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As we enter the second decade after 9/11, it is becoming increasingly clear that the tragedy of that day has been hijacked into a casus belli for protracted wars and neocolonial geopolitics, and ot...

This essay draws attention to the much-neglected arena of Orientalism in pulp fiction. Although Orientalism in popular culture has received considerable attention, it is restricted to the representations of the Orient in science fiction, television, electronic media and Hollywood films. Following 9/11, pulp literature has emerged with a renewed force in American hard-boiled fiction, specifically in the genre of the “literary thriller” and the “international political thriller”. Unlike the Orientalism in canonic fiction, pulp Orientalism forges an endosmotic “style” of civilizational Othering by reducing Oriental topographies into death worlds (terra necro), while depicting its subjects as splintered, unstable and mutable. Drawing on the writings of Robert Irwin and Achille Mbembe, this essay attempts a conceptual exposition of pulp Orientalism through Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son.

Postcolonial criticism challenges the normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism rooted in metropolitan cultures by inviting locally-bred, subaltern and third world experiences as forces of intervention and interruption in shaping universal(ist) ethics for a shared humanity. Nevertheless, these approaches remain more speculative than substantive, and they lack the empirical currency required for grounding local cosmopolitanism(s) outside of diasporic, transnational, exilic contexts. Through a close reading of R.K. Narayan’s fictional town of Malgudi, this paper explores its metonymical implications for a local cosmopolitanism (“locopolitan”): its unique rural and urban constellations; and an ethno-humanist narrative drawn along the “locopolitan” lines as opposed to the metropolitan (pre)conditioning of cosmopolitan experience. Such a reading aims at opening up an empirical basis for local cosmopolitanism within the postcolonial framework.

This essay articulates the ways in which the Indigenous People's Movement leading to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2007) succeeds in what postcolonial theory has conventionally set out to emancipate, but has failed to do. Postcolonial theory challenges all eurocentric and liberal humanist discourses on rights which place the Western subject as the ideal subject figure of all histories and societies, and appeals for a language that would articulate other ways of being human and humanist. Yet recent trends in postcolonial theory have come to embrace the language of cosmopolitanism and humanism as viable alternatives for a postcolonial future. Drawing upon the principle thematic of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Declaration provides an alternative to postcolonial theory's revisionist humanism—the re-cognition of difference. As part of the international legal discourse, the Declaration is particularly...

This essay critically examines the nature and scope of postcolonial interdisciplinarity. Although postcolonial studies claims to operate on, and forge in, an interdisplinary approach, its intentions are largely interdiscursive. In spite of the vague and elusive claims evident in the catalogue of introductory texts on postcolonial theory, neither postcolonial theorists nor its exponents have adequately established the disciplinary bounds or their methodological fusion(s) specific to, and required for, interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the disciplinary foundations of literature, history and philosophy, this essay demonstrates that postcolonial theory has developed an implicit oppositional critique to eurocentrism. This oppositional critique, while discursive in intention and formulaic in application, is subsequently borrowed by a host of social science disciplines—anthropology, geography and development studies— as a proxy methodology that protects against the perils of eurocentric longings.

This paper provides theoretical insights into Aboriginal educational and social transformation in Canada from an historical perspective. For almost a century, “decolonization” has been the most effective, and yet most commonly deployed conceptual tool in the writings on Aboriginal education. As an alternative to the decolonization paradigms, this paper suggests that postcolonial theory provides a more comprehensive, yet flexible conceptual framework to the understanding of historical and genealogical intricacies of Aboriginal education in Canada. In the process, theoretical underpinnings, questions, and situations inspired by the experiences of comparative colonialisms (such as the non-settler colonialisms) are discussed in conjunction with Canada's Aboriginal education.

Postcolonial theory challenges humanism for its ethical and political rationality advanced by colonial apologists, who used ‘civilizing mission’ as a rhetorical humanist device to cultivate social hierarchies and the violence required to maintain them. To that end, postcolonial theory was expected to offer a counter-narrative to the humanist ideology that is grounded in the Eurocentric vision of the world. This essay reviews some of the key theoretical debates concerning humanism and its counter discourse(s)—nativism—in the postcolonial project. Three distinct bodies of the postcolonial theory are examined: Edward Said's humanist project of ‘contrapuntality’ and its pertinent cultural relativism; the foundationalist manifestos of ‘provincializing’ Europe in Subaltern Studies; and the post-essentialist theories of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays, Reworking Postcolonialism explores questions of work, precarity, migration, minority and indigenous rights in relation to contemporary globalization. It focuses on the impact of global market forces on the formation of new subject positions among urban dwellers, exiles, and other disenfranchised communities. Bringing together political, economic and literary approaches to texts and events from across the postcolonial world, the essays collected here investigate the transformative effects of the global dissemination of capital and goods and the movements of people. They call for a revision of existing discourses on rights, entitlements and citizenship.