Fiction of Imperialism (Writing Past Colonialism Series)
The Fiction of Imperialism attempts to promote dialogue between international relations and postcolonialism. It addresses the value of fiction to an inderstanding of the imperial relationship between the West and Asia and Africa. A wide range of fiction and crisicism is examined as it pertains to colonialism, the North/South engagement and contemporary Third World politics. The book begins by contrasting the treatment of cross-cultural relations in political studies and literary texts. It then examines the personal as a metaphor for the political in fiction depicting the imperial connection between Britain and India.
What was imperial honor and how did it sustain the British Raj? If “No man may harm me with impunity” was an ancient theme of the European aristocracy, British imperialists of almost all classes in India possessed a similar vision of themselves as overlords belonging to an honorable race, so that ideals of honor condoned and sanctified their rituals, connecting them with status, power, and authority. Honor, most broadly, legitimated imperial rule, since imperialists ostensibly kept India safe from outside threats.
Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial practices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledged role in this discussion, alternately reviled and venerated as the harbinger of colonial dominion and avatar of liberation, as target and shield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas - eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory - in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial aspirations.
"Russian Empire" offers new perspectives on the strategies of imperial rule pursued by rulers, officials, scholars, and subjects of the Russian empire. An international team of scholars explores the connections between Russia's expansion over vast territories occupied by people of many ethnicities, religions, and political experiences and the evolution of imperial administration and vision. The fresh research reflected in this innovative volume reveals the ways in which the realities of sustaining imperial power in a multiethnic, multiconfessional, scattered, and diffuse environment inspired political imaginaries and set limits on what the state could accomplish.
By engaging closely with the work of Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), the iconic nineteenth-century imperial spy, explorer, anthropologist and translator, "Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton "explores the White Man's 'imperial fantasies', and the ways in which the many metropolitan discourses to which Burton contributed drew upon and reinforced an intimate connection between fantasy and power in the space of Empire.
