ABSTRACT

Taking a strikingly interdisciplinary and global approach, Postcolonialism Cross-Examined reflects on the current status of postcolonial studies and attempts to break through traditional boundaries, creating a truly comparative and genuinely global phenomenon. Drawing together the field of mainstream postcolonial studies with post-Soviet postcolonial studies and studies of the late Ottoman Empire, the contributors in this volume question many of the concepts and assumptions we have become accustomed to in postcolonial studies, creating a fresh new version of the field. The volume calls the merits of the field into question, investigating how postcolonial studies may have perpetuated and normalized colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers. The volume is the first to open a dialogue between three different areas of postcolonial scholarship that previously developed independently from one another:

  • the wide field of postcolonial studies working on European colonialism
  • the growing field of post-Soviet postcolonial/post-imperial studies
  • the still fledgling field of post-Ottoman postcolonial/post-imperial studies, supported by sideways glances at the multidirectional conditions of interaction in East Africa and the East and West Indies

Postcolonialism Cross-Examined looks at topics such as humanism, nationalism, multiculturalism, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene in order to piece together a new, broader vision for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. By including territories other than those covered by the postcolonial mainstream, the book strives to reframe the “postcolonial” as a genuinely global phenomenon and develop multidirectional postcolonial perspectives.

chapter 1|47 pages

Introduction: Postcolonialism cross-examined

Multidirectional perspectives on imperial and colonial pasts and the neocolonial present
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part I|47 pages

Post-colonial complexities

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chapter 4|17 pages

The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance

Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat's texts
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part II|82 pages

Case studies in light of unchanged asymmetries

chapter 5|18 pages

Accommodating “Syrien im Krieg”

Matrices of colonialism 1914–1917
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chapter 6|18 pages

Postcolonial asymmetry

Coping with the consequences of genocide between Namibia and Germany
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chapter 8|12 pages

Colonial lifestyle and nostalgia

The Ottoman Belle Époque and the project of modernization in Greek literature and heritage TV series
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part III|90 pages

Towards a multidirectional approach to the postcolonial

chapter 10|15 pages

Unthinking postcolonialism

On the necessity for a reset instead of a step forward
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chapter 11|21 pages

From Cuzco to Constantinople

Rethinking postcolonialism
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chapter 12|23 pages

Afrasian prisms of postcolonial memory

German colonialism in East Africa and the Indian Ocean universe in contemporary anglophone and German literature
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chapter 13|13 pages

The colonizer's day off

Colonial subjectivities in the Soviet-era Baltics*
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part IV|20 pages

Yet another major challenge

chapter 15|18 pages

Narratives of the Anthropocene

From the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities1
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