The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

by Jini Kim Watson (Editor), Gary Wilder (Editor), Sadia Abbas (Contribution by), Anthony C. Alessandrini (Contribution by), Sharad Chari (Contribution by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823280063
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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 and editor, with Gary Wilder, of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present.

Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).

Peter Hitchcock is professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1992); Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999); Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (2003); The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (2009); The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (2016; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo); Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (2017); and, most recently, The Debt Age (2018; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Sophia McClennen).

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the author of The Caste Question (California, 2009).

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 and editor, with Gary Wilder, of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present.

Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial Contemporary
Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder

1. Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions
Anthony C. Alessandrini

2. When Revolution Is Not Enough: Tracing the Limits of Black Radicalism in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and In Another Place, Not Here
Laurie R. Lambert

3. Mysterious Moves of Revolution: Spectres of Black Power, Futures of Postcoloniality
Sharad Chari

4. Reading Du Bois’s Revelation: Radical Humanism and Black Atlantic Criticism
Gary Wilder

5. De-provincializing Anticaste Thought: A Genealogy of Ambedkar’s Dalit
Anupama Rao

6. The Postcolonial Avant-Garde and the Claim to Futurity: Edwar al-Kharrat’s Ethics of Tentative Innovation
Adam Spanos

7. Neither Greek nor Indian: Space, Nation and, History in River of Fire and the Mermaid Madonna
Sadia Abbas

8. For a Marxist Theory of Waste: Seven Remarks
Vinay Gidwani

9. Goolarabooloo Futures: Mining and Aborigines in North-West Australia
Stephen Muecke

10. Buenos Aires’ La Salada’s Market and Plebeian Citizenship
Carlos A. Forment

11. The Speed of Place and the Space of Time: Toward a Theory of Postcolonial Velo/city
Peter Hitchcock

12. The Wrong Side of History: Anachronism and Authoritarianism
Jini Kim Watson

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

The Postcolonial Contemporary offers a striking set of vantage points to rethink the postcolonial present—at once a rich set of insights about the temporalities that postcolonial critique can animate and a riveting attentiveness to the political resources of earlier anticolonial struggles for grappling with new forms of imperial and capitalist subsumption. A set of beautifully written and conceptually creative chapters call upon literature, poetry, markets, and things to develop a grammar of dissensus in pursuit of a flourishing politics and 'plebian citizenry'—so urgent and vital for today.—Ann Laura Stoler, The New School

The Postcolonial Contemporary is without doubt the most comprehensive, engaging, and provocative reflection on the status of the postcolonial thinking and the crisis of the present. Informed by sophisticated theoretical thinking and a solid grasp of colonial and postcolonial history, this book will serve as a model for how collective conversations and scholarly debates can intervene in the politics of an unsettled moment.—Simon Gikandi, Princeton University

From the Publisher

The Postcolonial Contemporary is without doubt the most comprehensive, engaging, and provocative reflection on the status of the postcolonial thinking and the crisis of the present. Informed by sophisticated theoretical thinking and a solid grasp of colonial and postcolonial history, this book will serve as a model for how collective conversations and scholarly debates can intervene in the politics of an unsettled moment.

Simon Gikandi

The Postcolonial Contemporary offers a striking set of vantage points to rethink the postcolonial present—at once a rich set of insights about the temporalities that postcolonial critique can animate and a riveting attentiveness to the political resources of earlier anticolonial struggles for grappling with new forms of imperial and capitalist subsumption. A set of beautifully written and conceptually creative chapters call upon literature, poetry, markets, and things to develop a grammar of dissensus in pursuit of a flourishing politics and 'plebian citizenry'—so urgent and vital for today.

Ann Laura Stoler