Postcolonial Studies and Beyond
Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, et al.
Price
795
ISBN
9788178242033
Language
English
Pages
510
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2007
Territorial Rights
Restricted
Imprint
Permanent Black
Catalogues

This interdisciplinary volume is designed to expand the agenda of postcolonial studies, assess the field’s past and present foci, and affect its future evolution. The editors ask scholars to consider the intellectual, political, and methodological practices that have shaped—and which should shape—postcolonial modes of thought. Their effort is to reinvent and transform the field. They argue that such reinvention has been happening but that, having already influenced perspectives and methods across many disciplines, postcolonial studies is becoming increasingly institutionalized. To remain useful, it needs new directions and emphases. The essays here address questions about the field’s definition, relevance, and relationship to issues of modernity, transnationalism, and globalization. Can postcolonial studies produce insights that will illuminate what is marginalized or invisible within the discourses of globalization and neoimperialism? Can it draw on its tradition of anticolonial thought and sociocultural analysis to continue suggesting socioeconomically informed models of political mobilization and innovative critical language? Can it minimize Eurocentricism? The book contains a broad range of perspectives on these issues. It does not represent consensus but, rather, links contradictory and complementary contributions from history, anthropology, Asian and African studies, environmental studies, literature, political science, and religion to re-evaluate and stretch the field.

ANIA LOOMBA is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989) and Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). SUVIR KAUL is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Thomas Gray and Literary Authority (1992); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (2000); and (as editor) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (2001). MATTI BUNZL is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (2004). ANTOINETTE BURTON is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her recent books include Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (2003) and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (2003). JED ESTY is Associate Professor, English Department, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2003).