An introduction to the causes and consequences of the Korean War, this history seeks to challenge presumptions about Korea favoured by American politicians and network news pundits. Through a judicious survey of the historical record, Martin Hart-Landsberg demonstrates that the basic aim of U.S. foreign policy in Korea from the outset has been regional control - not democracy, despite Washington's claims. Reconstructing the long pattern of Korean struggles for national unity and independence from foreign domination, he shows that the division of the country into hostile states after World War II produced an "imaginary line" contrary to the interests and desires of a majority of Koreans. He examines the post-war history of North and South Korea, showing how Cold War foreign policy and division undermined valuable efforts at social change on both sides of the 38th parallel. Reunification, he concludes, is the optimal solution for Korea, so long as it transpires on a democratic and egalitarian basis, with participation by popular social movements.

Throughout today's postcolonial world, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain's once impressive if troubled imperial past. These structures are a conspicuous and near inescapable reminder of that past, and therefore, the built heritage of Britain's former colonial empire is a fundamental part of how we negotiate our postcolonial identities, often lying at the heart of social tension and debate over how that identity is best represented. This volume provides an overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British Empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Although much research has been carried out on architecture and urban planning in Britain's empire in recent decades, no single, comprehensive reference source exists. The essays compiled here remedy this deficiency. With its extensive chronological and regional coverage by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts. The volume is divided in two main sections. The first section deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical.

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. Insurgent Empire examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.

Why are relations between minorities and the police in France so fraught? Stripping away the myth that this tension is a sudden and recent disruption of its universalist republican tradition brought on by the presence of North African immigrants, Amit Prakash locates the origins of contemporary conflicts in race and empire in France's history. In Empire on the Seine, Prakash argues that the metropole and the colony dynamically co-developed a policing regime over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to manage colonial and racial difference. With the North African community emerging as a sizable and durable presence in Paris after World War I, this policing became a key state practice in imagining and administering the immigrant population. Prakash shows that despite the French state's current reluctance to use race as an official category, racial thought and racial targets animated police services, social services, and urban planning schemes from the 1920s until the 1970s. Using police archival records, reports from colonial officials, urban planning and housing studies, and the records of French social workers and immigrant associations, Prakash shows that colonial racism was integrated into the policing of Paris and that architecture, urbanism, and social housing assumed police functions for colonial and postcolonial migrants. In light of this history, contemporary social and racial segregation, periodic protests and rioting against police violence, and the aggressive posture of the Parisian police emerge as the material traces of French colonialism in the metropole. The city of Paris was the capital of an empire and its imperial shadows are long.

This book argues that Armenians around the world - in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I - developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s. Tsolin Nalbantian explores Armenians' discursive re-positioning within the newly independent Lebanese nation-state; the political-cultural impact (in Lebanon as well as Syria) of the 1946-8 repatriation initiative to Soviet Armenia; the 1956 Catholicos election; and the 1957 Lebanese elections and 1958 mini-civil war. What emerges is a post-Genocide Armenian history of - principally - power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence.

Offering a global history of India's refugee regime, Making Refugees in India explores how one of the first postcolonial states during the mid-twentieth century wave of decolonisation rewrote global practices surrounding refugees - signified by India's refusal to sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In broadening the scope of this decision well beyond the Partition of India, starting with the so called 'Wilsonian moment' and extending to the 1970s, the refugee is placed within the postcolonial effort to address the inequalities of the subject-citizenship of the British empire through the fullest realisation of self-determination. India's 'strategically ambiguous' approach to refugees is thus far from ad hoc, revealing a startling consistency when viewed in conversation of postcolonial state building and anti-imperial worldmaking to address inequity across the former colonies. The anti-colonial cry for self-determination as the source of all rights, it is revealed in this work, was in tension with the universal human rights that focused on the individual, and the figure of the refugee felt this irreconcilable difference most intensely. To elucidate this, this work explores contrasts in Indians' and Europeans' rights in the British empire and in World War Two, refugee rehabilitation during Partition, the arrival of the Tibetan refugees, and the East Pakistani refugee crisis. Ria Kapoor finds that the refugee was constitutive of postcolonial Indian citizenship, and that assistance permitted to refugees - a share of the rights guaranteed by self-determination - depended on their potential to threaten or support national sovereignty that allowed Indian experiences to be included in the shaping of universal principles.

Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate "nature" with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.

"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"

Twenty years on from the fall of apartheid in South Africa, veteran analyst and activist John S. Saul examines the liberation struggle, placing it in a regional and global context and looking at how the initial optimism and hope has given way to a sense of crisis following soaring inequality levels and the massacre of workers at Marikana. With chapters on South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique, Saul examines the reality of southern Africa's post-'liberation' plight, drawing on the insights of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral and assessing claims that a new 'precariat' has emerged. Saul examines the ongoing 'rebellion of the poor', including the recent Marikana massacre, that have shaken the region and may signal the possibility of a new and more hopeful future.

Amid the burgeoning literature on the connections between the global north and the global south, Mecca of Revolution is a pure example of post-colonial, or "south-south," international history. Through an examination of Algeria's interactions with the wider world, from the beginning of its war of independence to the fall of its first post-colonial regime, the Third Worldist perspective on the twentieth century comes into view. Hitherto dominant historical paradigms such as the Cold War are situated in the larger context of decolonization and the re-inclusion of the large majority of humanity in international affairs. At the same time, groundbreaking research in the archives of Algeria and a half-dozen other countries enable Mecca of Revolution to advance beyond the focus on discourse analysis that has typified previous studies of Third World internationalism. It demystifies terms like Non-Alignment, Afro-Asianism, and Bandung, and sheds new light on the relationships between the emergent elites of Africa, the Middle East, Asian, and Latin America. As one of the most prominent sites of post-colonial socialist experimentation and an epicenter of transnational guerrilla activity, Algeria was at the heart of efforts to transform global political and economic structures. Yet, the book also shows how Third Worldism evolved from a subversive transnational phenomenon into a mode of elite cooperation that reinforced the authority of the post-colonial state. In so doing, the Third World movement played a key role in the construction of the totalizing international order of the late-twentieth century. Ultimately, Mecca of Revolution shows the "post-colonial world" is all of our world.

A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in "A Turn to Empire," Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe.

Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears.

Fluently written, "A Turn to Empire" offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments.

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism unsettled the world. Over two decades earlier Aime Cesaire had famously spoken of the boomerang effect of colonization, which dehumanized both the colonizer and the colonized. Over time, Said and his 1978 book took Cesaire's anti-imperial critique one step further by enabling the boomerang effect of decolonization. Inspired by that intellectual trajectory, The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization redefines post-Orientalism in a relational and integrative way. This volume draws on the reception and critique of Said's ideas as well as his own attempts to appropriate the boomerang's recursive nature and empower decolonial processes that aimed to transform everyone, regardless of differences both imagined and real, for the betterment of all. Reflecting upon Orientalism, its legacies, and the myriad conversations it has generated, scholars from various disciplines examine acts of anti-racism and liberation through the lens of critical race theory. Covering topics including Said's anti-Orientalist world, Metis/Michif consciousness, writing by the French scholar Jacques Berque, the politics of allyship in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the convergence between healthcare and settler-colonialism in Northwestern Ontario, contributors explore the different paths critiques of imperial cultures and their politics of difference have travelled in Canada and abroad. Said's Orientalism reoriented both decolonization itself and his readers' imaginations. By redefining post-Orientalism as a relational and inclusive mode of liberation, this volume offers tools to think about difference differently, centring its anti-racist framework on the relationship between misrepresented people and their rewritten histories. Contributors include Yasmeen Abu-Laban (Alberta), Rachad Antonius (UQAM), Sung Eun Choi (Bentley), Mary-Ellen Kelm (Simon Fraser), Allyson Stevenson (Saskatchewan), Mira Sucharov (Carleton), and Lorenzo Veracini (Swinborne).

A NEW STATESMAN AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 A thrilling history of the revolutionary birth of modern Greece from 'the preeminent historian of a generation' (Misha Glenny) In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece. Mark Mazower's wonderful new book recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece. Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history. 'Exquisite, impressive' The Times 'Superbly subtle and thorough' Daily Telegraph

The definitive modern biography of the great slave leader, military genius and revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'the most unhappy man of men', imprisoned in a fortress in France. Black Spartacus draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step of Louverture's singular journey, from his triumphs against French, Spanish and British troops to his skilful regional diplomacy, his Machiavellian dealings with successive French colonial administrators and his bold promulgation of an autonomous Constitution. Sudhir Hazareesingh shows that Louverture developed his unique vision and leadership not solely in response to imported Enlightenment ideals and revolutionary events in Europe and the Americas, but through a hybrid heritage of fraternal slave organisations, Caribbean mysticism and African political traditions. Above all, Hazareesingh retrieves Louverture's rousing voice and force of personality, making this the most engaging, as well as the most complete, biography to date. After his death in the French fortress, Louverture became a figure of legend, a beacon for slaves across the Atlantic and for generations of European republicans and progressive figures in the Americas. He inspired the anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, the most eminent nineteenth-century African-American; his emancipatory struggle was hailed by those who defied imperial and colonial rule well into the twentieth. In the modern era, his life informed the French poet Aime Cesaire's seminal idea of negritude and has been celebrated in a remarkable range of plays, songs, novels and statues. Here, in all its drama, is the epic story of the world's first black superhero.

"A Place That Matters Yet" unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg's MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Sara Byala, in examining this story, sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, Byala paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on his philosophical notion of "three-dimensional thinking," which aimed to transcend binaries and thus - quite explicitly - racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum's opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a postapartheid institution, Byala showcases it as a rich - and problematic - archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.

Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about "things," Rudolf Mrazek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature.

The central chapters comprise vignettes and take up, in turn, transportation (from shoes to road-building to motorcycle clubs), architecture (from prison construction to home air-conditioning), optical technologies (from photography to fingerprinting), clothing and fashion, and the introduction of radio and radio stations. The text clusters around a group of fascinating recurring characters representing colonialism, nationalism, and the awkward, inevitable presence of the European cultural, intellectual, and political avant-garde: Tillema, the pharmacist-author of Kromoblanda; the explorer/engineer IJzerman; the "Javanese princess" Kartina; the Indonesia nationalist journalist Mas Marco; the Dutch novelist Couperus; the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer; and Dutch left-wing liberal Wim Wertheim and his wife.

In colonial Indies, as elsewhere, people employed what Proust called "remembering" and what Heidegger called "thinging" to sense and make sense of the world. In using this observation to approach Indonesian society, Mrazek captures that society off balance, allowing us to see it in unfamiliar positions. The result is a singular work with surprises for readers throughout the social sciences, not least those interested in Southeast Asia or colonialism more broadly."

After Empires describes how the end of colonial empires and the changes in international politics and economies after decolonization affected the European integration process. Until now, studies on European integration have often focussed on the search for peaceful relations among the European nations, particularly between Germany and France, or examined it as an offspring of the Cold War, moving together with the ups and downs of transatlantic relations. But these two factors alone are not enough to explain the rise of the European Community and its more recent transformation into the European Union. Giuliano Garavini focuses instead on the emergence of the Third World as an international actor, starting from its initial economic cooperation with the creation of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 up to the end of unity among the countries of the Global South after the second oil shock in 1979-80. Offering a new - less myopic - way to conceptualise European history more globally, the study is based on a variety of international archives (government archives in Europe, the US, Algeria, Venezuela; international organizations such as the EC, UNCTAD, and the World Bank; political and social organizations such as the Socialist International, labour archives and the papers of oil companies) and traces the reactions and the initiatives of the countries of the European Community, but also of the European political parties and public opinion, to the rise and fall of the Third World on the international stage.

"Another Reason" is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation.

Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination.

But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous.

Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of "A History of Hindu Chemistry"), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, "Another Reason" will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.

That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merdeka and a cherished sign of hope for the imminent arrival of peace and justice to West Papua. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua is an ethnographically framed account of the long, bitter fight for freedom that challenges the dominant international narrative that West Papuans' quest for political independence is fractured and futile. Camellia Webb-Gannon's extensive interviews with the decolonization movement's original architects and its more recent champions shed light on complex diasporic and intergenerational politics as well as social and cultural resurgence. In foregrounding West Papuans' perspectives, the author shows that it is the body politic's unflagging determination and hope, rather than military might or influential allies, that form the movement's most unifying and powerful force for independence. This book examines the many intertwining strands of decolonization in Melanesia. Differences in cultural performance and political diversity throughout the region are generating new, fruitful trajectories. Simultaneously, Black and Indigenous solidarity and a shared Melanesian identity have forged a transnational grassroots power-base from which the movement is gaining momentum. Relevant beyond its West Papua focus, this book is essential reading for those interested in Pacific studies, Native and Indigenous studies, development studies, activism, and decolonization.

South Africa in World History is the first survey of South African history to range from prehistory to the present, the first to fully integrate social history and women's history, and the first to emphasize connections between the United States and South Africa. Written by Iris Berger, a recognized authority on South Africa and a past president of the African Studies Association, this marvelous history ranges from the first Stone Age foragers and Iron Age farmers to the coming of the Dutch settlers and the introduction of slavery, the British conquest in the early nineteenth century, the discovery of gold and diamonds, the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the coming of apartheid, the Soweto Uprising, and the creation of a new society headed by Nelson Mandela. Drawing on colorful biographical and autobiographical literature to provide a personal focus, Berger also explores social and cultural history, examining issues of race, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity, and drawing on a rich tradition of literature (both oral and written), music, and the arts. The book also discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the devastating HIV/Aids epidemic in the country, and continuing struggles against racism and sexism, thus connecting the South African past with urgent contemporary issues.

A classic work in postcolonial studies, "Masks of Conquest" describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and its function as an effective form of political control abetting voluntary cultural assimilation. Gauri Viswanathan demonstrates how the literary text functioned as a mirror of the ideal Englishman and became a mask of exploitation that camouflaged the material activities of the colonizing British government. In her new preface, she argues that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently or inattentively to the deeper contexts of imperialism, transnationalism, and globalization in which the discipline first articulated its mission. "Masks of Conquest" illuminates the transcontinental movements and derivations of English studies, revealing the discipline's origins are as diffuse as its future shape.

!Viva Mexico! !Viva la Independencia! Celebrations of September 16 examines the Independence holiday, exploring how this most important public festival in the civic calendar has given Mexicans a rich tradition of national celebration that is part creation myth, part official pomp, and part popular merrymaking. The editors examine how Independence Day festivities have provided a medium for informal education, sketching on the canvas of the public sphere national values, glorifying specific historical events and individuals, and celebrating government plans and achievements. Since 1823, this festival has served as an essential contribution to the conversion of Mexicans to common ideals, as people across the country express their national identity with the cry, '!Viva Mexico! !Viva la Independencia!'

"Sartre is a true post-colonial pioneer. His ethical and political struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation speak to the problems of our own times with a rare courage and cogency."
Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature Harvard University
Nearly forty years after its first publication in French, this collection of Sartre's writings on colonialism remains a supremely powerful, and relevant, polemical work. Over a series of thirteen essays Sartre brings the full force of his remarkable intellect relentlessly to bear on his own country's conduct in Algeria, and by extension, the West's conduct in the Third World in general. The tussle is not equal, and the western imperialists emerge at the end, bloody, bruised and thoroughly chastened. Most startling of all is Sartre's advocacy of violence as a legitimate response to repression, motivated by his belief that freedom was the central characteristic of being human. Whether one agrees with his every conclusion or not, "Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism" shows a philosopher passionately engaged in using philosophy as a force for change in the world. An important influence on postcolonial thought ever since, this book takes on added resonance in the light of the West's most recent bout of interference in the non-Western world.

"En-Gendering India" offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts--primarily novels--produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism.
Through her readings of works by writers including Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Harriet Martineau, Flora Annie Steel, Anita Desai, and Bapsi Sidhaa, Ray demonstrates that Indian women were presented as upper class and Hindu, an idealization that paradoxically served the needs of both colonial and nationalist discourses. The Indian nation's goal of self-rule was expected to enable women's full participation in private and public life. On the other hand, British colonial officials rendered themselves the protectors of passive Indian women against their "savage" male countrymen. Ray shows how the native woman thus became a symbol for both an incipient Indian nation and a fading British Empire. In addition, she reveals how the figure of the upper-class Hindu woman created divisions with the nationalist movement itself by underscoring caste, communal, and religious differences within the newly emerging state. As such, Ray's study has important implications for discussions about nationalism, particularly those that address the concepts of identity and nationalism.
Building on recent scholarship in feminism and postcolonial studies, " En-Gendering India" will be of interest to scholars in those fields as well as to specialists in nationalism and nation-building and in Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial literature and culture.