University of Florida Press: Journals
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I Am No Man: Impacts of Military Service For Female Veterans
No full textIn 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the ban on women serving in combat roles in the US military. This policy decision effectively opened all positions in the military to women. Decades of scholarship inform us that military service leads to long-term socioeconomic benefits, but this research has focused on male veterans. This earning advantage holds true for all male veterans but is more significant for racial minority groups. As the original equal-pay institution, the military has long been an attractive option for women on their career path, and today female enlistment rates are rising faster than any other group. This study analyzes how military service affects women who elect to serve, across several economic and social variables, and how that has evolved for different cohorts of female service members. Conducting regression analysis on multiple census data sets, we find that women who join the military gain significant long-term socioeconomic benefits in comparison to their civilian counterparts, that military service affects social variables including marriage, and that these effects are stable over time.
Decolonizing George William Joy’s General Gordon’s Last Stand in Aboulela’s River Spirit
No full textIn Leeds City Art Gallery, visitors can see George William Joy’s painting General Gordon’s Last Stand (1893). The painting, which depicts the last moments of the life of General Charles George Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan who was killed during the Mahdist Revolution in 1885, stirred the British public’s and government’s sense of vengeance because it depicts the “savagery” of the crawling native and the “heroic” end of one of the carriers of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ It represents a perfect example of how pro-colonial art and artists helped mobilize the Empire’s colonial project. Hence, the aim of this paper is to examine how Leila Aboulela’s historical novel River Spirit (2023) interpolates the grand narrative that Joy’s painting perpetuates. We argue that the novel decolonizes what pro-colonial art tells about the “heroism” of the colonizer and the “backwardness” of the colonized in overseas colonies. On the one hand, Aboulela creates a fictional artist whom she models on Joy’s character and vividly depicts his aspirations of garnering fortune and fame while in Sudan. On the other hand, Aboulela’s fictionalization of Gordon’s assassin, a Sudanese man named Musa, is meant to deconstruct the historical narrative of the dominant culture by giving the natives a space to tell their versions of the story. By doing so, Aboulela encourages readers to view the same pivotal historical event with fresh eyes, and consequently, re-interpret historical colonial accounts
Echoes of Empire: Unveiling Colonial Tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City
No full textThis paper attempts to explore the representation of the Vijayanagara Empire and colonial tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s historical novel Victory City (2023). Unlike conventional narratives entrenched in the colonial and postcolonial epochs, Rushdie embarks upon an audacious exploration of precolonial antiquity inthe Indian subcontinent, traversing the ethereal realms of magic realism. Victory City’s departure from the conventional epochs of colonial and postcolonial India,however, beckons inquiries into Rushdie’s treatment of precolonial India and itshistorical consciousness. Employing a multifaceted methodology that intertwinesliterary analysis and historical criticism, this paper attempts to scrutinize Rushdie’srendition of the Vijayanagara Empire, interrogating its fidelity to historicalrecords and its potential to subvert colonial narratives. By juxtaposing Rushdie’sconstruction of an alternative archival narrative with established historical records,this paper evaluates the novel’s contribution to India’s cultural and historical identity.Ultimately, it offers a critique of Rushdie’s portrayal, highlighting its purportedneglect of India’s multifaceted historical legacy, perpetuation of reductionist viewpoints, and attenuation of its global cultural contributions
Notes on Contributors
No full textContributor biographies for volume 13, number 1 (Spring 2025) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studie
“All for One and None for All”? A Regime Theory Reappraisal of South–South Cooperation’s Geopolitical Erosion
No full textIn its heyday, South–South Cooperation (SSC) epitomized (among others) geopolitical contestation—from its genesis at the 1955 Bandung conference to the heights of the 1978 Buenos Aires Action Plan. Contemporaneously, SSC has lost much of its geopolitical significance and is instead associated with apoliticality in the form of, inter alia, technical cooperation between Global South states. International development scholars have applied periodization frameworks to rationalize the SSC’s geopolitical erosion, allowing them to pinpoint the glaring exogenous influence of the Global North in diffusing the SSC’s early zeal. This article seeks to complement this thesis albeit by shifting the justification for SSC’s geopolitical erosion away from rationalizations exclusively contingent on the North–South dyad toward one centered on SSC’s own internal institutional dynamics. To do so, the article brings international relations theory into the fold in the shape of regime theory to argue that this erosion may be as much down to endogenous factors as it is exogenous ones, with absent normative enforcement mechanisms, disparate centers of SSC leadership, and subsequent mistrust among the leading proponents of SSC equally responsible for its sustained geopolitical erosion
Eco-Development: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism in the Global South
No full textIn the fall of 1974, only a few months after the United Nations (UN) adopted the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), a grouping of leading intellectuals from across the Global South converged in Mexico for the Cocoyoc Conference. Under the auspices of the UN, the collective issued the Cocoyoc Declaration—a radical manifesto intended to provide an environmental framework for the NIEO. In a period when oil shocks and limitations to extractivism forced leaders to rethink the very nature of international development, the Cocoyoc Declaration articulated a vision of eco-development for the Global South. An intellectual history of Cocoyoc challenges the prevailing historical narrative of a monolithic Global South reluctant to embrace environmental regulations. Instead, the Cocoyoc Conference represented a seminal gathering of experts from Latin America, Africa, and Asia who embraced environmental consciousness as a powerful source for rethinking and reforming international development. In its aftermath, Cocoyoc helped to legitimate and establish new academic centers dedicated to environmental research in Mexico. Archival research into the lives of economists Ignacy Sachs and Enrique Leff reveals the tensions bound up with environmentalism and development from the perspective of postcolonial nations
TPLF and the Politics of Factionalism in Tigray
No full textFollowing the 2020–22 Tigray war that shambled the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s (TPLF) internal structure and legitimacy, the historical and dominant political force of contemporary Tigray evolves into factional politics, understood as a group-based power struggle within the party. This contribution first and foremost intends to enlighten and provide insights into the current TPLF political crisis. Despite common and dominant narratives focusing on personal or ideological agendas, the article intends to demonstrate to what extent this crisis is deeply rooted in the TPLF’s genesis and historical development. It then details the five major crises of the party, with a specific emphasis on the unprecedented last one. Doing so, it identifies a security-driven pattern of the party’s evolution and its successive reforms and reflects on its internal structure. It aims at grounding power struggles into sociological elements and provides insights into the social development and support of TPLF factions, be they actual or past. It provides detailed insights into factionalism practices and modalities, especially regarding controversies, and raises the hypothesis that factionalism is handled and regulated through controversies that offer internal platforms for TPLF power struggles, as well as the arena for public debates, thereby questioning their ideological dimensions
Advocating for the Decolonization of Hearing Health Care Development in the Pacific Islands: Reflections from an Australian Audiologist in Samoa
No full textTomás, António. In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda
No full textReview of: Tomás, António. In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022
Chancy, Myriam J. A. Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters
No full textReview of: Chancy, Myriam J. A. Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023