Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires

The topics of recent GNEL/ASNEL conferences have variously engaged with issues relating to spatiality, (dis)location and globalization. In the ensuing debates space and performance have proven to be important and extremely productive parameters for postcolonial theory and practice, but history has taken a backseat. While space continues to be an important parameter for postcolonial theory and practice, there is an increasing need to understand how the meanings of specific locations are constituted by the stories and histories woven around them, in other words, how spaces are the results of social and political interaction in time. To disregard the historical dimension of space is to divest it of its specificity. Against the trend advocating the spatial turn, we therefore propose to reconsider historicity as a central, and indispensable, aspect of postcolonial studies. The term ¡¥post-empire¡¦ has been chosen to provide a sharper definition to an otherwise almost limitless field and to critically reflect upon the amount of nostalgia and commodified yearning that is still attached to the idea of empire, despite decades of cutting-edge postcolonial scholarship and theorizing.

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http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=188373