This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
overlapped with the end of state socialism and the Yugoslav wars, this asymmetric relationship led to a decisive theoretical conjunction when scholars brought up in the region but working in the USA applied postcolonial theory to explaining postsocialism (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992 ; Todorova 1994, 1997 ; Bakić-Hayden 1995 ). Postcolonial thought is still closer to the centre of south-east European studies than many other fields. An image from another discipline which (after the Yugoslav wars) shares many topics with south
-cultural spaces overlap and compete; and a chapter by Peter Childs which offers a different perspective on the notion of marginality by addressing ‘Englishness’ in relation to ‘migrant’ writing in prose concerned with India and England after Independence. In each case specific intersections of identity are used to explore the wider configurations of space and self. In this section we also include an essay by Colin Graham which offers a mediation on the broader critical implications of postcolonial theory through analysis of its application in a specific context. Taking the
testify to the reality that ‘the question of where Ireland belongs has yet to settle into a single answer or set of answers’.61 Again, Field Day constitutes an instructive case study. The introduction of postcolonial theory, alongside the controversy involving the inclusiveness of the Anthology, has proved a particularly vexed issue in analyses of the Field Day enterprise. Deane’s introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature declared that Ireland’s current condition was ‘above all, a colonial crisis’.62 The book included essays by Edward Said, Frederic
In the context of urban Africa, how can we ‘see like a city’ and yet account for the different legacies of colonialism, inequality and social change across the region? This is a discussion that encompasses both local experiences as well as shared postcolonial theories of planned modernisation. Particularities about a place’s history and demographics also call for an analysis of how exceptionalities are responses to pressing global contexts. By combining specific discussions on African cities with a global overview on key issues including waste, energy transition, security and risk governance, we break the conventional polarisation between seeing ‘from within’ or ‘from afar’. The scholarship we present showcases the perspectives of scholars based in Africa and the UK, offering an alternative framing through collaboration and shared research. The data analysed and represented is also interpreted and translated, speaking through a variety of personal and scientific dispositions that appear throughout this volume. In particular, we use infrastructure – in its various intersections of place, people and power – to discuss the philosophy and postcolonial theories around becoming and being a city.
of the textualist The Empire Writes Back, but it was also the year of Timothy Brennan’s sociological Salman Rushdie and the Third World.4 1990 saw Robert Young’s anti-Marxist White Mythologies into print, but it also saw Neil Lazarus’s Marxist Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction.5 Anthologies of essays such as Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen’s Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, or Padmini Mongia’s Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, contain as many self-designated materialist as culturalist or textualist contributions.6 It can furthermore
most strongly associated with the unhyphenated version of the term. ‘Postcolonial theory’ overtook ‘post-colonial state’ in the mid 1990s to become the most common combination of terms involving either ‘postcolonial’ or ‘post-colonial’. ‘Postcolonial studies’ overtook ‘post-colonial state’ at around the same time to become the second most common combination. Similarly, the usage frequency of ‘postcolonial criticism’ and ‘postcolonial discourse’ increased dramatically between 1990 and 2000 to become among the
there, is far from peripheral. The tendency of postcolonial theory to recuperate every such local difference as a subversive act of ‘speaking back’ to the metropole obscures the autochthonous nature of a movement like the Spiritual Baptists, engendered out of specific local circumstances to which outside influence is itself marginal. Furthermore, the smallness of the society I
chapter11 21/12/04 11:28 am Page 164 11 You can get there from here: critique and utopia in Benita Parry’s thought Benita Parry is justly acclaimed as an exemplary demystifier – the thinker who has provided unsurpassed critiques of the neo-colonial elements that lurk in the work of some postcolonial critics and creative writers. Less acclaimed are the affirmative, even utopian elements of Parry’s intellectual project. Her writings, from imperialism to postcolonial theory to resistance, articulate optimistic belief in the achievability of political solidarity
Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 221–38, which follows similar arguments to his Oxford Literary Review article and applies them to the consideration of ethnic cultures within the USA. See Laura Chrisman, ‘Local Sentences in the Chapter of the Postcolonial World’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 7, 1 (1998), pp. 87–112, for a critical discussion of Lloyd’s ‘Ethnic Cultures’ article. 2 Kant wrote explicitly on race. See, for example, his ‘Of the Different Human