Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality(Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)

Addressing the problem of forging a theoretical practice that deals with the struggles of once-colonized countries with crumbling societies, the author proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view. Through a series of linked essays on culture and politics in his native Jamaica and Sri Lanka, the book examines the ways in which modernity inserted itself and altered the lives of the colonized. The institutional procedures encoded in these modern post-colonial states and their legal systems come under scrutiny, as do our contemporary languages of the political. The author's aim is to demonstrate that modern concepts of political representation, community, rights, obligation, and the common good do not apply universally and require reconsideration. His ultimate goal is to describe the modern colonial past in a way that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of our historical present and that enlarges the possibility of reshaping it.

About the Author :
David Scott is a Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He has held appointments at Bates College, the University of Chicago, and the University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of Formations of Ritual and is the editor of the journal Small Axe.

Review :
"This is an ambitious and exciting book by a gifted young anthropologist. David Scott takes two ex-colonial countries which he personally knows well, Sri Lanka and Jamaica, and subjects aspects of their constructed representation to probing criticism. He does much more than simply apply familiar principles of constructivist critique to new ethnographic material. Scott's purpose is to encourage the rethinking of political options for the future, and in so doing to extend the meaning of postcolonial critique."—Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center "In this powerfully argued and theoretically sophisticated book, David Scott interrogates the conditions of possibility for a post- 'third world' politics that is both critical and strategic. . . . A major work which marks a new departure in the field."—Stuart Hall