Author: Padmini Mongia
Translator(s)/ Edito: Padmini Mongia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 407
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195652460
Description
There is a crisis in contemporary postcolonial theory: while an enormous body of challenging research has been produced under its auspices, severely critical questions about the validity and usefulness of this theory have also been raised.
This Reader is positioned at the juncture where it can address these contestations. It makes available some of the "classics" of the field, engages with the issues raised by contemporary practitioners, and offers several of the arguments that strongly critique postcolonial theory.
In this lively and provocative selection, Padmini Mongia presents some of the key arguments by nineteen of today’s leading theorists, ranging from the ‘classic’ texts by said, Spivak and Bhabha to lesser known, but equally challenging new voices, from India and around the world.
This will be an essential text for students of postcolonial theory, and a book which every researcher and lecturer in the field will want to add to their own libraries.
Reviews;
‘…these essays [create] a lively debate among the contributors… a definite sense of the postcolonial emerge(s) out of this collection, and will certainly set the reader thinking about his/her relation to the postcolonial… this book is a scholar’s delight. ’
- The Book Review
‘The volume offers a rich range of issues in contemporary postcolonial and cultural theory… [this is] a useful publication.’
- The Telegraph, Culcutta
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: SHIFTING TERRAINS
1. Edward Said, from Orientalism
2. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’
3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post - in Postmodernism the
Post - in Postcolonial?’
4. Stephen Slemon, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory
For the Second World’
5. Benita parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance, or Two
Cheers for Nativism’
6. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and Diaspora’
7. Rey Chow, ‘Where Have All the Natives Gone?’
PART TWO: DISCIPLINING KNOWLEDGE
8. Barbara Christian, ‘The Race for Theory’
9. Biodun Jeyifo, ‘The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization
And Critical Theory’
10. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’
11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Poststucturalism, Marginality,
Postcoloniality and Value’
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of History;
Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?’
13. Paul Gilroy, "The Whisper Wakes, the Shudder Plays":
"Race" "Nation and Ethnic Absolutism"
PART THREE: LOCATING PRACTICE
14. Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’
15. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in
The Age of Global Capitalism’
16. Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’
17. Sara Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the
Postcolonial Condition’
18. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘Crosscurrents, Crosstalk:
Race, "Postcoloniality" and the Politics of Location’
19. Rosemary Jolly, ‘Rehearsals of Liberation: Contemporary
Postcolonial Discourse and the New South Africa’
Bibliography
Index