Late Imperial Culture

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.

Román de la Campa chairs the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York. His books include Latin Americanism and Late Imperial Culture.

Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso’s Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.

Aijaz Ahmad is a renowned cultural theorist who has taught in several western and Indian universities. A frequent contributor to Frontline magazine, he currently lives in New Delhi.