What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

Anna Bernard is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013) and the co-editor (with Ziad Elmarsafy and David Attwell) of Debating Orientalism (2013).

Ziad Elmarsafy is a Professor of Comparative Literature at King's College London, UK. His most recent publications include Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2012) and Debating Orientalism (co-edited with Anna Bernard and David Attwell, 2013).

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK, where he is also the Director of the university’s multidisciplinary Centre for Medical Humanities.