The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power - Tapa dura

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.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His previous publications include Ethnicities and Global Multiculture (2007) and Globalization and Empire (2004). He has previously edited two Zed books Global Futures and The Decolonization of Imagination.