The Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power

This collection provides an overview of strategies towards cultural decolonization in a post-Cold War world and to explore options for a global cultural politics. Addressing itself to an audience in both the South and the North, the book's contributors explore the relations between power and culture, between domination and the imagination. Acknowledging that former colonizers and colonized have both been shaped by a colonial imaginary, they explore a variety of decolonization strategies. This perspective rejects Eurocentrism and other forms of Western ethnocentrism, as well as traditional Third World cultural nationalism as a form of resistance to imperialism. Instead, a new vision is offered that opens the way to polycentrism, a normalization of cultural pluralism, and a post-coloniality that accepts a transcendence of old North-South boundaries.