Description: A comparative and multidisciplinary exploration of Europe's colonial past in relation to present multicultural, cosmopolitan and/or neocolonial experiences, assessing political, cultural and mediatized transitions
Brief description: Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University and Head of Humanities at Utrecht University College. She is the author of Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny, 2004) and The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014). She is also editor of Gender, Globalisation and Violence. Postcolonial Conflict Zones (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor of Migrant Cartographies (Lexington Books, 2005) with Daniela Merolla, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2011) with Marguerite Waller, Deconstructing Europe (Routledge, 2011) with Bolette Blaagaard.
Review Quotes:
"Postcolonial Transitions in Europe is an extremely important and timely intervention into academic and public debates around the continent's identity, its past, present and future. The volume offers rigorous and original scholarship that draws on a broad range of sources from popular culture to migration policies and ethnographic research. Its authors demonstrate how the concept of postcoloniality can be mobilized to productively address legacies of violence and inequality that have so far remained woefully undertheorized, while also pointing to more equitable ways for Europe to define itself and its place in the world. The accessible and thought-provokinginterrogation of issues that will only become more pressing in the future make thisan indispensible resource for anyone interested in what a postcolonial Europe might be." --Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Literature, University of California San Diego, author of European Others
"This beautiful collection of essays, presenting and surpassing the state of the art in postcolonial thinking about Europe's troubled identity in the early 21st Century, makes it possible for us to understand the combined effects of cycles now meeting with their simultaneous ends: eurocentrism, nation-building and collective identification through stable borders. Clearly Europe is the Post-Colony par excellence. It could have invented a new, equalitarian Cosmopolitanism. Or will it? The authors ask this burning question through investigation and imagination." --Etienne Balibar, author of We, the People of Europe? "Postcolonial Transitions in Europe is the bold attempt to unmask the colonial logic viciously at work, still today, within Europe itself. When crises and austerity have become system of governance; when neo-nationalisms, neo-racisms, and the policing of borders are trumpeted as the only alternative, this book has the courage to offer a new sense of orientation for a continent adrift." --Roberto Dainotto, author of Europe (in Theory)