Concepts of ‘appropriation’ have been discussed for several decades, in a variety of disciplines from art history to sociology. This chapter is primarily concerned with the relevance of appropriation as a category of historical research. Based on the history of everyday life and postcolonial theory, the chapter addresses the resistant forms of an art of the weak as well as the repressive forms of ‘cultural appropriation’. In doing so it shows that the genealogy of appropriation is to be historicised, just as its application in turn serves to historicise past practices. A look at empirical case studies proves the analytical fruitfulness of appropriation.

In recent years, scholars of International Relations and the Middle East have increasingly argued that the region’s enduring colonial legacies render postcolonial theory not merely relevant but essential. This chapter contends that the relationship also works in the opposite direction: the Middle East has been central to the emergence and evolution of postcolonial thought. It traces the disciplinary and historical foundations of postcolonialism, outlines its key claims and limitations, and concludes with an analysis of Syria as an illustrative case of postcolonial inquiry in the Middle Eastern context.

‘Sexuality and the Irish Novel’ situates the work of Irish writers addressing sexuality in Irish fiction after about 1960 in the context of the final years of literary censorship in the Irish Republic. Around the time of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), a series of novels, including J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley (1964), and later John McGahern’s The Pornographer (1979), combine explorations of sexuality with experiments in literary form. In the case of Anthony C. West’s The Ferret Fancier (1963) and Julia O’Faolain’s Women in the Wall (1975), the exploration of sexuality involves combining the historical novel with the Bildungsroman, while Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle (1977) strives for an embodied feminine consciousness. In each case, these novels explore sexual repression as a symptom not only of a postcolonial condition but also of the alienating tendencies of capitalist modernity.

This chapter systematically moves through the key questions of critique as a mode of building and improving knowledge in the humanities. It surveys key works in the conversation in relation to a variety of critical conversations and traditions, relating the questions of critique to major projects and goals in the field.

This chapter discusses the issue of Holocaust distortion and relativization, particularly in the context of far-left ideologies and antisemitism. It explores how certain groups have attempted to reframe the Holocaust narrative to support their political agendas, often in ways that trivialize or distort historical reality. The text delves into specific examples, such as the Norwegian far-left newspaper Klassekampen, which published articles in the late 1970s claiming collaboration between Zionists and Nazis during World War II. These articles distorted historical facts to paint Zionists as complicit in the Holocaust, using selective quotations and misrepresentations to support their narrative. The chapter also examines the role of Soviet propaganda in shaping anti-Zionist and antisemitic narratives, which were then adopted and spread by far-left groups in other countries. It highlights how these narratives often blurred the lines between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories. The chapter looks at the impact of the American TV series Holocaust on public discourse and how it sparked debates about historical memory and responsibility.

Chapter 4 examines how absurdism becomes a postcolonial aesthetic. Beginning with The Thing (1960), likely the first absurdist play in the subcontinent, the chapter focuses on the East Pakistani playwrights Sayeed Ahmad and Syed Waliullah and their dramaturgical experiments, read as reflective of a widespread engagement with absurdism in almost all of the languages of the subcontinent. Beyond encounters with Samuel Beckett (and Ahmad’s writings on not only Albert Camus, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco but everything from Ousmane Sembène to Zen Buddhism and Kabuki theater), I argue that for Ahmad and Waliullah, the absurdist register makes available a new kind of political critique and, in its abstract, decoded language, creates space for the postcolonial moral inventory. The wild heteroaesthetica of these plays (itinerant flute players, clowns, stick games, decimation) mark a departure from available dramatic modes during a period of interregnum: after the Independence of Pakistan (1947) and before the Independence of Bangladesh (1971), the absurd suggests confusion, drowsiness, and waiting as forms of postcolonial being.

Poststructuralist theory and postcolonial criticism represented the first major challenge to the institution of literary criticism as it had taken root in Britain and had been transported to Africa through the colonial university. This chapter discusses how the theories of literature, writing, and identity were geared toward a critique of the assumed relationship between language and identity and unsettled older forms of criticism and how this unsettling depended on the adoption of Africa as the quintessential zone of difference. A key question here is whether the notions of difference espoused by the new, poststructuralist criticism could rescue Africa from the old colonial accounts of the continent in which positioned Africa and Africanness as unmodern. Overall, the poststructuralist deconstruction of European systems of thought compelled intellectuals to rethink the location of Africa in global conceptual systems, leading to the rise of postcolonial criticism, a mode of thinking and reading whose goal was to question both the authority of English and American literary criticism and the nationalist foundations of earlier accounts of African literary criticism.

Current thinking views the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean as highly interconnected. This contrasts with late twentieth-century ideas of either geographically separate regions or more developed centers that dominated less complex peripheral societies. A major inspiration for the present approach is a post-processual understanding of the complex dimensions of consumption. Elite burial goods at Lefkandi ca. 1100–825 BCE illustrate how imports were used in status strategies. In the eighth century BCE, there is a decrease in valuable grave goods as dedications of imported luxury items in public sanctuaries became the preferred means of elite display. Current views also reflect postcolonial understanding of non-indigenous settlements as sites of hybridity and inbetweenness, not the imposition of a colonizing ethnicity on local identities but new cultural syntheses. Examples include a large number of the early so-called Greek colonies. A recently excavated example is L’Amastuola in Apulia, an indigenous settlement of the late eighth century where Greeks came to live in the early seventh century.

This chapter explores the constructed nature of environmental understanding through colonial, neocolonial, postcolonial and ecofeminist lenses. It begins by dissecting the binary opposition of nature versus civilisation as shaped by colonial narratives, revealing how this dichotomy justified the exploitation of Indigenous populations, women and natural resources. The analysis extends to neocolonial practices – such as land-grabbing and neoliberal economic expansion – and their environmental repercussions. Through literary and filmic examples like Robinson Crusoe and Cast Away, the chapter highlights how survival narratives reinforce human supremacy and commodify nature. It then critically examines the idealisation of Indigenous peoples as ‘noble savages’ and the romanticised notion of nature as a Garden of Eden. Moving towards constructive alternatives, it foregrounds postcolonial and ecofeminist approaches that challenge anthropocentrism, promote interconnectedness and embrace Indigenous cosmologies centred around earth goddesses like Pachamama and Papatūānuku. The chapter concludes with a case study on Brendon Grimshaw’s ecological restoration of Moyenne Island, advocating for grassroots conservation and ethical environmental care. Ultimately, the chapter urges readers to reassess dominant narratives and join collective efforts to protect and regenerate nature.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept – a linguistic mirage – most would argue there’s something of importance there, but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth – as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 14 – at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

The origins of Arthur are in the Welsh language, and this chapter presents the Welsh Arthur from those origins to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. While Geoffrey of Monmouth reconfigured the Arthur he found, propelling him into a new trajectory, the Galfridian route does not provide the telos for the Welsh material: the most important manuscripts of the period show court poets and prose writers engaging self-consciously with traditions old and new, aware of the colonial implications of French and English Arthurs, and energetically navigating strategies of irony, satire, postcolonial reimagining and culturally confident re-engagement with the pre-Galfridian (and pre-Chrétien). Arthur is at once signifier of the ‘Britain’ of the bards (a half-imagined Welsh-speaking Britain, inheritor of Romanitas) and a field of signification on which to project contemporary political realities, over the best part of a good millennium.