Decolonizing Our Names in the 21st Century: Place, Identity and Agency

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

In a postcolonial 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.

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.