Bringing together contributions from various disciplines and academic fields, this collection engages in interdisciplinary dialogue on postcolonial issues. Covering African, anglophone, Romance, and New-World themes, linguistic, literary, and cultural studies, and historiography, music, art history, and textile studies, the volume raises questions of (inter)disciplinarity, methodology, and entangled histories. The essays focus on the representation of slavery in the transatlantic world (the USA, Jamaica, Haiti, and the wider Caribbean, West Africa, and the UK). Drawing on a range of historical sources, material objects, and representations, they study Jamaican Creole, African masks, knitted objects, patchwork sculpture, newspapers, films, popular music, and literature of different genres from the Caribbean, West and South Africa, India, and Britain. At the same time, they reflect on theoretical problems such as intertextuality, intermediality, and cultural exchange, and explore intersections – postcolonial literature and transatlantic history; postcolonial and African-American studies; postcolonial literary and cultural studies. The final section keys in with the overall aim of challenging established disciplinary modes of knowledge production: exploring schools and universities as locations of postcolonial studies. Teachers investigate the possibilities and limits of their respective institutions and probe new ways of engaging with postcolonial concerns. With its integrative, interdisciplinary focus, this collection addresses readers interested in understanding how colonization and globalization have influenced societies and cultures around the world. Contributors: Anja Bandau, Sabine Broeck, Sarah Fekadu, Matthias Galler, Janou Glencross, Jana Gohrisch, Ellen Grünkemeier, Jessica Hemmings, Jan Hüsgen, Johannes Salim Ismaiel–Wendt, Ursula Kluwick, Henning Marquardt, Dennis Mischke, Timo Müller, Mala Pandurang, Carl Plasa, Elinor Jane Pohl, Brigitte Reinwald, Steffen Runkel, Andrea Sand, Cecile Sandten, Frank Schulze–Engler, Melanie Ulz, Reinhold Wandel, Tim Watson Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier are based in the English Department of Leibniz University, Hannover (Germany), where they research and lecture in British studies with a focus on (postcolonial) literatures and cultures.

Interdisciplinary Measures makes the case for a cross-disciplinary, but literature-centred, approach to postcolonial studies. Despite the anxieties that interdisciplinarity brings with it, a combination of different, discontinuously structured disciplinary knowledges is arguably best suited to address the tangled concerns of both the globalised present and the colonial past. The book looks specifically at the intersections between literary criticism, history, anthropology, geography and environmental studies, while arguing more specifically for a postcolonialism across the disciplines in the service of informed (cross-) cultural critique. Bringing together a wide range of literary material from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, New Zealand and South Asia, the book also considers the different, but sometimes related, cultural contexts within which the key debates in postcolonial studies – e.g. those around globalisation, North-South relations and the new imperialism – are currently taking place. These debates suggest the need for a multi-sited, multilinguistic and, not least, multidisciplinary appraoch to postcolonial studies that consolidates its status as a comparative field.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest scholarship in postcolonial studies, while also considering possible future developments in the field. Original chapters written by a worldwide team of contritbuors are organised into five cross-referenced sections, 'The Imperial Past', 'The Colonial Present', 'Theory and Practice', 'Across the Disciplines', and 'Across the World'. The chapters offer both country-specific and comparative approaches to current issues, offering a wide range of new and interesting perspectives. The Handbook reflects the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies and reiterates its continuing relevance to the study of both the colonial past, in its multiple manifestations, and the contemporary globalized world. Taken together, these essays, the dialogues they pursue, and the editorial comments that surround them constitute nothing less than a blueprint for the future of a much-contested but intellectually vibrant and politically engaged field.

Involuntary associations : "Postcolonial Studies" and "World Englishes"--Grammars of living break their Tense : world Englishes and cultural translation -- English in the conversation of mankind : world Englishes and global citizenship -- Declarations of linguistic independence: the postcolonial dictionary -- Writing after the end of empire : Composition, community, and creativity -- Slow reading : the opacity of world literatures -- Conclusion : English remains, englishes remain

Postcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach-by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette-as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.'s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu's fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu's work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova's and Franco Moretti's. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field's potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.

In The Postcolonial Orient, Vasant Kaiwar presents a far-reaching analysis of the political, economic, and ideological cross-currents that have shaped and informed postcolonial studies preceding and following the 1989 moment of world history. The valences of the ‘post’ in postcolonialism are unfolded via some key historical-political postcolonial texts showing, inter alia, that they are replete with elements of Romantic Orientalism and the Oriental Renaissance. Kaiwar mobilises a critical body of classical and contemporary Marxism to demonstrate that far richer understandings of ‘Europe’ not to mention ‘colonialism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘difference’ are possible than with a postcolonialism captive to phenomenological-existentialism and post-structuralism, concluding that a narrative so enriched is indispensable for a transformative non-Eurocentric internationalism.

The collected essays demonstrate the ways postcolonial studies has adapted Bourdieu’s sociology of literature to examine the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of postcolonialism as a field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts.