Terror And The Postcolonial

Download Terror And The Postcolonial full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Terror And The Postcolonial ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Terror and the Postcolonial

Author : Elleke Boehmer
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119143586
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (191 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Terror and the Postcolonial by : Elleke Boehmer

Download or read book Terror and the Postcolonial written by Elleke Boehmer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

Terror and the Postcolonial

Author : Elleke Boehmer
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119056195
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Terror and the Postcolonial by : Elleke Boehmer

Download or read book Terror and the Postcolonial written by Elleke Boehmer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

Terror Epidemics

Author : Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780226739359
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (393 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Terror Epidemics by : Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Download or read book Terror Epidemics written by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Terror Epidemics, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the global war on terror from a postcolonial literary perspective. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neo-imperial United States. Anchoring her book are studies of four major writers in the colonial-postcolonial canon: Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Albert Camus, and Salman Rushdie. Across these sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anti-colonial rebellion, and Muslim fanaticism specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. The metaphor surfaces again and again in old ideas like the decadence of Mughal India, the poor hygiene of the Arab quarter, and the "failed states" of postcolonialism. Exposing the long history of this broken but persistent narrative, Terror Epidemics is a major contribution to the rhetorical history of our present moment.

Colonial Terror

Author : Deana Heath
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192646168
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Colonial Terror by : Deana Heath

Download or read book Colonial Terror written by Deana Heath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics

Author : Olivia U. Rutazibwa
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317369394
Total Pages : 605 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics by : Olivia U. Rutazibwa

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics written by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engagements with the postcolonial world by International Relations scholars have grown significantly in recent years. The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics provides a solid reference point for understanding and analyzing global politics from a perspective sensitive to the multiple legacies of colonial and imperial rule. The Handbook introduces and develops cutting-edge analytical frameworks that draw on Black, decolonial, feminist, indigenous, Marxist and postcolonial thought as well as a multitude of intellectual traditions from across the globe. Alongside empirical issue areas that remain crucial to assessing the impact of European and Western colonialism on global politics, the book introduces new issue areas that have arisen due to the mutating structures of colonial and imperial rule. This vital resource is split into five thematic sections, each featuring a brief, orienting introduction: Points of departure Popular postcolonial imaginaries Struggles over the postcolonial state Struggles over land Alternative global imaginaries Providing both a consolidated understanding of the field as it is, and setting an expansive and dynamic research agenda for the future, this handbook is essential reading for students and scholars of International Relations alike.

Post-Orientalism

Author : Hamid Dabashi
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351295861
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (512 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Post-Orientalism by : Hamid Dabashi

Download or read book Post-Orientalism written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Orientalism is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and power. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? Dabashi's work picks up where Edward Said's Orientalism left off. Said traced the origin of the power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe. This hubris enabled them to write and represent the people they sought to rule. Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. He does not question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but he provides a different angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. Dabashi uses the United States as an example of a country that initiated militant acts of representation in Iraq and Afghanistan. He attempts to unearth and examine the United States' deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, particularly in light of the world's post-9/11 political reality.

Albert Camus the Algerian

Author : David Carroll
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231511760
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Albert Camus the Algerian by : David Carroll

Download or read book Albert Camus the Algerian written by David Carroll and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these original readings of Albert Camus' novels, short stories, and political essays, David Carroll concentrates on Camus' conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today. During France's "dirty war" in Algeria, Camus called for an end to the violence perpetrated against civilians by both France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and supported the creation of a postcolonial, multicultural, and democratic Algeria. His position was rejected by most of his contemporaries on the Left and has, ironically, earned him the title of colonialist sympathizer as well as the scorn of important postcolonial critics. Carroll rescues Camus' work from such criticism by emphasizing the Algerian dimensions of his literary and philosophical texts and by highlighting in his novels and short stories his understanding of both the injustice of colonialism and the tragic nature of Algeria's struggle for independence. By refusing to accept that the sacrifice of innocent human lives can ever be justified, even in the pursuit of noble political goals, and by rejecting simple, ideological binaries (West vs. East, Christian vs. Muslim, "us" vs. "them," good vs. evil), Camus' work offers an alternative to the stark choices that characterized his troubled times and continue to define our own. "What they didn't like, was the Algerian, in him," Camus wrote of his fictional double in The First Man. Not only should "the Algerian" in Camus be "liked," Carroll argues, but the Algerian dimensions of his literary and political texts constitute a crucial part of their continuing interest. Carroll's reading also shows why Camus' critical perspective has much to contribute to contemporary debates stemming from the global "war on terror."

Terror and Reconciliation

Author : Maryse Jayasuriya
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739165798
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Terror and Reconciliation by : Maryse Jayasuriya

Download or read book Terror and Reconciliation written by Maryse Jayasuriya and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terror and Reconciliation explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long ethnic conflict. It examines poetry, short fiction and novels by both diasporic writers and writers resident in Sri Lanka. Its discussion of resident Sri Lankan writers is particularly important because it calls attention to a rich and ambitious body of work that has largely been ignored in the Western academy and media until now. The book outlines the ways in which a wide range of resident and diasporic writers have sought to represent the conflict, mourn the violence and terror associated with the conflict, and present options for reconciliation in the conflict’s aftermath. The writers discussed grapple with issues of terrorism, human rights, nationalism, war, democracy, gender, ethnicity, and reconciliation, making this a study of profound interest for students and scholars of South Asian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, race and ethnic studies, women’s studies, and peace studies.

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

Author : Blanka Grzegorczyk
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351385372
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (513 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature by : Blanka Grzegorczyk

Download or read book Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature written by Blanka Grzegorczyk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-10 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread threat of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the twenty-first century has created a globalized context for social interactions, transforming the ways in which young people relate to the world around them and to one another. This is the first study that reads post-9/11 and 7/7 British writing for the young as a response to this contemporary predicament, exploring how children’s writers find the means to express the local conditions and different facets of the global wars around terror. The texts examined in this book reveal a preoccupation with overcoming various forms of violence and prejudice faced by certain groups within post-terror Britain, as well as a concern with mapping out their social relations with other groups, and those concerns are set against the recurring themes of racist paranoia, anti-immigrant hostility, politicized identities, and growing up in countries transformed by the effects of terror and counter-terror. The book concentrates on the relationship between postcolonial and critical race studies, Britain’s colonial legacy, and literary representations of terrorism, tracing thematic and formal similarities in the novels of both established and emerging children’s writers such as Elizabeth Laird, Sumia Sukkar, Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Bali Rai, Nikesh Shukla, Malorie Blackman, Claire McFall, Miriam Halahmy, and Sita Brahmachari. In doing so, this study maps new connections for scholars, students, and readers of contemporary children’s fiction who are interested in how such writing addresses some of the most pressing issues affecting us today, including survival after terror, migration, and community building.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies

Author : Graham Huggan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199588252
Total Pages : 751 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies by : Graham Huggan

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies written by Graham Huggan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies is a major reference work, which aims to provide informed insights into the possible future of postcolonial studies as well as a comparative overview of the latest developments in the field.

Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror'

Author : Fiona Tolan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131798501X
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror' by : Fiona Tolan

Download or read book Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror' written by Fiona Tolan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of ‘minority’ groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event’s contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the ‘war on terror’. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Security and Terror

Author : Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520968158
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Security and Terror by : Eli Jelly-Schapiro

Download or read book Security and Terror written by Eli Jelly-Schapiro and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened upon the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror—from the settler-colonization of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history has been registered and reckoned with in significant works of contemporary fiction and theory—in novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño, and in the critical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others. In this richly interdisciplinary inquiry, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial pasts enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.

The Truth Machines

Author : Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0472054392
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Truth Machines by : Jinee Lokaneeta

Download or read book The Truth Machines written by Jinee Lokaneeta and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--

Narratives of the War on Terror

Author : Michael C. Frank
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000073750
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Narratives of the War on Terror by : Michael C. Frank

Download or read book Narratives of the War on Terror written by Michael C. Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, this volume brings together essays on a wide array of literary, filmic and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror, and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus and Kenya, the book captures the multiple transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism and insurgency. These include, but are not restricted to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles. The essays featured in this volume draw upon, and critically engage with, the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereon, while responding to postcolonial theory’s call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Rerouting the Postcolonial

Author : Janet Wilson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135190208
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (351 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Rerouting the Postcolonial by : Janet Wilson

Download or read book Rerouting the Postcolonial written by Janet Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rerouting the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture. Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, this volume charts and challenges the diversity of postcolonial studies, including sections on: new directions and growth areas from performance and autobiography to diaspora and transnationalism new subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and discussions of areas of Europe as postcolonial spaces new theoretical directions such as globalization, fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’. Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.

Contemporary Literature from Northeast India

Author : Amit R. Baishya
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429944454
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Contemporary Literature from Northeast India by : Amit R. Baishya

Download or read book Contemporary Literature from Northeast India written by Amit R. Baishya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Northeast Indian borderlands, a cultural crossroads between South, Southeast and East Asia, constitute an important post-colonial exception to the narratives of nation, troubling the common perception of India as an ostensibly liberal regime. This book is the first to consider the representations of the effects of political terror and survival in contemporary literature from Northeast India. Fictions from this polyglot region offer alternative representations that show the post-colonial nation-state to engage in acts of aggression that parallel colonial regimes. The militarization of everyday life and the subsequent growth of cultures of impunity has left a lasting impact on ordinary existence in this border zone. Like in the much more widely discussed case of Kashmir, the governance of the Northeast region is not characterized so much by the management of life, the domain of what Michel Foucault calls biopolitics, but rather around the preponderance and distribution of death, what the postcolonial critic Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics. Not surprisingly, along with Mbembe’s theorizations, the influential works of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, on 'bare life' have provided fruitful pathways to a study of the sovereign politics of death and political terror in this region. The author draws upon the conceptual literature on political terror and sovereign power through a reading of Anglophone fictions alongside Assamese fictional narratives (all published after 1990), but shifts the onus from the 'why' of violence to the 'how' of lived experience. An original study of contemporary survivalist fictions that explores survival under conditions of civil and military threat, this book is a valuable contribution to the field of contemporary global literature focusing on cartographies of death and sovereign terror and postcolonial literature.

The World in a Grain of Sand

Author : Nivedita Majumdar
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788737466
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (887 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The World in a Grain of Sand by : Nivedita Majumdar

Download or read book The World in a Grain of Sand written by Nivedita Majumdar and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical universalism vs postcolonial theory 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.