Suchergebnisse

"The Postcolonial Unconscious is a major attempt to reconstruct the whole field of postcolonial studies. In this magisterial and, at times, polemical study, Neil Lazarus argues that the key critical concepts that form the very foundation of the field need to be re-assessed and questioned. Drawing on a vast range of literary sources, Lazarus investigates works and authors from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Arab world, South, Southeast and East Asia, to reconsider them from a postcolonial perspective. Alongside this, he offers bold new readings of some of the most influential figures in the field: Fredric Jameson, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. A tour de force of postcolonial studies, this book will set the agenda for the future, probing how the field has come to develop in the directions it has and why and how it can grow further"--

In this wide-ranging study, Neil Lazarus explores the subject of cultural practice in the modern world system. The book contains individual chapters on a range of topics from modernity, globalization and the 'West', and nationalism and decolonization, to cricket and popular consciousness in the English-speaking Caribbean. Lazarus analyses social movements, ideas and cultural practices that have migrated from the 'First world' to the 'Third world' over the course of the twentieth century. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World offers an enormously erudite reading of culture and society in today's world and includes extended discussion of the work of such influential writers, critics and activists as Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Samir Amin, Raymond Williams, Paul Gilroy and Partha Chatterjee. This book is a politically focused, materialist intervention into postcolonial and cultural studies, and constitutes a major reappraisal of the debates on politics and culture in these fields

In this critical assessment of Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, the author argues that the book contributes appreciably to the materialist critique of postcolonial studies, but that its effect is weakened both by its tone and its failure to identify its object precisely enough. In conflating the historiographic project of 'Subaltern Studies' with 'postcolonial theory', Chibber misrepresents the histories of each of these formations and also the institutional relationship between them. He is at his most compelling in his commentary on capital's 'universalising tendency', in which he demonstrates that arguments about capitalist globalisation do not require one to anticipate an increased homogenisation of the world or, more narrowly still, the progressive universalisation of 'western' norms, values and modes of social life. His critique of the deep-set postcolonialist conviction as to the radical difference and incommensurability between 'western' and 'non-western' worlds is also very valuable. But because he does not utilise the full resources of Marxist and anti-imperialist theory – above all, the theory of uneven and combined development – Chibber fails to diagnose 'postcolonial theory' for what it is: a conjuncturally distinct version of 'Third Worldism'. He wrongly accuses it, instead, of 'Eurocentrism'.

This article proposes that there is a category error at the heart of 'postcolonial studies' as an academic field. There has been a notable failure in the field to situate the historical projects of colonialism and imperialism in the determinant contexts of the inception, consolidation and development of the modern world system, whose developmental logic is that of combined and uneven development. Even on the best postcolonialist accounts, imperialism is typically situated in civilisational terms and refers to 'the West' rather than to capitalism. The social and temporal power identified through this means is a euphemism. The idea of 'the West', as it is deployed in postcolonial studies, inevitably issues in a dematerialised — and, for that matter, unhistorical — understanding of the forces powering the world system over the course of the past 500 years. This case is argued through reviewing work by Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank, Benita Parry, Fredric Jameson, Susan Bassnett, V. Y. Mudimbe, Rey Chow and novelists such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ousmane Sembène, inter alia.

A review on a book by (1) David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta Books, 2000). References. Adapted from the source document.