In the introduction to the Vintage edition of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison recalls the Vermont summer of 1945 during which he began to write his soon-to-be-classic novel of race and identity. Ellison remembers that while unsuccessfully “plotting a novel based on the war then in progress,” he happened upon

Finding Uncle Tom apparently alive and well was certainly a shock to Ellison’s sensibilities, and for the novel he thought himself to be writing, the jolt administered turned out to have been terminal. Yet, Ellison’s unexpected encounter with what he had presumed to be a dead letter was also highly fortuitous: the Vermont Tom Show conjures up “the spokesman for invisibility” who would become the protagonist of Ellison’s first novel (xvi). Uncle Tom’s refusal to die becomes the invisible man’s insistence on living.

An apparent paradox characterizes contemporary law. The legal system is going through a serious crisis while jurisprudence is enjoying something of a renaissance. At the turn of the millennium, law faces a crisis of form and a demand for ethics. To start with ethics, over the last twenty years a widely felt sense that justice has miscarried has been evident. In the United Kingdom, justice has been aborted in miscarriages of justice and denials of access to justice, in racial and gender discrimination, in institutional violence and legal dogmatism. Many recent legal reforms, most importantly the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 and various measures against institutional racism in the police and other state agencies, aim at removing the worst cases of abuse, but they have been criticized for timidity. But, for the legal scholar, the question is somewhat different. How is it that we came to the point where the legal system appears to be almost divorced from considerations of morality? Michel Foucault has called the great eighteenth-century civil lawyers who stood against the autocratic state “universal intellectuals”: the “man of justice, the man of law, he who opposes to power, despotism, the abuses and arrogance of wealth, the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Postmodernity has undermined our belief in the universality of law or in the ability of an ideal equity to ground its operations. What is the meaning of justice in a world of cognitive and moral uncertainties?

For modern readers perhaps nothing is more off-putting than the subject of classicism, with its unfortunate connotations of privilege and cultural exclusivity. In this chapter I want to show how classical culture spawns meanings, overturns ideas, amuses, shocks, and makes new in Marlowe's hands. It is far from dead, and neither does it necessarily work to confirm white, male privilege. The Renaissance had a more inclusive view of the classics than we do. Virgil, for example, was accepted as the author of the pseudo-Virgilian text known as Virgil's Gnat, so the arch poet of panegyric, the high priest of epic and imperial expansion, was also the author of a mockheroic trifle about an insect. The classical authors that Marlowe chose to translate and/or imitate in his poems, including Ovid, Lucan, Musaeus, and, in 'The Passionate Shepherd', Callimachus, were all recognized as dissident writers both by their contemporaries and by the Renaissance. Marlowe chose to identify himself with writers who, in various ways, resisted the political, moral, gender, and aesthetic ideals epitomized by Virgil's Aeneid, the text that has come to embody classicism for us. Our appreciation of Marlowe's poems is not only hampered by our narrow understanding of the classical ideal, we also prefer texts that confirm our values of individualism, distinction, and authenticity of voice. We denigrate texts, like Marlowe’s poems, which are translations or imitations because they supposedly lack originality, and conform to collaborative models of production which we are only just beginning to appreciate. We tend to agree with James VI, who once advised writers to avoid translation because it impairs one’s sovereignty: ‘ze are bound, as to a staik, to follow that buikis phrasis, quhilk ze translate’.

Before the late 1970s, there was no field of academic specialization that went by the name of “postcolonial studies.” Today, by contrast, postcolonial studies occupies a position of legitimacy and even relative prestige, not only within the Euro-American academy but also in universities in many countries of the formerly colonized world. Postcolonial studies centers have been set up in many institutions - mostly linked to departments of literature but inviting significant input also from scholars based in cultural studies, history, anthropology, art, and other disciplines - and innumerable conferences and colloquia have been convened. Advertisements for academic positions in postcolonial studies have become fairly routine. Several dedicated academic journals have begun publication, and any number of other journals have devoted special issues to “postcolonial literature,” “postcolonial theory, ” or “the postcolonial condition.” Literary anthologies and critical readers, as well as compilations of essays in the field, have been published, and many of these have sold very well.1 And in addition to the hundreds of scholarly books and thousands of critical articles that might be said to be in the field or indeed to make it up - from the works of Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, V. Y. Mudimbe, Peter Hulme, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to the mass of less influential work on particular authors, periods, situations, events, and concepts - there has recently emerged a burgeoning production of scholarly texts that take the critical field itself as their object.

The quarter century in which Bruckner composed his first symphonies contained no shortage of symphonies in general, and they exhibit considerable diversity of genre and style but they have largely not survived in the concert hall: although there remain many good reasons for claiming the symphony as the central genre of instrumental music in the nineteenth century, the years 1850–75 constitute a period richer in historical themes than in major works. Of 507 symphonic works considered in a recent survey, some have survived though overshadowed by their composer's later output (e.g. the first five symphonies of Dvořák). Others have lived on as rare examples of the genre from composers whose career flourished in other fields (e.g. Smetana's ‘Triumphal’ Symphony). Symphonists who have been rediscovered in the age of recording include the underrated Gernsheim, while Gade and Raff serve as examples of prolific composers who have clung on tenuously to experience intermittent modest revivals. The vast majority belong in the category of ‘forgotten symphonies’ discussed in another recently published thesis on ‘epigonality’ in the symphony.

The influence of Liszt seems reflected in the large number of programmatic works: symphonies, symphonic poems, and a host of intermediate genres such as the symphonic fantasy and overture-symphony. Closer inspection, however, discourages viewing the programmatic phenomenon uniformly as a monument to the triumph of the New German School. Among composers with a biographical link to Weimar is Raff, who composed programme symphonies that show little formal or procedural resemblance to Liszt; Draeseke serves as an example of a composer of symphonic poems who later turned to older concepts of the ‘characteristic’ symphony with few claims to the rhetoric of the ‘poetic’ espoused by Liszt.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of political and economic developments in the world system since the end of the Second World War in 1945. There are several reasons why it seems important to begin a volume devoted to postcolonial studies with an account of this kind - not only to “set the scene,” as it were, to discuss the conditions prevailing in the post-war years, as the great movements for independence and national liberation in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean gathered momentum in the drive towards decolonization; but also to sketch the contours of the global dispensation into which the new countries were subsequently precipitated at independence (joining the Latin American states, most of which had achieved political independence in the nineteenth century), and in the context of which they had to take their place, for the most part as relatively poor and relatively poorly resourced nation-states (both undeveloped and under-developed) in an inegalitarian, unevenly integrated, and highly polarized world system of nation-states. It is impossible to understand the fraught trajectories of developments in these new nation-states in the decades since their decolonization - hard-won victories as well as an abundance of what the historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, has called “setbacks and defeats” (1983: 95) - without a consideration of the global picture, both of the shifting balance of geopolitical forces and of transformations and restructurings in capitalism and capitalist class relations world-wide. The dispositions of power in the world system have not only set certain untranscendable limits to what it has been possible, and what impossible, for the newly decolonized states to achieve; they have also been such as to determine - or at the very least powerfully influence - policies and practices in these new states (as also in their older Latin American counterparts) even in situations where their leaders have imagined and sought to put forward and implement credible alternatives.

In the Bengali year 1255 (1849 ce), a young widow becomes pregnant during an (illicit) affair with her brother-in-law; he demands that her natal family eliminate the problem. During the abortion arranged by her mother and sister, Chandra dies. Her relatives are arrested and their statements are taken down. The depositions are later archived and anthologized with other documents at Viswabharati University.

“How is one to reclaim this document for history?” (Guha 1987: 138). In his compelling essay, “Chandra's Death,” Ranajit Guha poses the question integral to Subaltern Studies, the influential school of Indian historiography he helped to found in the early 1980s. The question encapsulates the collective's contestatory framework: how is Indian history to be written outside the historically dominant frameworks, first of colonialism and, later, of élite nationalism?

Beginnings: colonial discourse analysis

Those wanting to understand the beginnings and development of postcolonial studies will readily find numerous Introductions, Readers, Companions, monographs, and journal articles offering a variety of definitions and genealogies, advising further reading, and proposing new objects of study. If the scale of publications testifies to the rapid assimilation of a disparate interdisciplinary undertaking within academic curricula, then the range of analytic strategies suggests a volatile and contested discussion. Yet despite a project in which poststructuralists vie with Marxists, culturalists with materialists, textualists with realists, postcolonial criticism has come to be identified as postmodernist in its orientation - an alignment promoted more or less actively by prominent critics in the field. One consequence of this is that there has been a fluid, polysemic, and ambiguous usage of the term “postcolonial” within and beyond specialist circles. The plenitude of signification is such that “postcolonial” can indicate a historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance - indeed, in the spirit of mastery favored by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean.2 As a result it is not uncommon to find the term used in connection with any discursive contest against oppression or marginalization - such as feminist or queer or disability studies.

Postcolonial studies emerged in the 1980s. By this time, the great era of Third-World anticolonial nationalism was at an end, and violent ethnic communalism was beginning to assume global dimensions. Such political shifts fed the tendency of postcolonial studies to regard nationalism as inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist, and destructive. The 1980s additionally witnessed the global expansion and intensification of capitalism. This led to the popular academic view that the era of nation-states was itself nearing a close and that nationalism was therefore redundant (Hobsbawm 1993). These tendencies were further fueled by developments in critical theory. The culturalist turn of social and literary theory, poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity - these encouraged postcolonial studies to view nationalism as a primarily cultural and epistemological, rather than socio-political, formation. This accompanied the view that nationalism was, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggested, “a reverse or displaced legitimation of colonialism,” doomed to repeat the “epistemic violence” of the colonialism it had rejected (1999: 62). Less antagonistic are the approaches associated with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991, first published 1983). In these, nationalism is construed as Janus-faced, paradoxical in its cultural, temporal modernity and simultaneous reliance on the past to define and legitimate itself.

This chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Jean Baudrillard's and Fredric Jameson's accounts of the postmodern have had a significant impact on the field of film studies, affecting both film theory and history. The most influential aspects of each theorist's work are outlined in the first two sections. The first section focuses on two key texts by Baudrillard: Simulations and America, while the second addresses Jameson's famous article “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” I shall indicate the ways in which their ideas have been taken up and/or challenged at the end of each section. The critical debates surrounding these conceptions of the postmodern have impacted upon film history due to cinema's dual status as both an icon of modernity and a symbol of the postmodern. The third section explores the many different definitions of the relation between the modern and the postmodern and traces the ways in which this distinction intersects with other key oppositions in film theory and history, such as classical/postclassical and narrative/spectacle. The final section will use current theoretical conceptions of affirmative postmodernisms in order to provide a reading of Face/Off that challenges its status as the ultimate in meaningless spectacle.

Introduction: damning the vessel

This chapter deals with the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with an incident from a story that is about exile and travel in the colonial world. This event occurs in February 1767, on board a ship sailing from Montserrat, in the east Caribbean, towards Savannah, Georgia, passing the Bahamas en route. The cargo of the vessel in question includes “above twenty” slaves. Our narrator, by his own account, had been born in West Africa, captured as a child, and sold to white slave-traders. Unlike many others he had survived both the horror of the middle passage and the brutalities of plantation life and had managed, a year previously, to buy himself back from his owner as a formally, if precariously, free individual. His name is Olaudah Equiano and he writes: