Fall/Winter 2006 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

N E W I N PA P E R B A C K
Imagining London
Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis
John Clement Ball
London was once the hub of an empire on which ‘the
sun never set.’ After the Second World War, as Britain
withdrew from most of its colonies, the city that once
possessed the world began to contain a diasporic world
that was increasingly taking possession of it. Drawing
on postcolonial theories, as well as interdisciplinary
perspectives from cultural geography, urban theory,
history, and sociology, Imagining London examines
representations of the English metropolis in Canadian,
West Indian, Indian, and second-generation ‘black
British’ novels written in the last half of the twentieth
century. It analyses the diverse ways in which London
is experienced and portrayed as a transnational space
by Commonwealth expatriates and migrants.
As the former ‘heart of empire’ and a contemporary
‘world city,’ London metonymically represents
the British Empire in two distinct ways. In the early
years of decolonization, it was a primarily white
city that symbolized imperial power and history.
Over time, as migrants from former colonies have
‘reinvaded the centre’ and changed its demographic
and cultural constitution, it has come to represent
empire as a global microcosm and profoundly
relational locale. John Clement Ball examines the
work of more than twenty writers, including established
authors such as Robertson Davies, Mordecai
Richler, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul,
Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie, and newer voices
such as Catherine Bush, David Dabydeen, Amitav
Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith.
John Clement Ball is an associate professor in the
Department of English at the University of New
Brunswick.
LITERARY STUDIES / CULTURAL STUDIES
265 pp / 6 x 9 / Available
ISBN 0-8020-9455-4 / 978-0-8020-9455-1
£14.95 $27.95 C
Originally published in cloth: June 2004
Gramsci’s Politics of
Language
Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School
Peter Ives
CULTURAL SPACES. WINNER OF THE RAYMOND KLIBANSKY PRIZE
Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony
have permeated social and political theory, cultural
studies, education studies, literary criticism, international
relations, and post-colonial theory. The
centrality of language and linguistics to Gramsci’s
thought, however, has been wholly neglected. In
Gramsci’s Politics of Language, Peter Ives argues that
a university education in linguistics and a preoccupation
with Italian language politics were integral
to the theorist’s thought. Ives explores how the
combination of Marxism and linguistics produced
a unique and intellectually powerful approach to
social and political analysis.
To explicate Gramsci’s writings on language,
Ives compares them with other Marxist approaches
to language, including those of the Bakhtin
Circle, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt
School, including Jürgen Habermas. From these
comparisons, Ives elucidates the implications of
Gramsci’s writings, which, he argues, retained the
explanatory power of the semiotic and dialogic
insights of Bakhtin and the critical perspective of
the Frankfurt School, while at the same time foreshadowing
the key problems with both approaches
that post-structuralist critiques would later reveal.
Gramsci’s Politics of Language fills a crucial gap in
scholarship, linking Gramsci’s writings to current
debates in social theory and providing a
framework for a thoroughly historical-materialist
approach to language.
Peter Ives is an assistant professor in the Department
of Politics at the University of Winnipeg.
POLITICS / CULTURAL STUDIES
288 pp / 6 x 9 / May 2006
ISBN 0-8020-9444-9 / 978-0-8020-9444-5
£18.00 $27.95 C
Originally published in cloth: May 2004
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