New Imperialisms, new imperatives taking stock of postcolonial studies

Abstract

"It has become commonplace to say that "the world changed after 9/11." The precise contours of this change, the nature and extent of the rupture from the past that the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing "war on terrorism" are supposed to have initiated are, of course, still being debated. In the West, many of these debates are being registered in the pages of left-wing publications such as Monthly Review, International Socialist Review, and Socialist Register, which published a special issue titled The New Imperial Challenge. In the last year alone, numerous books by well-known critics of empire sought to unravel the meaning of the new imperialism; among them were Immanuel Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, Rahul Mahajan's Full Spectrum Dominance, Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital, and Aijaz Ahmad's Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of Our Time, to name just a few."