from being a gentlemanly pursuit, to its current commodification as large-scale commerce controlled by conglomerates. The chapter takes into account the many roles of publishing houses, especially as gatekeepers, and their power and influence in determining availability, access, and audience. It also notes how book covers now have to jostle for space, attention, and sales, concerned less with author intention or artistry, and more with branding and marketing. Book covers continue to play their roles in representation, but of different parties and concerns. This chapter considers books as material objects rather than literary ones, focusing on the corporeality of books and book covers.

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Gender, Place & Culture, 2013

Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose... more Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.

Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English

Decolonising medical knowledge – The case of breast cancer and ethnicity in the UK

Journal of Cancer Policy

Wither the plurality of decolonising the curriculum? Safe spaces and identitarian politics in the arts and humanities classroom

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: Wha... more Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of ‘safe’? Prompted by a real-life ‘n-word incident’ in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with the enactment of the ‘wounded attachments’ of identitarian politics and the playing of ‘Privilege or Oppression Olympics’. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom.

Twenty-First-Century Antigones: The Postcolonial Woman Shaped by 9/11 in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

Studies in the Novel, 2021

Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market

Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, 2014

Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comme... more Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comment on the meteoric success of Indian writing in English (IWE): ‘[T]he English novel was parochial in the 80s. Indian writers have given us the colour. We badly needed it.’2 Amis’s claim puts a questionmark on the whole issue of the UK’s reception of IWE as, according to him, IWE was given a warm welcome because of its ability to provide what Graham Huggan has termed ‘exotic’ features and what Francesca Orsini discusses as ‘fantastical’ writings, rather than necessarily being welcomed for its literary merit. Anis Shivani also makes a similar accusation against IWE as it is disseminated in the USA when he says that ‘American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange’.3 The same can be applied to contemporary IWE, marketed and circulated throughout the world today. Lisa Lau rightly links this commodification of IWE, catering to Western readers, to the adoption of re-Orientalist4 strategies. The situation in terms of the Western reception of IWE has reached such a state that Tabish Khair even argues that ‘the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage’.5

The Male South Asian Domestic Servant: Master-Servant Relationships, Class Chasms, and Systematic Emasculation

Sri Lanka Journal of Humanities, 2014

The Re-Orientalising Strategy of the Unreliable Narrator

Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English

This chapter demonstrates the development of a novel re-Orientalising strategy in 21st century In... more This chapter demonstrates the development of a novel re-Orientalising strategy in 21st century Indian writing in English (IWE). Through detailed formal textual interpretation of the works of Jeet Thayil (Narcopolis), Akhil Sharma (The Obedient Father), Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger), and Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia), the employment of the unreliable narrator is deconstructed and unpacked to ascertain its role, effect, and impact. The case studies contain a range of unreliable narrators, from the deceitful to the unbalanced, from the alternative to the untrustworthy. It is argued that by employing unreliable narrators, IWE can subvert the problems of re-Orientalism to some degree, requiring of readers more contextual knowledge, more critical judgement, and more sceptical scrutiny, thus altering the reception and the literary marketplace.

The language of power and the power of language

Power and Narrative, 2007

This article will discuss the complexity of positionality and the implications of writing in the ... more This article will discuss the complexity of positionality and the implications of writing in the English language in a South Asian context. Given the postcolonial heritage of South Asia, contemporary authors producing literature in English find themselves confronted with both tremendous opportunity as well as tremendous controversy. Literature has become a product in the circuit of culture, and the concluding sections will therefore discuss and explore how writers, and particularly diasporic writers, using English (as opposed to the other languages in India) are able to seize a disproportionate amount of world attention and consequently, through their choice of language, gain the power to make their presentations and representations dominant and prevalent in terms of distribution and influence.

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

This article brings the concept of anger, particularly gendered anger, to bear on a postcolonial ... more This article brings the concept of anger, particularly gendered anger, to bear on a postcolonial and intersectional reading of the apparent ragelessness of working-class Indian women who act as surrogates in the international commercialgestational surrogacy (ICGS) industry in India. We explore how rage—the robust expression of the primary emotion of anger—can be silenced, how anger can be disallowed out of existence. Despite being given little information and say over the surrogacy process from start to end, taking high risks with their immediate and long-term mental and physical health (as well as risking social stigmatization and the welfare of their own families), and the lack of rights they are permitted during pregnancy over their own bodies and lives, Indian surrogates are not usually seen as either articulating or experiencing anger, resentment, or outrage over the situation. They seem to be singularly “rageless” at their victimization. This article frames the silencing and s...

Geology Uprooted! Decolonising the Curriculum for Geologists

Geology is colonial. It has a colonial past and a colonial present. Most of the knowledge that we... more Geology is colonial. It has a colonial past and a colonial present. Most of the knowledge that we accept as the modern discipline of geology was founded during the height of the post-1700 European empire's colonial expansion. Knowledge is not neutral, and its creation and use can be damaging to individuals and peoples. The concept of "decolonising the curriculum" has gathered attention recently, but this concept can be misunderstood or difficult to engage with for individuals who are not familiar (or trained to work) with the literature on the issue. This paper aims to demystify decolonising the curriculum, particularly with respect to geology. We explain what decolonising the curriculum is and then outline frameworks and terminology often found in decolonising literature. We discuss how geology is based on colonised knowledge and what effects this may have. We explore how we might decolonise the subject and, most importantly, why it matters. Together, through collaborative networks, we need to decolonise geology to ensure our discipline is inclusive, accessible to all, and relevant to the grand challenges facing diverse world societies.

Resisting re-orientalism in representation: Aman Sethi writes of Delhi

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018

Urban redevelopment, the new logics of expulsion, and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower

cultural geographies, 2019

Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tow... more Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower (2011), this article is concerned with the impact on individuals and communities of forms of impersonal, systemic violence resulting from neoliberal accumulation and the reproduction of mobile capital, extending existent precarities as well as opening up new precarities. We examine the experiences of the previously less precarious – that is, members of the middle classes in Recife, Brazil, and Mumbai, India – now rendered newly precarious. We frame the temporality of these precarities via themes of memory, presentism and futurity in order to depict how sites in the Global South are targeted by mobile capital, and how individuals and communities are impacted by the growing extent of precarities, eroding long-established systems of social and communal protection, and undermining social loyalties and securities. Through the narratives of a novel and a film, we analyse cultural representa...