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'This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other ‘Others’, examining Caryl Phillips' case study of the migrant David Oluwale. Oluwale's abhorrent treatment in Leeds necessitates discussion of the burgeoning new current of postcolonial cities research, to which this special issue adds interdisciplinary perspectives. To explore whether or not global and postcolonial cities are actually synonymous, we return to the origins of postcolonial studies to suggest that the postcolonial city has a longer provenance than the global, and retains the double meaning of ‘post’ as signalling both a coming after and a continuation. We go on to argue that the special issue demonstrates that postcolonial cities exclude even as they embrace, and produce both internal and external marginality. The foreword concludes by adumbrating potential problems with the special issue's topic: its neglect of economics in favour of culture, its overlooking of the postcolonial rural, and as terminology not coming from within but without.' (Forword 783)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism,
single work
criticism
(p. 853-865)'While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested.' (Publication abstract)
