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Book Review
| After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation. Edited by ANTOINETTE BURTON. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 369 pp. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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This is an intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking collection of twenty-one essays (including the invaluable introduction by the editor) that debate the adequacy or limitations of the "modern, Western, Euro-American nation" (p. 1) as an analytical category for the study of history and culture. This questioning of the hitherto widely accepted idea of the centrality of the nation-state, as Burton acknowledges, owes much to the development of postcolonial studies and its new and discerning investigations into the nature of colonial hegemony. However, Burton does not appear to see herself as an integral part of that school of studies. Rather, she evidently, and with good reason given her scholarly contributions, sees herself as an exponent of a new subfield of studies concerning "the imperial turn." Helpfully, for those who may not be immersed in the latest theoretical developments in this area, she defined "the imperial turn" as "the accelerated attention to the impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the wake of decolonization ... racial struggle and feminism in the last quarter century" (p. 2). While acknowledging the interrelationship between this subfield and postcolonialism, she does not tend to see the two as "coterminous" (p. 9). Indeed, her object in providing the intellectual and organizational drive to create this collection of original essays is to stimulate debate and thinking about the limitations of traditional national histories and to further explore and critique the interconnectedness of empire, nation, colony, race, and gender as the world moves into an era of increasing globalization. This also involves reshaping the nature of history writing itself to give it more of an international, interdisciplinary flavor and contemporary relevance. |
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