Short review

Abstract

In many ways this volume has the appearance of being the standard work, if not quite the classic, of that much attacked, ill-defined, but still burgeoning body of ideas known as “postcolonialism.” As a sympathetic critic, it gives me an opportunity to explore the promise and the dangers in that writing and methodology. Postcolonialism as an intellectual project, rather than a chronological moment, turns the insights (and baggage) of critical cultural studies—from the writings of such stalwarts as Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan—to the relationship between colonies and their colonizers. In the process, it adds a significantly novel dimension to cultural studies because it insists that identities in the metropole (mother country) are just as much constituted by the experience in the colonies; the construction of the colonial Other involves the cultural production of the colonizing self both at home and in the colonies.

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Notes on contributors

Prasenjit Duara

teaches history at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. His newest book, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of the Nation, explores the genitive and persistent association between professional history and the nation-state by considering the histories of China and India.