Postcolonialism and Political Theory

Postcolonialism and Political Theory explores the intersection between the political and the postcolonial through an engagement with, critique of, and challenge to some of the prevalent restrictive tenets and frameworks of Western political and social thought. It is a response to the call by postcolonial studies, as well as to the urgent need within world politics to turn towards a multiplicity – largely excluded from globally dominant discourses of community, subjectivity, power and prosperity – constituted by otherness, radical alterity, or subordination to the newly reconsolidated West. The book offers a diverse range of essays that reexamine and open the boundaries of political and cultural modernity’s historical domain; that look at how the racialized and gendered and cultured subject visualizes the social from elsewhere; that critique postcolonial theory’s claim to celebrate diversity; and that complicate the notion of postcolonial politics within settler societies that continue to practice exile of the indigenous. Postcolonialism and Political Theory is an ideal book for graduate and advanced undergraduate level study and for those working both disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily, both inside and outside academia.

Contents: 1. Alterity and Modernity (Las Casas, Vitoria and Suárez: 1514-1617)/Enrique Dussel. 2. Ibn Khaldun and the Origins of State Politics/Lucian M. Ashworth.3. Power and development/Graham Finlay. 4. From American Democracy to French Empire/John Savage. 5. Postcolonial Dialogics/E. San Juan. 6. Problematic People and Epistemic Decolonization/Lewis Gordon. 7. The Gift of Double Consciousness/Jane Anna Gordon. 8. Symptomatic Politics/Joan W. Scott. 9. Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and creolization/Hwa Yol Jung. 10. From Postcolonial Critique to Postoccidental Paradigm/Alice Feldman. 11. Doing the Postcolonial Differently/Phillip Darby. 12. Postcolonial Dialogues and Public Cyberspace/M.I. Franklin.