Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

In the concluding Chapter 6, I suggest other inquiries unfold when we take seriously the notion of the citizen as free and empowered. The approach to freedom and power developed throughout these chapters provides another way to interpret and understand Athenian political thought from the ground up. Recognizing democratic freedom as autonomy calls for a reassessment of ancient critiques of that freedom, such as Plato’s criticisms in the Republic. Likewise, expanding our view of power beyond power over others in order to allow multiple, simultaneous agents with the power to act uncovers often overlooked individuals with power, such as women and metics. In terms of modernity, democratic freedom offers a form of liberty before liberalism separate from republican or neo-Roman conceptions that is still able to protect a multiplicity of individual values.

The Introduction turns to Terry Eagleton’s comment on reading Naipaul (“Great art, dreadful politics”) and asks how critics have addressed this quandary about a great writer. It looks at the critical essays on Naipaul by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri in particular to examine how Naipaul’s works challenge the idea of “postcolonial arrival.” The overall thesis of the book is summed up as a reading in which an author “reads us.” To undertake this project, the work is grounded in a systematic examination of all of the author’s published and unpublished works, the secondary bibliography, and material deposited in the Naipaul Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. To make a case for Naipaul’s place in global literary culture, there are four key impulses that govern the book. They are: history, aesthetics, textual engagement, and archival knowledge. To give meaning to that achievement, this book is written with thematic unities in mind. Although chronology is not totally dispensed with, the chapters are structured with the aim of establishing connections within Naipaul’s heterogeneous corpus. But for that interconnectedness to succeed, Naipaul followed an uncompromising commitment to writing as an aesthetic endeavour, uninhibited by fashion or ideology.

This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

The chapter recovers and investigates a substantial body of poems from undivided India composed during 1914–1918 and how such a corpus challenges conventional Anglo-centric understandings of the term 'First World War poetry'. Showcasing the remarkable range and richness of war poetry written in Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, the chapter examines some of their historical and formal complexities, including their oral and aural dimensions; in the absence of testimonies, such poetry fills in the gaps left by history. Starting with civilian verse and songs – elite and subaltern, written and spoken, pro-war and anti-war, direct, oblique or diffuse - I propose the idea of a war 'poetics' rather than ‘poetry’ from combatant men and village women who were often non-literate but highly literary. I conclude with readings of the 'war poems' of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammed Iqbal and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poets of the future India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively.

This chapter highlights how colonial institutions, especially Western education through academic knowledge, have helped to sustain the “colonial matrix of power.” Its corrupted nature is reflected in the extrapolation of data from Africa (subaltern culture) and rebranding them as Western, which is to the detriment and exclusion of Africans and a support structure for Western hegemony. The solution to this imbroglio as proffered by the author is “decoloniality,” a process that combats the root of the problem seeking to “dismantle the colonial matrix of power,” and enhancing the practice of “subaltern epistemology,” which is the means to achieve what he referred to as “epistemic liberation.” The systematic process to achieving this is what the chapter sets out to do here: show how the academic sustains the colonial matrix of power, examine the biases associated with ethnography, “deconstructs the researcher’s role in it,” bridge the gap between quality research and subaltern epistemology, and lastly, how to achieve epistemic liberation using autoethnography. Using autoethnography as the methodology, the researcher explains and justifies why the researcher, for a proper interpretation of African cultural ethos, has to be the researched.

This constellation brings together two essays that address the questions ‘Where is Poland?’ and ‘What is Poland?’ Krzysztof Zajas argues that there is no such thing as one Polish culture, while showing how constructions of the ‘centre’, be it in the form of ‘Polishness’ or ‘cultural achievements’, not only homogenize but mask the work of Polonization and colonization in its attempts to subordinate Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. Dorota Sajewska shows how after 1989 two narratives re-emerge simultaneously, the harmed Slavic subaltern and an interest in multicultural heritage paired with colonial influence in the borderlands. While she uses Stanislaw Wyspianski to constellate the local and transnational in order to position Poland within a global cultural archive, Sajewska’s primary focus is on racialized forms of violence and the sideways or peripheral glance at European history that allows new understandings of epistemological traditions in historiography and the decolonisation of knowledge production.

This chapter investigates Adès’s 2003–4 opera The Tempest in the context of postcolonial theory, arguing that the adaptation considerably transforms the statuses of Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero. I situate the opera within major strands of postcolonial thought of the past half-century, focussing especially on Caliban as a way to explore themes of resistance, identity and diaspora. Identifying the opera’s transformations in the libretto, I then explore how both text and Adès’s music work as ambiguous signifiers of political subtexts, centring on ideas of servitude and power. Touching also on the different aesthetics of the several contrasting productions of the opera, I tie together these different areas to put this operatic Tempest in dialogue with the extensive corpus of critical approaches to the play in literature, film and theatre. I conclude by suggesting that it can be productively analysed in the context of legacies of colonialism and empire in twenty-first-century Britain.

Chapter 6, ‘Imagining a Community’, brings together, and builds on, the findings made throughout the book about the nature of the international community imagined within the archive. This shows that whilst the tribunal functioned as a site of liberal international governance, that underneath this liberal vision sat a distinctly illiberal understanding of community. In particular this shows that the archive divided the international community into the international, as a site of peace and order, and the local, as a site of barbarity; protected a space wherein violence was a legitimate aspect of international relations; and projected a patriarchal and colonial vision of community as the voice of the subaltern was denied.

The history and historiography of Iran, as of the countries of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down, elite-driven and state-centred modernization, and methodological nationalism, the assumption that the geographical territory defined by the state and the population within its borders is the primary, and sometimes only, organizing principle for research and analysis. The chapters contained in this book seek to problematize both these narratives. Their attention is firmly on subaltern social groups, including the “dangerous classes,” and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elite created by the infant Pahlavi state; the hungry poor pitted against the deregulation and globalization of the late nineteenth century Iranian economy; rural criminals of every variety, bandits, smugglers and pirates, and the profoundly ambiguous attitudes towards them of the communities from which they came; slaves and the puzzle of their agency. The historical experience of these groups is also deployed in a much larger attempt to understand the wider societies of which they were a part and the nature of the political, economic and cultural authority to which they were subject. In particular they are counterpointed to the praxis of modernism, hegemonic across the world from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century and depicted here in all its astonishing ambition, reaching from the state itself into the deepest and most intimate layers of everyday life. In addition, and complementary, to this spotlight on subaltern lives, the chapters contained here seek to move beyond a narrow national context, seeking to demonstrate, through a series of case-studies, the explanatory power of global, transnational and comparative approaches to the study of the social history of the Middle East.

The introduction situates the book in relation to academic and activist developments concerning same-sex cultures and intimacies in Africa at the turn of the century. Prominent among the key terms concepts it introduces, is the African feminist critique of the “ethnopornographic” colonial gaze on Black women’s sexual bodies and the queer destabilization of categories of sexual identity and its attending LGBT identity politics. The epistemological challenge of researching female same-sex desires from a queer postcolonial perspective, is illustrated through a discussion of the conflicting African and queer feminist representations of “women marriages,” a historical institution found in a variety of African societies. Considering the few anthropological references to female same-sex practices and to the historical practice of “friendship marriage” in colonial Ghana, it highlights the conceptual potential of friendship and kinship, as opposed to and alongside sexuality for an intersectional feminist analysis women’s erotic desires and intimacies.

In “New World Order, Old World Ways: Hemingway’s Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” Marc K. Dudley looks specifically to how well Hemingway studies of the past twenty years has engaged the tenents of postcolonial theory, which critiques the political oppressions of imperialism, both political and cultural. As he argues, criticism has mostly focused on Hemingway’s ethics, arguing in the main that between his first African safari in 1933–1934 and his final one twenty years later he grew in his awareness of the Third World political scene, which allowed him to tentatively overcome his ethnocentrism. That space, many critics argue, can be measured in the differences between Green Hills of Africa (1935) and the posthumously published True at First Light (1999) and the full manuscript from which it was culled, Under Kilimanjaro (2005). In addition to Africa, Dudley explores Hemingway’s political awareness of Cuba, from its late-nineteenth-century fight for independence from Spain to the revolutions of both 1933 and 1939. Texts examined include To Have and Have Not (1937) and the oft-ignored story “Nobody Ever Dies” (1939).

If affect theory is principally concerned to account for the visceral forces and intensities that relate human and non-human bodies, how might it help to make sense of the force and intensity of capitalist cultures of accumulation and extraction as they are lived, felt, and understood by subaltern bodies living and dying in the Global South? In what ways might the transmission of affect associated with the political and economic legacies of European colonialism shape the understanding of such contemporary cultures of accumulation, extraction, and dispossession? And how might technologies of representation, such as printed books, help to illuminate the ways in which the sign systems of the market economy, the media, and the state affect the bodies and lived environments of those who feel the slow violence of debt, capital accumulation, and dispossession most acutely? This chapter tries to address these questions by considering how subaltern histories are registered affectively through the transmission of human remains. Building on poststructuralist theories of subaltern affect and psychoanalytic accounts of affect in the decolonial thought of Frantz Fanon, it suggests that the histories of those whose lives are deemed without value and denied expression in hegemonic forms of speech and representation are nevertheless transmitted in the embodied experiences of subalternity.