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.

Lauren Beck is a professor of visual and material culture studies at Mount Allison University, Canada, and specializes in place name science and identity. Her publications include Canada's Place Names and How to Change Them and Firsting in the Early Modern Transatlantic World. Grace A. Gomashie is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture, Mount Allison University, Canada, where she researches topics on equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. She has published in onomastics, Indigenous language maintenance, Spanish varieties, community studies, and translation studies.

Introduction: Decolonizing Our Names in the 21st Century 1. Geotags and Check-Ins as Renaming Practices of Indigenous Digital Activism: The Gidmt'en Checkpoint Case 2. Decolonizing Place Names in Vietnam: An Overview of Names with Linguistic Diversity 3. Ghanaian Surnames at the Crossroads: Empirical Insights 4. Policy, Education, and Storytelling: Approaches to Decolonizing Canadian Toponymy 5. Decolonizing Names and Dynamics of Cross-Cultural Naming Practices Among the Urhobo and Yoruba Ethnic Groups in Nigeria 6. Translanguaging Names, Decolonizing Language: What Makes a Name 'Chinese'? 7. Aareck to Zsaneka: African-American Nominals, Unnaming, and Aesthetic Justice 8. Same Old, Same Old: How Postcolonialism Didn't Change Things in Singapore