Interrogating the Postcolonial: On the Limits of Freedom, Subalternity, and Hegemonic Knowledge

This review surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke’s Ethnographic State; Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time; Viatcheslav Morozov’s Russia’s Postcolonial Identity; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire. The central topics covered by these four books range from questioning the inevitability and givenness of the national independence option during decolonization, to attempting to sketch a history of French Orientalism in …