Decolonizing Our Names in the 21st Century

This book of essays combines different decolonial approaches from around the world to offer a roadmap for updating names and naming practices, restoring and protecting pre-colonial ones, and reimagining or recontextualizing the relationship between place, identity, and names.

In a post-colonial context, naming often serves as a bitter reminder of past harms through commemorative naming practices, whether through a system of baptismal names or a former colony’s approach to dealing with the names that the colonizer left behind. This volume assembles authors who hail from formerly colonized regions of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia to engage with this problem of decolonizing names in the twenty-first century from a global perspective. The book also points to what strategies have had more success than others while envisioning the tools needed for progress in the future.

Offering a useful framework with approaches that can easily be used across other geographical contexts, this volume is suitable for scholars and students interested in decolonization, identity, and naming practices.