Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World

A major re-appraisal of debates on politics and culture in postcolonial and cultural studies.

Neil Lazarus (Author)

9780521624930, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 May 1999

312 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.4 kg

"[Lazarus] has helped to clear the ground and to orient thinking toward those critical possiblities genuinely immanent to a really existing globalization." Diaspora

In this wide-ranging study, Neil Lazarus explores the subject of cultural practice in the modern world system. The book contains individual chapters on a range of topics from modernity, globalization and the 'West', and nationalism and decolonization, to cricket and popular consciousness in the English-speaking Caribbean. Lazarus analyses social movements, ideas and cultural practices that have migrated from the 'First world' to the 'Third world' over the course of the twentieth century. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World offers an enormously erudite reading of culture and society in today's world and includes extended discussion of the work of such influential writers, critics and activists as Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Samir Amin, Raymond Williams, Paul Gilroy and Partha Chatterjee. This book is a politically focused, materialist intervention into postcolonial and cultural studies, and constitutes a major reappraisal of the debates on politics and culture in these fields.

Introduction: hating tradition properly
1. Globalization, modernity and the 'West'
2. Disavowing decolonization: nationalism, intellectuals, and the question of representation in postcolonial theory
3. Cricket, modernism, national culture: the case of C. L. R. James
4. 'Unsystematic fingers at the conditions of the times': Afropop and the paradoxes of imperialism.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]