Nisha Waller
Biographic Data
| ID | 908672 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nisha Waller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nisha |
| FAMILY NAME | Waller |
| SIGNATURE | WALLER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Potsdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4948-4432 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
By definition political
.
Invaders, Tourists, or Visitors? Reading Indigenous Stories in a German University Context
In this article, we ask how to engage with Indigenous stories non-extractively from our own positioning as German scholars within the German university system. Taking guidance from the methodological work of Stó:lō and St’at’imc scholar and storyteller Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem and Wiradjuri author, critic, and academic Jeanine Leane, we engage with representations of German settler figures in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild and Ellen van…
Majority jury verdicts in England and Wales
In England and Wales, the requirement for a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases was abolished in 1967, marking a significant departure from a centuries-old legal tradition. Majority verdicts are now common practice, yet no research to date explores the origins of this sudden change to the jury system. In contrast, recent research in the US uncovered a connection between the conception of majority verdicts in Louisiana and Jim Crow era law-ma…
Layered Maps
This essay offers an archipelagic reading of Walter Mosley’s detective novel Down the River Unto the Sea (2018). I argue that the spatial imaginary of the novel constitutes a layered map of the Americas that registers continental visions of the US nation-state but cognitively remaps and breaks up this space into various archipelagic constellations. I read the novel as contributing to a specifically African American mode of the archipelagic, which…
Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer
I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad-and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground-with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and "thinking otherwise" about land and water, I sugge…
Introduction
Editors’ introduction
Postcolonial Literatures in English
The term 'postcolonial literatures in English' designates English-language literatures from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, as well as the literatures of diasporic communities who have moved f
Postcolonial Futures
Postcolonialism often seems to be concerned with the past. While a critical view of the past, and in particular a critique of the history established by imperial powers, is a crucial part of postcolonial work, a simplistic reduction of the ‘postcolonial’ to dealing with the past is itself the result of colonialism’s temporality, of colonizers’ strategic use and conceptions of time. As many postcolonialist critics have argued, colonialist temporal…
Interlude
In postcolonial studies, the term has been applied to a wide range of contexts of domination. Empires have been categorized as ancient or modern (e. g., the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire, respectively), colonial or postcolonial (the Portuguese Empire and global Empire), empires of rule and empires of settlement (the Soviet Union is an example of the former; the French Empire and British Empire were both), pre-industrial and post-indust…
Postcolonial Oceans
In the Western literary imagination, oceans are overwhelmingly the space of White male endeavor. From William Shakespeare’s Prospero to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab to Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlowe, the heroes and anti-heroes of canonic seafaring narratives, be they aristocrats or traders, captains, sailors or castaways, figure as the core agents of Western globalization. Even if increasingly haunted by th…
Interlude
Epistemic violence is a concept introduced to postcolonial studies by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988, see also ch. 5). Originally, Michel Foucault developed the idea of the episteme in Western thought in History of Madness and continued its exploration in The Order of Things. According to his definition, an episteme is the anonymous codification and structure which determines the knowledge for…
Connecting Atlantic and Pacific
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contac…
A garden in the middle of the sea”
Nicole Waller’s study of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers examines how conventional literary studies’ approaches (those that depend on biography and character analysis) may tether James’s work to a set of values that reinscribe the hierarchies that his narrative specifically sets adrift. Reviewing various newer paradigms in American Studies—the border, immigrant studies, the Black Atlantic, Native American encounters—Waller relies on a subset of t…
Terra incognita
This essay analyzes the contemporary conceptualization of the site of the detention center as a paradoxical space on the global map: detention centers are envisioned as removed from standard legal and social structures but simultaneously determined and circumscribed by political interests. Via an analysis of two texts, Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying, and the 2008 US Supreme Court ruling Boumediene v. Bush, I argue that a detention s…
Terra incognita
This essay analyzes the contemporary conceptualization of the site of the detention center as a paradoxical space on the global map: detention centers are envisioned as removed from standard legal and social structures but simultaneously determined and circumscribed by political interests. Via an analysis of two texts, Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying, and the 2008 US Supreme Court ruling Boumediene v. Bush, I argue that a detention s…
Connecting Atlantic and Pacific
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contac…
Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer
I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad-and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground-with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and "thinking otherwise" about land and water, I sugge…
Terra incognita
This essay analyzes the contemporary conceptualization of the site of the detention center as a paradoxical space on the global map: detention centers are envisioned as removed from standard legal and social structures but simultaneously determined and circumscribed by political interests. Via an analysis of two texts, Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying, and the 2008 US Supreme Court ruling Boumediene v. Bush, I argue that a detention s…
A garden in the middle of the sea”
Nicole Waller’s study of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers examines how conventional literary studies’ approaches (those that depend on biography and character analysis) may tether James’s work to a set of values that reinscribe the hierarchies that his narrative specifically sets adrift. Reviewing various newer paradigms in American Studies—the border, immigrant studies, the Black Atlantic, Native American encounters—Waller relies on a subset of t…
Connecting Atlantic and Pacific
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contac…
Postcolonial Literatures in English
The term 'postcolonial literatures in English' designates English-language literatures from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, as well as the literatures of diasporic communities who have moved f
Postcolonial Futures
Postcolonialism often seems to be concerned with the past. While a critical view of the past, and in particular a critique of the history established by imperial powers, is a crucial part of postcolonial work, a simplistic reduction of the ‘postcolonial’ to dealing with the past is itself the result of colonialism’s temporality, of colonizers’ strategic use and conceptions of time. As many postcolonialist critics have argued, colonialist temporal…
Interlude
In postcolonial studies, the term has been applied to a wide range of contexts of domination. Empires have been categorized as ancient or modern (e. g., the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire, respectively), colonial or postcolonial (the Portuguese Empire and global Empire), empires of rule and empires of settlement (the Soviet Union is an example of the former; the French Empire and British Empire were both), pre-industrial and post-indust…
Postcolonial Oceans
In the Western literary imagination, oceans are overwhelmingly the space of White male endeavor. From William Shakespeare’s Prospero to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab to Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlowe, the heroes and anti-heroes of canonic seafaring narratives, be they aristocrats or traders, captains, sailors or castaways, figure as the core agents of Western globalization. Even if increasingly haunted by th…
Interlude
Epistemic violence is a concept introduced to postcolonial studies by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988, see also ch. 5). Originally, Michel Foucault developed the idea of the episteme in Western thought in History of Madness and continued its exploration in The Order of Things. According to his definition, an episteme is the anonymous codification and structure which determines the knowledge for…
Introduction
Editors’ introduction
Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer
I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad-and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground-with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and "thinking otherwise" about land and water, I sugge…
Layered Maps
This essay offers an archipelagic reading of Walter Mosley’s detective novel Down the River Unto the Sea (2018). I argue that the spatial imaginary of the novel constitutes a layered map of the Americas that registers continental visions of the US nation-state but cognitively remaps and breaks up this space into various archipelagic constellations. I read the novel as contributing to a specifically African American mode of the archipelagic, which…
Majority jury verdicts in England and Wales
In England and Wales, the requirement for a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases was abolished in 1967, marking a significant departure from a centuries-old legal tradition. Majority verdicts are now common practice, yet no research to date explores the origins of this sudden change to the jury system. In contrast, recent research in the US uncovered a connection between the conception of majority verdicts in Louisiana and Jim Crow era law-ma…
By definition political
.
Invaders, Tourists, or Visitors? Reading Indigenous Stories in a German University Context
In this article, we ask how to engage with Indigenous stories non-extractively from our own positioning as German scholars within the German university system. Taking guidance from the methodological work of Stó:lō and St’at’imc scholar and storyteller Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem and Wiradjuri author, critic, and academic Jeanine Leane, we engage with representations of German settler figures in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild and Ellen van…
History (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Literature (4 works)