The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823280063 ISBN 13: 9780823280063

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2018

Synopsis

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.

Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present?

In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines―history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies― and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

About this title

About the Author:

Jini Kim Watson (Edited By)
Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota, 2011).

Gary Wilder (Edited By)
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology and History and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015).

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0823280063
• ISBN 13: 9780823280063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Watson Jini Kim, Wilder Gary