Colonialism/Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba

Colonialism/Postcolonialism (The New Critical Idiom) (Paperback)
by Ania Loomba

# Paperback: 263 pages
# Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (October 19, 2005)

'Colonialism/Postcolonialism' moves adroitly between the general and the particular, the conceptual and the contextual, the local and the global, and between texts and material processes. Distrustful of established and self-perpetuating assumptions, foci and canonical texts which threaten to fossilize postcolonial studies as a discipline, Loomba's magisterial study raises many crucial issues pertaining to social structure and identity; engaging with different modes of theory and social explanation in the process. There is no doubt that this book remains the best general introduction to the field.
–Kelwyn Sole, Professor, English Department, University of Cape Town

Easily the most informative and wide-ranging series of its kind, so packed with bright ideas that it has become and indispensable resource for students of literature.
–Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester, UK

The New Critical Idiom is a constant resource, essential reading for all students.
–Tom Paulin, University of Oxford

"a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight"
Sylvia Plath's 'April 18'

Hardt & Negri - Empire

Empire
by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

# Paperback: 478 pages
# Publisher: Harvard University Press; New Ed edition (September 15, 2001)

Empire is a sweeping book with a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology, economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke University's literature program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a geopolitical force.

Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that "the multitude" will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jefferson's constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place

towards multitude