Post-Empire Imaginaries? ― Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires

Although the first half of the twentieth century saw the Great War sweeping away old empires and colonies after World War II, the idea of empire still piques the human imagination. Defining the post-empire imaginary very broadly as a repertoire of rules, gestures, and styles and an archive of images, narratives, and effects derived from historical empires, the contributors argue that the general idea of empire as well as the concrete histories, the cultural heritage, and the rules and rites of different empires continue to provide a rich symbolic repertoire for the present. Seventeen essays are divided into two parts: conceptualizing empires, mapping empires; (post) empire imaginaries in historical media. Chapters are: maps of empires past; (re)writing history; the hermeneutics of empire; exploring for the empire; teaching the empire; the Ottoman imaginary of Evliya Celebi; “imagine a country where we are all equal”; British (post)colonial discourse and (imagined) Roman precedents; “as if empires were great and wonderful things”; travelling through (post-)imperial panoramas; “no one belongs here more than you”; the bonds of empire; Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood; Johannesburg Zoologica; toxic terror and the cosmopolitanism; something is foul in the state of Kerala; conflicting models of agency in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Barbara Buchenau, Ph.D. (2002), University of Gottingen, is Professor of North American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her publications include a book on American settler fiction; a monograph onTypecasting in Colonial North America is under preparation.Virginia Richter, Ph.D. (1997), University of Munich, is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her numerous publications includeLiterature after Darwin. Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).Marijke Denger is currently completing her PhD on community in contemporary postcolonial novels at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Contributors are: Elsie Cloete, Mayannah N. Dahlheim, Rainer Emig, Elena Furlanetto, Jana Gohrisch, Alfred Hiatt, Kerstin Knopf, Donna Landry, Karsten Levihn-Kutzler, Michael Meyer, Eva-Maria Muller, Timo Muller, Eva M. Perez, Judith Raiskin, Cecile Sandten, Silke Stroh, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein.