Description: "An explanation of postcolonial film theory and how it explicates James Cameron's film"--
Brief description: Gautam Basu Thakur is Assistant Professor of English at Boise State University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010 and taught at the University of Mississippi before joining Boise State in 2011. His teaching and research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational/world literature, critical theory with a particular focus on Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature of the Empire.
Review Quotes: "This erudite and brilliantly provocative book takes us on a familiar journey through the history of post-colonial theory in order to end up in a new place: a critique not of colonialism but instead of the new Eurocentric neo-liberal, globalized subject. Basu Thakur teases us by juxtaposing James Cameron's Avatar with Michael Haneke's Caché. Of these two, it is Caché that surprisingly ends up with the post-colonial laurels for expressing what it is to be 'truly imagined by other worlds, ' whereas Avatar is dismissed for re-presenting the fantasy of otherness that supplements the West's on-going performance of its own politically correct, neo-liberal subjectivity. This book will outrage even as it informs, adding new fire to the criticism of what Basu Thakur calls 'the West's unending imaginative vacuity about otherness.'" --Henry Krips, Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair of Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, USA