Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique

✍ Scribed by Benita Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 252
• Series: Postcolonial Literatures
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view.

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Contents......Page 5
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Beginnings, affiliations, disavowals......Page 16
Problems in current theories of colonial discourse......Page 26
Resistance theory/theorizing resistance or two cheers for nativism......Page 50
Signs of the Times......Page 68
Liberation theory: variations on themes of Marxism and modernity......Page 88
Internationalism revisited or in praise of internationalism......Page 106
Reading the signs of empire in metropolitan fiction......Page 120
The content and discontents of Kipling's imperialism......Page 132
Narrating imperialism: beyond Conrad's dystopias......Page 145
Tono-Bungay: the failed electrification of the empire of light......Page 161
Materiality and Mystification in A Passage to India......Page 175
Reconciliation and remembrance......Page 192
Notes......Page 208
Index......Page 244