Colonization or Globalization?

This book articles presents new scholarship on the subject of imperial expansion through colonization and globalization from a variety of postcolonial perspectives. The essays in this volume, grouped in three chapters, scrutinize imperial expansion within the context of national identities and imageries-deconstructing the modernist and utopian idea of a nation as a site of homogeneity, and reviewing the importance of the concept in the different phases of colonization. Hence the first chapter is entitled 'Neo-Imperial Traces or Premonitions in Modernism.' The post-classical phase of colonialism is examined through the representation of the colonized and the once-colonized. Applying postcolonial theories and often moving beyond them, scholars scrutinize such textual and filmic representations as exemplified in Asia. These make up Chapter Two, 'Interference of the Imperial Tradition in Asia,' which allows for the re-articulations of cultural heritage in the region within the different and ever renewed schemes of imperial expansion. Chapter Three, 'Reformulations of the Imperial Project,' seeks to explore the questions surrounding inclusion in and exclusion from the realm of power as the founding principle of empire, suggesting that they are discursive and deliberate. Postcolonial societies inherit the trauma of colonialism that subjected people to a cultural displacement that is exacerbated by renewed efforts of imperial influence through globalization.

Covering a wide range of texts—from contemporary British detective fiction to Hollywood's King Solomon's Mines—the essays in this collection deploy a variety of postcolonial approaches to examine and argue for a continuum between colonialism and globalization. This is a timely, refreshing volume, which will be of keen interest to scholars of contemporary literature and culture., This is an excellent and timely intervention into the dialogue between postcolonialism and globalization studies, emphasizing as it does the utility and adaptability of postcolonial concepts to a rapidly changing world. The collection demonstrates with admirable clarity the ways in which the imperial enterprise has developed globally and shows how valuable postcolonial analyses have become.

Silvia Nagy-Zekmi is a professor of Hispanic and Cultural Studies and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at Villanova University. She authored Transatlantic Parallelisms: Postcoloniality and Writings by Women in Latin America and North Africa ; History of Andean Folksons; edited Paradoxical Citizenship; Orientalism in Latin America and coedited with Fernando Leiva Democracy in Chile. Chantal Zabus is a professor of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13; a researcher with the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, as well as a senior scholar at the Institut Universitaire de France, Paris. She is the author of Between Rites and Rights, The African Palimpsest, and Tempests after Shakespeare. She has also edited Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies on Excision and Circumcision; Changements au féminin en Afrique noire; and with Jacques Derrida, Le Secret.