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Normative Legitimacy and Normative Dilemmas: Postcolonial Interventions

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Negotiating Normativity

Abstract

The specific focus of this volume lies on critically scrutinizing how power manifests itself in norms and normativity; by opening up new research perspectives that point towards the ambivalent and twofold character of normativity, we show how norms are appropriated, contested as well as transformed. The analyses take a stance against restricting binaries as well as against the assumption of an allegedly all-encompassing (post-)colonial power. This introduction begins by outlining the editors' notion of norms and normativity, then portrays how normativity has been negotiated in postcolonial feminist approaches and finally elaborates on how the concepts of appropriation, contestation and transformation assist in understanding resistance and its entanglement with the multifaceted trajectories of power in a postcolonial world.

The editors would like to express their sincere appreciation to Smaran Dayal and Lorraine Klimowich for their help and support in the editorial process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Within postcolonial discourses, many terms denote hegemonic global power relations and structures of domination, such as Orient/Occident, global North/global South, First World/Third World (Castro Varela and Dhawan 2015). The contrastive pair “the West and the Rest,” established by Stuart Hall (1992) is commonly referred to in scholarly literature as well. The current volume primarily employs the terms “global South/North,” since this pair diverges from suggesting monolithic entities and draws attention to the “South” within the “North” and vice versa.

  2. 2.

    These were most visibly transported by such as Kangura’s Ten Hutu Commandments that shored-up fear and hatred among Rwandans (see Taylor 1999).

  3. 3.

    The term, introduced in 1952 by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990), functions as an analogy to the “third estate” of the French Revolution to describe those countries where the majority of the world’s population lived but who remained powerless in global politics.

  4. 4.

    Overall, the conference is regarded as the first international postcolonial conference (cf. Young 2001: 191).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Berlin, Austria

    Nikita Dhawan

  2. Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Elisabeth Fink & Johanna Leinius

  3. Department of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel

Authors
  1. Nikita Dhawan
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  2. Elisabeth Fink
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  3. Johanna Leinius
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  4. Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel
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Correspondence to Nikita Dhawan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Austria

    Nikita Dhawan

  2. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Elisabeth Fink

  3. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Johanna Leinius

  4. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel

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Dhawan, N., Fink, E., Leinius, J., Mageza-Barthel, R. (2016). Normative Legitimacy and Normative Dilemmas: Postcolonial Interventions. In: Dhawan, N., Fink, E., Leinius, J., Mageza-Barthel, R. (eds) Negotiating Normativity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30984-2_1

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