The Postcolonial Contemporary Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

"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
This volume seeks to recognize and reflect upon the postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, while asking whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, The Postcolonial Contemporary cuts across this false alternative, thinking with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.
Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed from the 1970s to 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?
The book’s twelve contributors, from a range of disciplines and regional locations—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies; the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina—push past our habitual oppositions: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. They reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries.
From the book’s powerful and substantial Introduction through its dozen compelling chapters, The Postcolonial Contemporary will be a landmark volume for reassessing a crucial critical framework for today’s world.
Contributors: Sadia Abbas, Anthony C. Alessandrini, Sharad Chari, Carlos A. Forment, Vinay Gidwani, Peter Hitchcock, Laurie Lambert, Stephen Muecke, Anupama Rao, Adam Spanos, Jini Kim Watson, Gary Wilder
Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology and History and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.