Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cultural Margins)

Rating:
Summary: If you know the work of the editors, nothing to see here
Review: A disappointing book that I picked up for the essays by Parry (liberation theory) and Brennan (a curious "alternative history" of postcolonial studies), which were OK but not fantastic, and overall the book is dominated by straw-man arguments about postcolonial theory, squarely located within European epistemology. The introduction, ironically, suggests that "there needs to be a productive dialogue between Marxism and postcolonial studies", yet the examples of postcolonial studies mentioned in the book, such as Spivak, have of course given serious and detailed readings of Marx that are not taken particularly seriously here. More to the point, the entire tone is one of "debunking" and not at all exciting. If you're grumpy with all those postcolonial theorists supposedly taking over everything and you want to have arguments with them, or just make yourself feel better about liking your Adorno books more, this might be useful to you.