"The Present as History" is a rare opportunity to hear world-renowned scholars speak on the new imperialism, feminism and human rights, secularism and Islam, post-colonialism, and the global economy. They treat the United States as an object to be historically and politically interrogated rather than as the norm from which all else is to be evaluated and assess the Third World through its history of colonialism and neocolonialism rather than focusing on issues of culture and morality.

Amartya Sen discusses the shortcomings of the development agenda as it was conceived at the close of the Second World War, while Joseph Stiglitz explains economic globalization and the power of the International Monetary Fund in guiding its trajectory. Sanjay Reddy argues that global poverty estimates are flawed, and Helena Norberg-Hodge uses her experience in Tibet to lay bare the problems with development practice.

Political scientists Partha Chatterjee, Mahmood Mamdani, and Anatol Lieven chart the growth of hegemonic power from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Chatterjee examines the enduring effects of colonial administrative and governing practices, while Mamdani, focusing on the present global dispensation, explains the growth of terrorist movements around the world in the context of the Cold War. Lieven looks at the different strains of American nationalism and the continuities and ruptures between nineteenth-century empires and the present one. Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi elaborates the relationship between Islam, democracy, and human rights while anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood respectively trace the historical use of women as an excuse for imperial intervention and discuss the relationship between liberalism, Islam, and secularism. Literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the legacy of colonialism in the domain of language and education, and isolates the problems associated with human rights discourse and practice.

In conclusion, Talal Asad traces the genealogy of the term secularism, the special place of Islam within it, and its relationship to modernity. Gil Anidjar considers the distinction between religion and politics and elaborates the historical links between secularism and Christianity. Taken together, these interviews offer a valuable understanding of world history and a corrective to predominant conventional discourses on global power and justice.

Africa since 1940 is the flagship textbook in Cambridge University Press' New Approaches to African History series. Now revised to include the history and scholarship of Africa since the turn of the millennium, this important book continues to help students understand the process out of which Africa's position in the world has emerged. A history of decolonisation and independence, it allows readers to see just what political independence did and did not signify, and how men and women, peasants and workers, religious and local leaders sought to refashion the way they lived, worked and interacted with each other. Covering the transformation of Africa from a continent marked by colonisation to one of independent states, Frederick Cooper follows the 'development question' across time, seeing how first colonial regimes and then African elites sought to transform African society in their own ways. He shows how people in cities and villages tried to make their way in an unequal world, through times of hope, despair, renewed possibilities, and continued uncertainties. Looking beyond the debate over what or who may be to blame, Cooper explores alternatives for the future.

"The Present as History" is a rare opportunity to hear world-renowned scholars speak on the new imperialism, feminism and human rights, secularism and Islam, post-colonialism, and the global economy. They treat the United States as an object to be historically and politically interrogated rather than as the norm from which all else is to be evaluated and assess the Third World through its history of colonialism and neocolonialism rather than focusing on issues of culture and morality.

Amartya Sen discusses the shortcomings of the development agenda as it was conceived at the close of the Second World War, while Joseph Stiglitz explains economic globalization and the power of the International Monetary Fund in guiding its trajectory. Sanjay Reddy argues that global poverty estimates are flawed, and Helena Norberg-Hodge uses her experience in Tibet to lay bare the problems with development practice.

Political scientists Partha Chatterjee, Mahmood Mamdani, and Anatol Lieven chart the growth of hegemonic power from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Chatterjee examines the enduring effects of colonial administrative and governing practices, while Mamdani, focusing on the present global dispensation, explains the growth of terrorist movements around the world in the context of the Cold War. Lieven looks at the different strains of American nationalism and the continuities and ruptures between nineteenth-century empires and the present one. Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi elaborates the relationship between Islam, democracy, and human rights while anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood respectively trace the historical use of women as an excuse for imperial intervention and discuss the relationship between liberalism, Islam, and secularism. Literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the legacy of colonialism in the domain of language and education, and isolates the problems associated with human rights discourse and practice.

In conclusion, Talal Asad traces the genealogy of the term secularism, the special place of Islam within it, and its relationship to modernity. Gil Anidjar considers the distinction between religion and politics and elaborates the historical links between secularism and Christianity. Taken together, these interviews offer a valuable understanding of world history and a corrective to predominant conventional discourses on global power and justice.

The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vital interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of diaspora studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. It also includes seminal essays that have been selected specifically for this collection, as well as one brand new paper. The volume presents: introductions to each section that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary, and theoretical contexts; essays grouped by key subject areas including religion, nation, citizenship, home and belonging, visual culture, and digital diasporas; writings by major figures including Robin Cohen, Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Pnina Werbner, Floya Anthias, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, and Salman Rushdie. The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader is a field-defining volume that presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to diaspora.

Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language: in textbooks and language classrooms; in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies; in propaganda and psychological warfare; and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence, and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion.

'The Search for Cultural Identities in Post-Colonial Africa' is Eddy Moto Ewane's first book. It chronicles, with a tinge of humour, efforts of a West African village to identify itself with its cultural and ancestral past, against the backdrop of socio-administrative machinations. From the era under the German protectorate, through that of the British mandate under the League of Nations, to the codified laws of traditional institutions, it depicts the difficult transformation of an ethnic group from a quasi-native village to a modern administrative headquarters. Oral communication between the colonists and the natives passed through several interpreters. With the chain of distortions, the natives unwittingly committed a number of sacrileges. They had to appease their gods - but at which cost? The Search for Cultural Identities in Post-Colonial Africa unveils with stunning detail, the astonishing truth concealed for a century. Eddy Moto Ewane plunges the reader into a society plagued by political and administrative gamesmanship, intrigues, power-mongering, black magic and selfishness. The author's narrative skills of the native mannerisms help to add humour and life to an otherwise historical work.

Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony. From these experiences a theme of loss resonates-loss of land, of freedom, of language, of culture, of self, and of ideals born from independence. Nathalie Etoke demonstrates that, beyond territorial expropriation and the pain inflicted upon the body and the soul, the violence that seals the encounter with the `other' annihilates an age-old cycle of life. In the wake of this annihilation, continental and diasporic Africans strive to reconcile that which has been destroyed with what has been newly introduced. Their survival depends on their capacity to negotiate the inherent tension of their historical becoming. The book develops a transdisciplinary method encompassing historicism, critical theory, Africana existential thought, and poetics.

This book explores the relationship of a colonial people with English law and looks at the way in which the practice of law developed among the ordinary population. Paula Jane Byrne traces the boundaries among property, sexuality and violence, drawing from court records, dispositions and proceedings. She asks: What did ordinary people understand by guilt, suspicion, evidence and the term "offense"? She illuminates the values and beliefs of the emerging colonial consciousness and the complexity of power relations in the colony. The book reconstructs the legal process with great tetail and richness and is able to evoke the everyday lives of people in the colonial NSW.

In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru's political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru's politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru's internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world. Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru's appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.

'Essential reading ... will not be bettered' Ferdinand Mount, Wall Street Journal 'Gandhi's finest biographer' David Kynaston, Guardian The magnificent new biography of Gandhi by India's leading historian A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 Gandhi lived one of the great 20th-century lives. He inspired and enraged, challenged and galvanized many millions of men and women around the world. He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj, which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact, but which he did more than anyone else to destroy, using revolutionary tactics. In a world defined by violence on a scale never imagined before and by ferocious Fascist and Communist dictatorship, he was armed with nothing more than his arguments and example. This magnificent book tells the story of Gandhi's life, from his departure from South Africa to his assassination in 1948. It is a book with a Tolstoyan sweep, both allowing us to see Gandhi as he was understood by his contemporaries and the vast, varied Indian societies and landscapes which he travelled through and changed beyond measure. Drawing on many new sources and animated by its author's wonderful sense of drama and politics, Gandhi is a major reappraisal of the crucial years in this titanic figure's story.

The brutal suppression of the uprising in Morant Bay in October 1865 under Governor Edward Eyre and the ensuing 'reign of terror' is a watershed in Jamaican history. Paul Bogle and his allies, overwhelmed by colonial firepower and betrayed by Maroons in service to the British Crown, were mercilessly cut down by the elites (local and foreign) who justified their actions based on the continued belief in the subjugation and suppression of the black race by the white race, emancipation notwithstanding. In Colour for Colour Skin for Skin, Clinton Hutton deconstructs the ideological, cultural, philosophical, economic, social and political rationale for the uprising by formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants and its violent suppression by the colonial forces, and articulates its significance in the development of a national black consciousness. This consciousness, and fight for freedom and justice, he argues, has strengthened over periods of Jamaica's short history, evidenced by the emergence of Garveyism and Rastafari, the 1938 labour riots, and articulated in Jamaican popular music and more recently, the resurgence of Revival worship. Using fascinating first-hand accounts of the uprising and its aftermath from the Report of the Royal Commission of 1866 and numerous newspaper reports among other sources, Hutton presents the 'Morant Bay Rebellion' squarely at the forefront of the continuing expression of a national complex in a post colonial society.

During the 1950s, John Glubb and the Arab Legion became the 'cornerstone' of Britain's imperial presence in the Middle East. Based on unprecedented access to the unofficial archive of the Arab Legion, including a major accession of Glubb's private papers, Graham Jevon examines and revises Britain's post-1945 retreat from empire in the Middle East. Jevon details how Glubb's command of the Arab Legion secured British and Jordanian interests during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, answering questions that have dogged historians of this conflict for decades. He reveals how the Arab Legion was transformed, by Cold War concerns, from an internal Jordanian security force to a quasi-division within the British Army. Jevon also sheds new light on the succession crisis following King Abdullah's assassination, and uses previously unseen documents to challenge accepted contentions concerning King Hussein's dismissal of Glubb, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and the nature of Britain's imperial decline.

In 1921, during the Irish War of Independence, the fort on Spike Island in County Cork was the largest British-military-run prison for Republican prisoners and internees in the Martial Law area, housing almost 1,400 men from Munster and south Leinster. Tom O'Neill has compiled an outstanding record of these men, using primary-source material from Irish Military Archives, British Army records, and prisoner and internee autograph books. This book includes details of arrests, charges, trials, convictions, sentences and transfers of the Republicans held on Spike Island. From the establishment of the military prison in 1921, to the escapes, hunger strikes and riots, as well as the fatal shooting by sentries of two internees that took place there, Spike Island's Republican Prisoners, 1921 is the first comprehensive history of individuals and events on the island during the Irish War of Independence. Spike Island is now a world-class tourist attraction.

"This is a remarkable exploration of the idea of the 'minority.' Through close and historically situated readings of literary and political texts in German, English, and Urdu, Mufti has produced a comparative account of Jewish and Muslim minority-ness in Europe and India that is both dazzling and profound. An outstanding first book from a brilliant young mind."--Partha Chatterjee, Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

""Enlightenment in the Colony" is a bold and original book which demonstrates the profound link between the 'Jewish question, ' as it tragically unfolds in twentieth-century Europe, and the crisis of partition and of Muslim identity in India. It is one of those arguments that, as soon as it is made, seems at once unanswerable and of unprecedented significance. With impressive erudition, Aamir Mufti grounds his analysis in readings of literary works, from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda to the lyrical poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which are subtle and persuasive. A major contribution to our understanding of minority cultures, Enlightenment in the Colony should establish Mufti as a key intellectual presence in debates about secularism and postcolonial culture today."--Jacqueline Rose, author of "The Question of Zion"

"A captivating and provocative work of cross-disciplinary and comparative literary scholarship that deploys the critical legacies of the 'Jewish question' in German and English literature to analyze the crisis of postcolonial secularism and Muslim identity in Indian and Pakistani writers. In a series of brilliant readings of dramatic, narrative, and poetic texts, Aamir Mufti posits a vernacular modernity and moves us toward a criticalsecularism that fully captures the fractures and disjunctions of Enlightenment thought that continue to fuel political conflicts in the Middle East and in South Asia today."--Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University, author of "Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory"

"This is a splendid, challenging, major work. Mufti combines rare erudition with great critical intelligence and an attention to major issues. The book carries forward its inquiry by means of two brilliant insights. First, one may both illuminate and reposition the question of communalism within democratic, secular, independent India by recognizing its structural relation and historical connections to the 'Jewish question' within the European liberal Enlightenment. Second, one may further focus the issue by pursuing the evolution of the Urdu language and its literature, as reshaped first in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion and then by the dual nationalist pressures of India and Pakistan after partition. Mufti's concern with the conditions that make possible, and complex, such a thing as 'minority identity' means that this book will offer resources to students of Palestine, Ireland, and no doubt other tough cases."--Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh, author of "The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860"

Contemporary Singapore is simultaneously a small postcolonial multicultural nation state and a cosmopolitan global city. To manage fundamental contradictions, the state takes the lead in authoring the national narrative. This is partly an internal process of nation building, but it is also achieved through more commercially motivated and outward facing efforts at nation and city branding. Both sets of processes contribute to Singapore's capacity to influence foreign affairs, if only for national self-preservation. For a small state with resource limitations, this is mainly through the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

This book provides a unique comparative study of the major secessionist and self-determination movements in post-colonial Africa, examining theory, international law, charters of the United Nations, and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU)/African Union's (AU) stance on the issue. The book explores whether self-determination and secessionism lead to peace, stability, development and democratisation in conflict-ridden societies, particularly looking at the outcomes in Eritrea and South Sudan. The book covers all the major attempts at self-determination and secession on the continent, extensively analysing the geo-political, economic, security and ideological factors that determine the outcome of the quest for self-determination and secession. It reveals the lack of inherent clarity in international law, social science theories, OAU/AU Charter, UN Charters and international conventions concerning the topic. This is a major contribution to the field and highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students in African Studies, Development Studies, African Politics and History, and Anthropology.

The demise of apartheid was one of the great achievements of postwar history, sought after and celebrated by a progressive global community. Looking at these events from the other side, An African Volk explores how the apartheid state strove to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy. Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as interviews with leaders of the apartheid order, Jamie Miller shows how the white power structure attempted to turn the new political climate to its advantage. Instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the regime looked to co-opt and invert the norms of the new global era to promote a fresh ideological basis for its rule. It adapted discourses of nativist identity, African anti-colonialism, economic development, anti-communism, and state sovereignty to rearticulate what it meant to be African. An African Volk details both the global and local repercussions. At the dawn of the 1970s, the apartheid state reached out eagerly to independent Africa in an effort to reject the mantle of colonialism and redefine the white polity as a full part of the post-colonial world. This outreach both reflected and fuelled heated debates within white society, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of profound economic, cultural, and social change. Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk takes readers into the corridors of white power to detail the apartheid regime's campaign to break out of isolation and secure global acceptance.

In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers, empire and nation, consumption and production, "In Another Country" vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their own uses. Asking what nineteenth-century Indian readers chose to read and why, Joshi shows how these readers transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. By subsequently analyzing the eventual rise of the English novel in India, she further demonstrates how Indian novelists, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context.

A growing number of historians, political commentators, and cultural critics have sought to analyse Ireland's past and present in colonial terms. For some, including Irish Republicans, it is the only proper framework for understanding Ireland. Others reject the very use of the colonial label for Ireland's history; while using the term for the present can arouse outrage, especially amongst Ulster Unionists. This book evaluates and analyses these controversies, which range from debates over the ancient and medieval past to those in current literary and postcolonial theory. Scholarly, at times polemical, it is the most comprehensive study of these themes ever to appear. It will undoubtedly arouse sharp controversy.

Because many of the documents and books about Puerto Rico have been written by the island's colonizers, only the victors were celebrated. With this in mind, the author has expressly composed this book from the viewpoint of the colonized, suppressed, and exploited. She challenges a previously-held notion that the Tainos simply gave up at the first sight of the Spaniards, and shows that they not only fought the intruders, but continued to resist them for more than sixty years after the battle of Yaguecas. The author discusses the fate and contributions of Africans who, as slaves or as free persons, became instrumental in Puerto Rico's social and economic development and shows how this multi-cultural Caribbean island brings together the global traditions of the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

The issue of devolution has often been one for polemic rather than reasoned analysis.This title places developments in the United Kingdom in their historical context, examining political and constitutional aspects of devolution in Britain from Gladstone's espousal of Home Rule in 1886 right up to the 1998 legislation governing the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. As well as considering what devolution will mean for Scotland and Wales, and how it will work in practice, Vernon Bogdanor discusses parallels with earlier devolution debates, giving special attention to the issue of Irish Home Rule which dominated British politics from 1886 to 1914. He also examines the experience of devolution in Northern Ireland and analyzes the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as well as considering the impact and implications of the new arrangements for the government of London under the Mayoral system implemented in May 2000. Devolution in the United Kingdom cuts across the boundaries of disciplines such as history, political science, and law, and will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the significance of the most important constitutional development of our time.

Opposing the orthodoxies of establishment postcolonialism, Beyond Postcolonial Theory posits acts of resistance and subversion by people of color as central to the unfolding dialogue with Western hegemony. The testimonies and signifying practices of Rigoberta Menchu, C.L.R. James, various "minority" writers in the United States, and intellectuals from Africa, Latin America, and Asia are counterposed against the dogmas of contingency, borderland nomadism, panethnicity, and the ideology of identity politics and transcultural postmodern pastiche. Reappropriating ideas from Gramsci, Bakhtin, Althusser, Freire, and others in the radical democratic tradition, San Juan deploys them to recover the memory of national liberation struggles (Fanon, Cabral, Che Guevara) on the face of the triumphal march of globalized capitalism.

How the conflict between political Islamists and secular-leaning nationalists has shaped the modern Middle East In Making the Arab World, Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, describes how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region from the 1920s to the present. He tells this story through an unprecedented dual biography of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) and another of the twentieth-century Arab world's most influential figures-Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the father of many branches of radical political Islam. Based on a decade of research, including in-depth interviews with many leading figures in the story, Making the Arab World is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, from civil wars to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

In his new book, Bill Ashcroft gives us a revolutionary view of the ways in which post-colonial societies have responded to colonial control.
The most comprehensive analysis of major features of post-colonial studies ever compiled, Post-Colonial Transformation:
* demonstrates how widespread the strategy of transformation has been
* investigates political and literary resistance
* examines the nature of post-colonial societies' engagement with imperial language, history, allegory, and place
* offers radical new perspectives in post-colonial theory in principles of habitation and horizonality.
Post-Colonial Transformation breaks new theoretical ground while demonstrating the relevance of a wide range of theoretical practices, and extending the exploration of topics fundamentally important to the field of post-colonial studies.