This book closes a gap in postcolonial theory through its scrutiny of how four Indian and Nigerian English plays that are situated in national traditions reframed their own cultural terrain in international terms. It maps the trajectory that Indian and Nigerian dramatists, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Wole Soyinka and Badal Sircar, adopted as they moved from the specific to the bicultural to the global. The intercultural dialectic validated here provides a protean comparative scaffolding that evolves out of, and reflects, the interculturality of the literatures it is critiquing, allowing the book to be an entry point, practical guide, and reference for those interested in studying and comparing literatures from Asia and Africa written or translated into English. Its approach and dialectic can also be expanded for use in comparative literary studies on all intercultural encounters.

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics Geo Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.

The enhanced globalization, intellectual cross-fertilization and cultural dialectics have made Post-colonial Literature, Diasporic literature and Studies of different Cultures very important now a days. This book explores postcolonial literature, development of postcolonial literature and some of the major debates generated by the emergence of postcolonial approaches to literary studies in the late twentieth century. In this book the works of three postcolonial writers, Anita Rau Badami, Bharati Mukherjee and Shauna Singh Baldwin have been analyzed who focus on the phenomenon of immigration, the status of new immigrants, the adjustment to new lands, complexities of cross-cultural negotiation, cultural assimilation and the feeling of alienation often experienced by expatriates and their struggle for identity and survival. This book offers new insight into Postcolonial literature and generates the awareness of the complex ways in which the identities are constituted historically through migration, displacement, colonialism, exile and cultural and racial hybridization.

This book provides a clear and nuanced appraisal of Hegel’s treatment of Africa, India, and Islam, and of the implications of this treatment for postcolonial and global studies. Analyzing Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and his views on Africa, India, and Islam, it situates these views not only within Hegel’s historical scheme but also within a broader European philosophical context and the debates they have provoked within Hegel scholarship. Each chapter explores various in depth readings of Hegel by postcolonial critics, investigating both the Eurocentric and potentially global nature of his dialectic. Ultimately, the book shows both where of this profoundly influential thinker archetypally embodies certain Eurocentric traits that have characterized modernity and how, ironically, he himself gives us the tools for working towards a more global vision. Offering a concise introduction not only to an important dimension of Hegel’s thought – his orientation towards “empire” – but also to the various issues raised by postcolonial theory and global studies, this book will be of use to philosophers as well as advanced students of literary and cultural theory alike.

In Inter-imperiality Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée. Weaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, she shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered, racialized labor, while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order. To study literature is therefore, Doyle argues, to attend to world-historical processes of imaginative and material co-formation as they have unfolded through successive eras of vying empires. It is also to understand oral, performed, and written literatures as power-transforming resources for the present and future. To make this case, Doyle analyzes imperial-economic processes across centuries and continents in tandem with inter-imperially entangled literatures, from A Thousand and One Nights to recent Caribbean fiction. Her trenchant interdisciplinary method reveals the structural centrality of imaginative literature in the politics and possibilities of earthly life.

Articles with reference to the colonial history of India, 1761-1947.

The Postcolonial Unconscious is a major attempt to reconstruct the whole field of postcolonial studies. In this magisterial and, at times, polemical study, Neil Lazarus argues that the key critical concepts that form the very foundation of the field need to be re-assessed and questioned. Drawing on a vast range of literary sources, Lazarus investigates works and authors from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Arab world, South, Southeast and East Asia, to reconsider them from a postcolonial perspective. Alongside this, he offers bold new readings of some of the most influential figures in the field: Fredric Jameson, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. A tour de force of postcolonial studies, this book will set the agenda for the future, probing how the field has come to develop in the directions it has and why and how it can grow further.