"Natural Hierarchies" adopts a highly original approach to trace the emergence and development of social rank in our present-day world. The author draws upon traditional methods used in the social sciences, detailed accounts of historical events in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, and mainland America, to illustrate how meanings of race and caste have been transformed mainly through political struggles, and particularly in the context of colonialism.

This new and highly provocative analysis looks at ideas of hierarchy in the light of the latest historical, anthropological, and sociological evidence to generate understanding of present struggles in race and ethnic relations. It is a well-reasoned account that illuminates the strong historical links between the idea of hierarchy and concepts of race and caste.

Drawing from a range of materials, including religious texts, women's literature, field interviews, historical archives, critical theories, and rap music, this book offers important critiques of the way religious and feminist knowledge is constructed. This text looks at white feminist theology and its misunderstanding of Native North American women, Chinese footbinding, and veiling by Muslim women, as well as the Jewish emancipation in France, the symbolic dissection of black women by rap and sermons, and the potential to rewrite and reclaim religious stories. This important reassessment of religious studies offers new visions for the development of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist discourses of liberation.

Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British Colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.
Drawing on materialist South African historiography, postcolonial theory and geographical conceptions, imperial Networks examines:
* the origins and early nineteenth century development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Xhosa and the construction of colonial settler identities.
Imperial Networks introduces students to key debates in the historiography of nineteenth century South Africa, as well as in materialist and postcolonial constructions of the past.

Providing coherence in understanding the role that education and higher education played in the colonizing purposes of the rich nations of the North, this book draws from multiple geo-political spaces across the world to consider how epistemic injustice has characterized colonial higher education systems. Within this text, carefully chosen international contributors explore how colonialism, coloniality, and colonization have impacted indigenous people's ways of knowing, feeling, behaving, valuing, being, and becoming in fundamental ways and how the West's idea of education and schooling have been used as key instruments in the project of world domination and subjugation. Beyond these key entry concepts, chapters use ideas of modernity, post modernism, globalization, internationalization, and neo-liberalism to examine how higher education in colonial and post-colonial societies still answers to a colonial narrative and what can be done to decolonize the system. Unpacking the historical and philosophical antecedents of higher education and critically examining the intentions and impact of colonial assumptions behind higher education in different parts of the world, this is suitable reading for postgraduates and scholars in the field of higher education, as well as senior management teams in universities and practitioners who work directly in the field of transformation in government, and university departments.

Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of so-called "postcolonial" writing? In "The Postcolonial Exotic," Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial "products" are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. This timely and challenging volume examines everything from well-meaning multiculturalism, tourism, and pseudo-anthropology, to the Booker prize, anthologies, and academic texts. It points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.

In this original and accessible introduction to post-colonial literatures in English, Dennis Walder guides the reader through the historical, linguistic and theoretical issues that inform post-colonial literary study. He then goes on to provide three detailed case studies, focusing upon Indian fiction in English, Caribbean and Black British poetry and contemporary South African literature. In a searching final chapter he considers, through a focus upon work by Ariel Dorfman, V. S. Naipaul and Michael Ondaatje, the questions of what might follow 'After Post-Colonialism'. Among the writers and theorists discussed are: Achebe, Brathwaite, Bhaba, Gordimer, Fanon, Freud, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, C. L. R. James, Marx, Mhlophe, Miller, Narayan, Ngugi, Nichols, Said, Sahgal, Sartre, Spivak, Trivedi and Walcott.

'A living testimony to Sartre as a significant anti-colonial figure, with not only an analytic brain but ethical precepts worthy of emulation. It provides a detailed and massively well-informed insight into French Colonial policies in Algeria.' - Human Nature Review

Author Biography:
Richard Allen is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at The Open University, Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi.

Perhaps no two nations in modern times have had a more complex cultural engagement than imperial Britain and colonised India. This unique anthology of stories, poems, historical documents and extracts from novels - most unavailable elsewhere - enables readers to examine the cultures of these two countries in an integrated way.
Introductory chapters by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi and others set out agendas for reconsideration of classic texts from the period. Major themes include:
The British nation and the colonies
Literature, nation and revolution
Poetry and nation
Liberal dilemmas in England and India
Gandhian nationalism
Independence and after
Post-colonial hybridity
Literature and Nation helps readers understand how critical thinking in the post-colonial area has developed. It also extends the field of post-colonial studies by presenting fresh primary materials translated into English from other languages. It is essential reading for all those interested in Britain and India, in colonial and post-colonial discourse, and in the interface of literature and history.

Defenders of the Union is a concise and readable overview of the history and contentious politics of Unionism and the affect it has had on Anglo-Irish relations over the last two hundred years. It is an essential guide to this confusing topic and covers key areas such as:
* definition of unionism
* establishment of the union
* Unionist literature
* loyalists since 1972.

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.

The World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques the valorization of the local in cultural theories typically accompanied by a rejection of universal categories - viewed as Eurocentric projections. But the privileging of the local usually amounts to an exercise in exoticization of the South. The book argues that the rejection of Eurocentric theories can be complemented by embracing another, richer and non-parochial form of universalism. Through readings of texts from India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Egypt, the book shows that the fine grained engagement with culture, the mapping of ordinary lives not just as objects but subjects of their history, is embedded in much of postcolonial literature in a radical universalism - one that is rooted in local realities, but is able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts and desires that stretch across cultures and time. It is a universalism recognized by Marx and steeped in the spirit of anti-colonialism, but hostile to any whiff of exoticism.

Nishapuri flourished in the 12th century and wrote a succinct history in Persian of the Saljuq Turks, a tribal group from Central Asia who in the 11th century established a vast empire, enduring for some century and a half and bringing about lasting changes to the ethnic composition and the patterns of land utilisation in the northern tier of the Middle East.

The European empires as they existed from the Age of Discovery until after the First World War shaped the modern world. So great has been their political, economic and cultural influence that to fully understand contemporary history and events, it is essential to have an understanding of the imperial past. This book is an impressive achievement. It brings together in one comprehensive volume, all the essential facts and figures relating to the process of empire-building by the European powers. It complements the Longman Companion to European Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century by the same author - together they help to explain why different empires had different philosophies, dissolved in different ways, and left different legacies.

Author Biography:
Pal Ahluwalia is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Adelaide. He has written extensively on African Politics and post-colonial theory. His most recent publication, with Bill Ashcroft, is Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, also published by Routledge.

The problems investigated in this collection had lasting consequences not only in the field of colonialism but in international politics as well. Decolonization and the Cold War, which brought about the most significant changes to global policits after 1945, are treated together.

This ground-breaking book makes sense of the complexities and dynamics of post-colonial African politics, illustrating how post-colonial theory has marginalised a huge part of its constituency, namely Africa.
Politics and Post-colonial Theory traces how African identity has been constituted and reconstituted by examining movements such as
* negritude
* the rise of nationalism
* decolonisation
and questions how helpful post-colonial analysis can be in understanding the complexities which define institutions such as
* the nation-state
* civil society
* human rights
* citizenship
Politics and Post-colonial Theory bravely breaks down disciplinary boundaries. Its radical vision will be essential reading for all those engaged in Politics, post-colonial studies and African studies.

Offering a fresh look at the ways in which neoliberalism has claimed to cure the Balkan region of its ethnic particularities under the pretext of Europeanization, this book shows how the reconfiguration of the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the region has resulted in its functioning as Europe's neocolony. The contributors to this volume engage in postcolonial analysis of the Balkans' past and present coloniality by way of interrogating race, racism, trauma, film, and global capitalism. They challenge the idea of a United Europe that rests on the assumption that the European Union's 'newness' represents both a clean slate and the right to shift ownership of its colonial histories to former colonial subjects and their national histories. Taken as a whole, the volume seeks to transform Europe's colonial amnesia into postcolonial awareness and to speak from within the Balkans as a site of Europe's neocolony. As it critically interrogates a neocolonial reconfiguration of the Balkans as a massive social overhaul, which includes at once global integration and local social disintegration, this book will be of interest to those studying the region, as well as postcolonialism in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

This work provides a comprehensive overview of the contentious politics of Unionism and the effects it has had on the relationship between Britain and Ireland over the past two centuries. By considering the history of Unionism, the Act of Union of 1801 and its aftermath, it provides a significant guide to these historical events and the continuing legacies which they have created. This book looks at the way the Union has affected Anglo-Irish and Catholic-Protestant relations and also considers its social, cultural and economic effects on Irish and British life. Key aspects which are discussed include: definition of Unionism; establishment of the Union; defending the union; and Protestant Churches and opposition to Home Rule.

Yanihara Tadao was a well-known Christian and pacifist who occupied the Chair of Colonial Policy at Tokyo Imperial University from 1923-1937. His extensive commentary on Japanese as well as European colonial policy is remarkable not only for its scholarly integrity but also for its breadth, and represents a comprehensive body of writing in Japanese before World War II. This historically contextualized analysis of Yanihara's commentary on Japanese colonial policy offers both an intellectual biography and an analysis of his theories of colonization and imperialism and his empirical studies of conditions in the Japanese colonies based on his own observations. It contains a critical analysis of Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia, Manchuria and China which is placed within the historical conditions prevailing in 1920s and 1930s Japan. The final chapter charts Yanihara's downfall during the notorious Yanihara Incident of 1937 where a clash with university authorities and ultimately the public prosecutor led to his enforced resignation and the banning of many of his books.

By reinterpreting the way that Korean reformers confronted the process of modernization/Westernization between 1880 and 1910, this study challenges the "failure thesis" which maintains that subsequent Japanese colonization is an indication that the early modernization process in Korea was unsuccessful.

Rhodesia's illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 is an act that not only shaped regional politics but also had a profound effect on Britain's attempt to retreat from its empire. This edited collection brings together leading voices in the field, whose contributions - on the role of finance, 'big business', and the regional and international actors involved in the country's negotiated independence - update long-held historiographical wisdoms, signalling a revival in economic and diplomatic explanations for the country's decolonisation. In particular, they shed fresh light on the role(s) played in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe by economic (private business) and political (liberation movements, Western and Southern African governments) actors that until now have been studied with very limited access to primary sources. As scholarship on Zimbabwe is currently dominated by studies that seek to understand the 'crisis' in which the country has recently found itself, this collection acts as a clarion call that reinforces the importance of studies of earlier historical processes. In doing so, the book provides a more nuanced understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between Zimbabwe's colonial and postcolonial history, and examines the roles played by external governments and individuals in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Edward Said (1935-2003) was a towering figure in post-colonial studies and the struggle for justice in his native Palestine, best known for his critique of orientalism in western portrayals of the Middle East. As a public intellectual, activist, and scholar, Said forever changed how we read the world around us and left an indelible mark on subsequent generations. Hamid Dabashi, himself a leading thinker and critical public voice, offers a unique collection of reminiscences, travelogues and essays that document his own close and long-standing scholarly, personal and political relationship with Said. In the process, they place the enduring significance of Edward Said's legacy in an unfolding context and locate his work within the moral imagination and environment of the time.

Focusing on approaches to autonomy in countries whose societies are marked by ethnic diversity, this study examines the effects of territorial solutions to the safeguarding of cultural identities. Studying the problem from a cross-national and analytical perspective, the contributors distinguish among the types of autonomy and their impact on pluralism, democracy and the unity of the state. Post-Franco Spain, in the process of continuing democritization, has become important as a laboratory of institutional accomodation of ethnic and regional identities, and the second section concentrates on that country's attempts to steer a middle course between federalism and forms of decentralization. The study contains case studies dealing with questions of nationalism, autonomy and identity in Kosovo, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, British Columbia and Africa.

Focusing on approaches to autonomy in countries whose societies are marked by ethnic diversity, this study examines the effects of territorial solutions to the safeguarding of cultural identities. Studying the problem from a cross-national and analytical perspective, the contributors distinguish among the types of autonomy and their impact on pluralism, democracy and the unity of the state. Post-Franco Spain, in the process of continuing democritization, has become important as a laboratory of institutional accomodation of ethnic and regional identities, and the second section concentrates on that country's attempts to steer a middle course between federalism and forms of decentralization. The study contains case studies dealing with questions of nationalism, autonomy and identity in Kosovo, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, British Columbia and Africa.