Explores the possibilities and challenges of Asian immigrant Christian leadership in the United States. In A Postcolonial Leadership, Choi Hee An explores the interwoven relationship between Asian immigrant leadership in general and Asian immigrant Christian leadership in the United States. Using several current leadership theories, she analyzes the current landscape of US leadership and explores how Asian immigrant leaders, including Christian leaders, exercise leadership and confront challenges within this context. Drawing upon postcolonial theory and its analysis of power, Choi examines the multilayered dynamics of the Asian immigrant community and Christian congregations in their postcolonial contexts, and offers a new liberative interpretation of colonized history and culture in order to propose postcolonial leadership as a new leadership model for Asian immigrant leaders. “This book includes a wide variety of historical, contemporary, and cross-cultural understanding of leadership theories; in particular, it provides a unique understanding of the challenges and possibilities of Asian American leadership in immigrant communities and churches. Anyone interested in the topic will appreciate the depth and breadth that this work provides.” — Sangyil Sam Park, author of Korean Preaching, Han, and Narrative

Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.

Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued. This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration. The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory.

Postcolonial theory has had the most impact in disciplines such as literature and, to some degree, history, and perhaps the least impact in the discipline of politics. However, there is growing interest in postcolonial theory within politics, and interest in especially high in the subfield of international relations. This text provides a comprehensive survey of how postoclonial theory shapes our understanding of international relations.

Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism’s relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought—hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism. The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking—as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.

This book draws on Daoist yin/yang dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis of hegemony, hierarchy, and violence to a more balanced engagement with parity, fluidity, and ethics. The author theorizes that we may develop a richer, more representative approach towards sustainable and democratic governance by offering a non-Western alternative to hegemonic debates in IR. The book presents the story of world politics by integrating folk tales and popular culture with policy analysis. It does not exclude current models of liberal internationalism but rather brackets them for another day, another purpose. The deconstruction of IR as a singular unifying school of thought through the lens of a non-Westphalian analytic shows a unique perspective on the forces that drive and shape world politics. This book suggests new ways to articulate and act so that global politics is more inclusive and less coercive. Only then, the book claims, could IR realize what the dao has always stood for: a world of compassion and care. The Dao of World Politics bridges the humanities and social sciences, and will be of interest to scholars and students of the global/international, as well as policymakers and activists of the local/domestic.