Postcolonial Studies and Beyond

This volume is designed to expand the agenda of postcolonial studies, assess the field’s past and present, and affect its future evolution. The editors ask scholars to consider the intellectual, political, and methodological practices that have shaped-and which should shape-postcolonial modes of thought. The effort is to reinvent and transform the field. For, having influenced perspectives and methods across disciplines, postcolonial studies is becoming increasingly institutionalized. To remain useful, it needs new directions and emphases. The essays here address questions about the field’s definition, relevance, and relationship to issues of modernity, transnationalism, and globalization. Can postcolonial studies illuminate what is marginalized or invisible within the discourse of globalization and neo-imperialism? Can it draw on its tradition of anticolonial thought and sociocultural analysis to suggest socio-economically informed models of mobilization and innovative critical language? Can it minimize Eurocentricism? The book contains a range of perspectives on these issues, and links contributions from history, anthropology, Asian and African Studies, environmental studies, literature, politics, and religion to re-evaluate and stretch the field.