The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay: 34 (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures) - Hardcover

Varma, Rashmi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415880394 ISBN 13: 9780415880398

Publisher: Routledge, 2011

Synopsis

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks―the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.

About this title

About the Author

Rashmi Varma is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the co-editor (with Warhol, et al.) of Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Literature in English (2008).

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415880394
• ISBN 13: 9780415880398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244