Symbolizing Resistance against Empire

Any act of envisioning the future requires a mapping of our past and current loca-tions. We must ask: Where are we now? Where did we come from? Where are. heading? Postality—post-colonial, post-industrial, even post-revolutionary times-seems to characterize the current impasse in modern critical thought. Inaugurated by the United Nation’s bombing of Iraq for occupying the territory of another nation (Kuwait), the post-Cold War era we inhabit today may be as far removed from the Enlightenment vision of a cosmopolitan world culture (expressed, for example, in Goethe’s notion of a Weltliteratur ) as it is from the years when this century opened with the Boer Wars in South Africa, the Boxer rebellion against foreign incursions in China, and the Spanish-American War. Our postmodern conjuncture is in fact distinguished by ethnic particularisms and by the valorization of the aleatory, contingent, and heterogeneous—all symptoms of a more profound structural crisis. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Art · China · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Enlightenment · Literature · Political economy · Political science · Postmodernism · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Theology · Globalization and Cultural Identity · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci