Postcolonial interruptions- unauthorised modernities. Professor Iain Chambers
Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities is a ground-breaking work that revaluates the cultural and political understandings of the world today from the perspective of the south. Largely located in the Mediterranean, and in understandings of a ‘southern question’ that extends beyond local and national confines, the arguments and perspectives proposed seek to explore the historical formation and political configurations of a multiple modernity.
Drawing upon the interdisciplinary lines of thought developed within cultural and postcolonial studies, the work develops a concept of heritage beyond the concerns and obsessions of the Anglo-American world. It offers a counter-hegemony construction of the figure of the migrant and ‘other’ as a disruptive force in the construction of the idea of the West. It proposes a rethinking of the geo-political economies of knowledge and power, lived and viewed from elsewhere. This accessibility written book should be of interest to anyone interested in the construction of modernity and the future of postcolonial studies.
Professor Iain Chambers, Durham University
Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in 'Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. He is known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean.
Professor Chambers has a degree in History and American Studies from Keele University, and subsequently acquired an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has lived in Naples since 1976, and has held visiting professorships at Hunter College (CUNY) in 1990, the University of Oslo in 1992, in Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine in 1995, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008. He has also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz in 1994; been invited as Visiting Scholar at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles for the year 1996-7; and been a Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine in 1997.
He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture (1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (1986), Border dialogues: Journeys in postmodernity (1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (1994), Hendrix, hip hop e l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) (1995), Culture after humanism (2001); and most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008). He is also editor with Lidia Curti of The Post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (1996,) and the volume Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006). Several of these titles have been translated into various languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish. In addition Professor Chambers has served on the editorial boards of Formations, Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Communal Plural, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, and Third Text.