Neocolonialism

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War

Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between U.S. and Soviet forces. Shining a spotlight on writers from the war’s numerous fronts and applying lenses of race, gender, and decolonization, the essayists present several new angles from which to view the tense global showdown that lasted roughly a half-century. Ultimately, they reframe the Cold War not merely as a divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between nations rich and poor, and mostly white and mostly not. By emphasizing the global dimensions of the Cold War, this innovative collection reveals emergent forms of post-WWII empire that continue to shape our world today, thereby raising the question of whether the Cold War has ever fully ended.

Postcolonial Global Justice

A new account of global justice that recovers anticolonial thought for resisting a neocolonial age Politicians and activists today turn to the language of decolonization to call attention to such issues as cultural and linguistic decline, exploitative foreign investment, and global institutions dominated by superpowers. But does anticolonial thought really provide a model for reimagining world politics? The history of decolonization has not resulted in the liberating transformations that many envisioned. In Postcolonial Global Justice, Shuk Ying Chan proposes a new account of postcolonial global justice centered around the value of social equality. Drawing on the thought of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Chan argues that a central theme in anticolonial thought is the rejection of hierarchy and the embrace of equality. These ideas from decolonization, she suggests, give us tools for critiquing contemporary global hierarchies and for rejecting postcolonial nationalism more concerned with policing its citizens than promoting their freedom and equality. Following the wave of postcolonial state-founding in the twentieth century, many in the West saw decolonization as largely accomplished—and yet global politics continue to feature hierarchies that resemble colonial relations. Chan investigates these new and persistent colonial hierarchies across three areas of contemporary world politics: international investment, cultural imperialism, and global governance. Exploring the changes needed to move toward a new, more equal postcolonial world order, Chan offers a vision of global justice rooted in the unrealized egalitarian aspirations of anticolonial thinker-activists, prompting us to rethink what decolonization may mean today.

Neocolonialism, Methods and Manoeuvres