"Worlds Within" tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood to supersede national borders, this book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics.
Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, "Worlds Within" explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen, the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.

Articles on the historical, social and political realities of postcolonialism as expressed in contemporary writing. Contemporary postcolonial studies represent a controversial area of debate. This collection seeks a more pragmatic approach to the subject, taking into account its historical, social and political realities, rather than ignoring aconsideration of material conditions. The contributors look at the oppositional power held and exercised by anti-colonial movements, a neglected topic; address the literary strategies devised by metropolitan writers to contain the insecurities of empire, given that unrest and opposition were integral to British imperialism; contest the charges of nativism and essentialism made by postcolonial critics against liberation writings; and investigate the voicesof both inhabitants of post-independence nation states, and those scattered by colonialism itself. Dr LAURA CHRISMAN teaches at Sussex University; BENITA PARRY is Honorary Professor at Warwick University. Contributors: Vilashini Cooppan, Fernando Coronil, Gautam Premnath, Ato Quayson, Tim Watson, Lawrence Phillips, Sukhdev Sandhu