Histories, Myths and Decolonial Interventions A Planetary Resistance

This book explores postcolonial myths and histories within colonially structured narratives which persist and are carried in culture, language, and history in various parts of the world. It analyzes constructions of identities, stereotypes, and mythical fantasies in postcolonial society. Exploring a wide range of themes including the appropriation and use of language, myths of decolonialization, and nationalism, and the colonial influence on systems of academic knowledge, the book focuses on how these myths reinforce, subvert, and appropriate colonial binaries for the articulation of the postcolonial self. With essays which study narratives of emigrants in Argentina, the colonial mythology in the Dodecanese in Italy, and the mythico-narratives of island insularity in contemporary Sri Lanka among others, this volume emphasizes the role of indigenous studies in building a postcolonial consciousness. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of post-colonial studies, cultural studies, literature, history, political science, and sociology.

List of Contributors. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction Part 1: Marching Memories: Histories, Myths and Fantasies 1. The ‘Good Italian’ fable and the case of Dodecanese 2. Decolonizing Sinixt "Extinction": Settler Allies in Indigenous Resurgence 3. Legtimizing Myths and Legends: The Social Construction of Gendered Stereotypes 4. Islanded Hauntings: Sri lanka’s Seascape Imaginaries and Mythico-histories of the Insular Part 2: Everyday Decoloniality: Engagements and Experiences of Everyday Life 5. Decolonial Re-existence and the Myths of Knowledge Production 6. Re-visioning and Revision-ing the ‘Nation’: Teaching History and Mythology to the Children of the Parivar 6. ‘Pustuled Sufferer and Pitted Survivor’: A Decolonial Reading of Small Pox Narratives in India 7. A Decolonial Dreaming. Index.

Arti Nirmal is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Banaras Hindu University, India. She has authored a book Shifting Homes and Transnational Identities: Women Novelists of the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora (2015), edited a volume titled History and Myth: Postcolonial Dimensions (2021) and co-edited Legal Research and Methodology: Perspectives, Process and Practice (2019). Her academic interests are diaspora and migration studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, law and literature, gender studies, folk studies, and peace studies. Sayan Dey grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal and is currently working as Postdoctoral Fellow at Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand. He is also Head, Gender (in)equality Program, Center for Regional Research and Sustainability Studies, India. His areas of research interests are postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, race studies, food humanities, and critical diversity literacy.