This book offers a radical, "Third World" approach to current debates on canon revision, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and reforms in education and culture.

This book offers a radical, "Third World" approach to current debates on canon revision, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and reforms in education and culture.

World literature, many have stressed, is a systematic category. Both literary scholars and social scientists have argued that the prestige of the major literary languages is key to establishing the shape of the overall system. In order to critically interrogate world literature and cinema, Premises and Problems approaches this system from the perspective of languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position. This perspective raises new questions about the nature of literary hegemony and the structure of world literature: How is hegemony established? What are the costs of losing it? What does hegemony mask? How is it masked? The contributors focus predominantly on literatures outside the small circle of prestigious modern European languages and on films and film criticism produced outside the best-known centers. The inclusion of this unfamiliar material calls attention to some areas of obscurity that make key features of the system indistinct, or that make it difficult to trace relationships between texts that hold different levels of prestige, such as those of the Global North and the Global South. The book argues that the study of world literature and cinema will profit from a sustained and informed engagement with the body of work produced by historical social scientists committed to the perspective of the world-system.

A comprehensive survey of how scientific disciplines have always been informed by politics and ideology on the basis of the Gramscian views in historical materialism, hegemony and civil society.

Hegemony and Education explores how the educational insights implicit in Antonio Gramsci's historical materialist outlook have been reconciled to the post-Marxist theory of "radical democracy." The author argues that there is an urgent need to redefine the dynamics of hegemony as a theory centering on the problem of cognitive and moral (relational and valuational) submissiveness; that is, a problem indicative of the pathologies of capitalism with respect to democratic theorizing.

Reading on the Edge explores the notion of multiple cultural identity and exile in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. Focusing on the cultural politics of modernism through the prism of cultural theory, the book reconceives each author's work while at the same time redrawing modernism's traditionally Eurocentric disciplinary boundaries. The book therefore has wide implications for our understanding of modernism and the modernist canon.