After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements

by Gyan Prakash (Editor)

Overview

After Colonialism offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and the changes in knowledge, disciplines, and identities produced by the imperial experience. Ranging across disciplines—from history to anthropology to literary studies—and across regions—from India to Palestine to Latin America to Europe—the essays in this volume reexamine colonialism and its aftermath. Leading literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists engage with recent theories and perspectives in their specific studies, showing the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world and offering postcolonial reflections on the effects and experience of empire.


The contributions cross historical analysis of texts with textual examination of historical records and situate metropolitan cultural practices in engagements with non-metropolitan locations. Interdisciplinarity here means exploring and realigning disciplinary boundaries. Contributors to After Colonialism include Edward Said, Steven Feierman, Joan Dayan, Ruth Phillips, Anthony Pagden, Leonard Blussé, Gauri Viswanathan, Zachary Lockman, Jorge Klor de Alva, Irene Silverblatt, Emily Apter, and Homi Bhabha.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691037424
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/19/1994
Series:	Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gyan Prakash is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India and coeditor of Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia.

Table of Contents

Preface p.vii
Introduction: After Colonialism p.3
PART ONE: COLONIALISM AND THE DISCIPLINES
Ch. 1 Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism p.2
Ch. 2 Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives p.40
Ch. 3 Haiti, History, and the Gods p.66
Ch. 4 Why Not Tourist Art? Significant Silences in Native American Museum Representations p.98
PART TWO: COLONIALISM AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE
Ch. 5 The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder p.129
Ch. 6 Retribution and Remorse: The Interaction between the Administration and the Protestant Mission in Early Colonial Formosa p.153
Ch. 7 Coping with (Civil) Death: The Christian Convert’s Rights of Passage in Colonial India p.183
Ch. 8 Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897–1929 p.211
Ch. 9 The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of “Colonialism,“Postcolonialism,” and “Mestizaje” p.241
PART THREE: COLONIAL DISCOURSE AND ITS DISPLACEMENTS
Ch. 10 Becoming Indian in the Central Andes p.279
Ch. 11 Ethnographic Travesties: Colonial Realism, French Feminism, and the Case of Elissa Rhaïs p.299
Ch. 12 In a Spirit of Calm Violence p.326
Notes on the Contibutors p.345
Index p.347

Editorial Reviews

"The contributors are drawn from literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and history, and their work represents the latest in subaltern studies and theorizing about postcolonialism. . . . The contributors challenge disciplinary categories, conventional notions of cultural difference, and offer alternative 'displacements.'"

Virginia Quarterly Review

"The contributors are drawn from literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and history, and their work represents the latest in subaltern studies and theorizing about postcolonialism. . . . The contributors challenge disciplinary categories, conventional notions of cultural difference, and offer alternative 'displacements.'"-- "Virginia Quarterly Review"

From the Publisher