Names and Naming in the Postcolonial English‑Speaking World

Mirko Casagranda

The collection of essays "Names and Naming in the Postcolonial English-Speaking World" explores the connections between names, naming practices and postcolonial studies by investigating how identity, memory and history are discursively construed and textually represented in Wales and Ireland, Canada and the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent and New Zealand. Drawing on the interdisciplinary nature of onomastic studies, the volume adopts several theoretical and methodological approaches and builds on the assumption that names have been the means to stigmatize ethnic diversity and the supposed inferiority of the ex-colonies but also the linguistic tools through which postcolonial identities are redefined and re-appropriated. The papers here presented should be read as a decolonized map of the Anglophone world where old names and Eurocentric perspectives are questioned and the power of renaming and the need for new names reclaimed.