This study considers the recent surge of science fiction narratives from the postcolonial Third World as a utopian response to the spatial, political, and representational dilemmas that attend globalization.

In twelve critical and interdisciplinary essays, this text examines the relationship between the fantastic in novels, movies and video games and real-world debates about nationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. Topics covered include science fiction and postcolonialism, issues of ethnicity, nation and transnational discourse. Altogether, these essays chart a new discursive space, where postcolonial theory and science fiction and fantasy studies work cooperatively to expand our understanding of the fantastic, while simultaneously expanding the scope of postcolonial discussions.

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

Using close readings and thematic studies of contemporary science fiction and postcolonial theory, ranging from discussions of Japanese and Canadian science fiction to a deconstruction of race and (post)colonialism in World of Warcraft, This book is the first comprehensive study of the complex and developing relationship between the two areas.

Though science fiction is often thought of as a Western phenomenon, the genre has long had a foothold in countries as diverse as India and Mexico. These fourteen critical essays examine both the role of science fiction in the third world and the role of the third world in science fiction. Topics covered include science fiction in Bengal, the genre's portrayal of Native Americans, Mexican cyberpunk fiction, and the undercurrents of colonialism and Empire in traditional science fiction. The intersections of science fiction theory and postcolonial theory are explored, as well as science fiction's contesting of imperialism and how the third world uses the genre to recreate itself. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

This book presents new scholarship on the subject of imperial expansion through colonization and globalization from a variety of postcolonial perspectives. The chapters in this volume, grouped in three sections, 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 section, entitled Neo-Imperial Traces or Premonitions in Modernism. The postclassical 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 section 2, Interference of the Imperial Tradition in Asia, which allows for the rearticulations of cultural heritage in the region within the different and ever-renewed schemes of imperial expansion Section 3, 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. Book jacket.

This innovative and lively book is quite unlike any other introduction to postcolonialism. Robert Young examines the political, social, and cultural after-effects of decolonization by presenting situations, experiences, and testimony rather than going through the theory at an abstract level. He situates the debate in a wide cultural context, discussing its importance as an historical condition, with examples such as the status of aboriginal people, of those dispossessed from their land, Algerian raï music, postcolonial feminism, and global social and ecological movements. Above all, Young argues, postcolonialism offers a political philosophy of activism that contests the current situation of global inequality, and so in a new way continues the anti-colonial struggles of the past. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.