Overview

Colonised subjects can play roles that sustain the power structure of coloniality. In this book, Morgan Ndlovu asks why people help support a system responsible for their own subjugation. Morgan Ndlovu provides a critique of the agency of the colonised subjects as exercised under coloniality. Eschewing abstract theory, he takes a 'bottom up' approach to theorising the agency of indigenous people. Through analysis of the experiences of the performance of indigeneity and the staged representations of commodified culture in South Africa, he recognises the efforts of the colonised subjects and the conditions under which they survive. However, he also cautions against choices and actions that may aggravate their conditions. Performing Indigeneity provides an insightful evaluation of what could constitute an 'authentic' indigenous agency among the colonial subalterns in India, Australia, Canada, Africa and the Americas.

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9780745338590

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Reviews

'A magisterial study that draws our attention to the dark side of colonial imaginaries of indigeneity and cultural tourism in the post-colony. Ndlovu is profound and prosaic, this book joins the ranks of contemporary voices from the Global South that can only be ignored at our own peril' -- Finex Ndhlovu, Associate Professor of Language in Society, University of New England, Australia

'In this enriching book, Morgan Ndlovu has joined the exalted list of intellectuals of the Global South such as Valentin Mudimbe and Edward Said that have been called 'whistle blowers against ideologies of Otherness.' How coloniality of knowledge masquerades as indigeneity is unmasked and the many-layered onion of cultural imperialism is peeled. This is a disobedient decolonial treatise that throws a telling tantrum at the cognitive Empire' -- William Mpofu, University of the Witwatersrand 'A magisterial study that draws our attention to the dark side of colonial imaginaries of indigeneity and cultural tourism in the post-colony. Ndlovu is profound and prosaic, this book joins the ranks of contemporary voices from the Global South that can only be ignored at our own peril' -- Finex Ndhlovu, Associate Professor of Language in Society, University of New England, Australia

Author Information

Morgan Ndlovu is Associate Professor of Development Studies at the University of South Africa and a founding member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network. He is the author of Performing Indigeneity: Spectacles of Culture and Identity in Coloniality (Pluto, 2019).

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