Postcoloniality, Globalization, and Diaspora

Ashmita Khasnabish is lecturer at Lasell University and visiting scholar at Oxford University.

• Chapter 1: The Battle of Energy between Matter and Spirit: Does it Direct us to a Better Universe?, Ashmita KhasnabishChapter 2: After Neoliberalism and Post-structuralism: Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora and Globalization, Paget HenryChapter 3: Between ‘post-colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’: Mauritian fictionas a paradigm for literary postcoloniality in ‘different degrees’, Markus ArnoldChapter 4: “I’m a believer in the dance of change” –Metamorphosis and Mutation in Keri Hulme’s Short Fiction, Melanie OttoChapter 5: Magical Realism: Narrative Play and Historical Jokes, Stephanie Walsh MatthewsChapter 6: Revising the Myth: A Proposal for a Methodological Protocol for the Study of American Culture, Aida Roldán GarcíaChapter 7: Envisioning Global Citizenship, Ifeanyi A. Menkiti

The essays in this collection trace the progression from the constructs of postcolonialism through to globalization and pose the question: what comes next? The contributors represent a wide geographical and cultural area and a wide range of expertise. The subject matter of these essays is equally far-reaching, focusing on the movement toward environmental stewardship among the first peoples of New Zealand to hybridity in Mauritius so complex that it defies that category. What draws these disparate essays into a whole is their common emphasis — while laying out the trajectory in literary and cultural studies from postcolonialsm and post structuralism to globalism, they all note the strictures of these paradigms: the focus on subalternity, the post-structuralist imposition of Western interpretive frameworks on non-Western thought, the globalization that flattens out difference in an effort to smooth largely economic exchanges.In different ways these essays leave behind subalternity and erasure of difference to propose constructs of egalitarian exchange, based upon alternative “discursive centers” more confidently asserted. And as several of the authors assert, the establishment of such discursive centers is “at its core a metaphysical undertaking.” The stance underlying these essays is that expressed by the editor in the preface: What is wrong with optimism?