Late Imperial Culture

A work of criticism on the cultures of imperialism. Fundamental to the editors' conceptualization is the premise that while colonialism may be a thing of the past for the majority of the world's people, its legacies in political, economic and ideological structures continue to shape the world.

Spanning time and space from late Victorian Britain and Ireland to postwar America and Latin America, Late Imperial Culture maps crucial regions in the terrain of imperial cultural practices including theater, film, photography, fiction, autobiography, and body art. The forms reviewed in this lively collection range from those which accept and reproduce empire’s dominant self-images to scathing critiques of the oppressions that colonialism has visited upon its subjects and the price it continues to exact from them.

A diverse range of theoretically sophisticated and historically informed contributors take as given two fundamental facts about the culture of imperialism: firstly, that it has a long and complex history which, in the present epoch, merits its being designated “late”; and, secondly, that its impact on the contemporary world is far from exhausted. Together they highlight the contradictions in the serried cultural practices of imperialism in its different historical periods.

Contributors: Aijaz Ahmad, Steven Cagan, Román de la Campa, David Glover, May Joseph, Caren Kaplan, Rob Nixon, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Marianna Torgovnick.