Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

Based on the inductive analysis of the previous chapters of the book, the conclusion provides closing remarks on the nature and meaning of the classic and the canon in history. I argue that the ability of some history classics to transcend time stems from their literariness, as it supports the text’s historicity, which include features shared with the classic in literature such as endurance, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. But I introduced other specificities of the historical operation such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of literariness without damaging the pastness of the past. I emphasize two conclusions. First, I hope to have contributed in some measure to demystifying the idea that ‘classic’ and ‘canon’ are two notions that imply normativity, rigidity, traditionalism, uncritical inertia, or cultural supremacism. Second, I hope that this research will contribute to consolidating the field of ‘historical criticism’, or ‘critical analysis of historical texts’, complementary to but distinct from the theory of history and the history of historiography, which has begun to flourish in historiography in recent decades.

The Introduction turns to Terry Eagleton’s comment on reading Naipaul (“Great art, dreadful politics”) and asks how critics have addressed this quandary about a great writer. It looks at the critical essays on Naipaul by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri in particular to examine how Naipaul’s works challenge the idea of “postcolonial arrival.” The overall thesis of the book is summed up as a reading in which an author “reads us.” To undertake this project, the work is grounded in a systematic examination of all of the author’s published and unpublished works, the secondary bibliography, and material deposited in the Naipaul Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. To make a case for Naipaul’s place in global literary culture, there are four key impulses that govern the book. They are: history, aesthetics, textual engagement, and archival knowledge. To give meaning to that achievement, this book is written with thematic unities in mind. Although chronology is not totally dispensed with, the chapters are structured with the aim of establishing connections within Naipaul’s heterogeneous corpus. But for that interconnectedness to succeed, Naipaul followed an uncompromising commitment to writing as an aesthetic endeavour, uninhibited by fashion or ideology.

Both because Islam arose later than Christianity and because of its present largely negative reputation, this chapter is structured somewhat differently from its predecessors. A first section looks at its historical relations with culture, stressing first positive aspects and then the distortions noted by Edward Said and his followers, as well as the more general, detrimental effect of western imperialism. The second section then explores historical restraints upon fundamentalism; first in the four Sunni schools through analogy, abrogation and chains of transmission. Mystical Sufism is then portrayed as an unjustifiably marginalised alternative. The final section then looks at contemporary options, taking first modern Muslim contextualisation before noting possible reasons why Christians could legitimately endorse Mohammad’s modification of earlier biblical stories. The variety of its present forms demonstrates the extent to which it can be seen to be pulled in opposing directions, hope in openness to new ideas restrained by warning pressures to ossify its past.

This chapter focuses on heavy metal music and culture in the Middle East. It provides a summary of previous research on metal in the region and touches upon common clichés of metal as a source of counterculture, revolution and change. It then addresses the complicated relationship between metal studies and Orientalism. It is the author’s contention that research on metal in the Middle East has been directly influenced by Orientalist discourse. The author further argues that the impact of this discourse has led to the politicisation and exoticisation of a particular figure – the ‘Muslim metalhead’. This chapter seeks to contribute to the current discussion on ‘Oriental metal’ as an attempt to exotify the very existence (and art) of metalheads from a region that has been geopolitically framed as the ‘Middle East’.

Edward Said was known not only for his literary studies, his strong support for Palestinian identity, and his influential political commentary but for his criticism of Orientalist scholarship and its impact on the image of Muslims maintain by many Westerners. But for all his criticism of those scholars, it may be argued, however, that Said missed much about their work that should have been addressed. In this chapter, we consider the Orientalist romanticization of the Arabic language, their dismissal of actual Islamic law court decisions, and their emphasis on Arab stasis rather than their social fluidity and creativeness. If we paint a fuller picture of the Orientalists’ scholarship, we can understand both the strengths and weakness not only of their approach to the cultures of the region but where Said himself was able or unable to fulfill his own professed goals.

This chapter begins from a concern about the extent to which “diaspora” is one of a number of concepts that threatens to be swallowed up by the newly-dominant institutional category of “world literature,” and goes on to discuss what stands to be lost as a result, as well as how we might proceed differently. Forgetting diaspora, it argues, impoverishes our attempts to think literature in an internationalist framework; this contribution is thus an attempt to assist in the act of remembering. In particular, the chapter makes a case for reading Palestinian literature diasporically as a move toward a world literature that reads work not just “globally,” but with an eye toward internationalism.

According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

Why connect state violence with representation? The book proposes a rethinking of democratic theory based on the Arab Uprisings of 2011, also known as the Arab spring. The introduction provides definitions of the key concepts of representation, democracy, participation and civil society, and describes the sources and methods. The book argues that cultural representation and political representation come together through the theme of violence. Historically the means of coercion have been turned against Arab citizens; in 2011 these citizens proposed that democratic accountability be added to the management of legitimate violence and state coercion.

Jeanne Morefield maintains that a truly democratic response to the crisis of liberal democracy requires citizens in the global North to embrace a radically reflective, deconstructive subjectivity that relentlessly calls into question the historical and contemporary shape of “the people” under consideration. To develop this subjective perspective, the chapter draws upon Edward Said’s notion of exilic criticism and compares it with contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism and left populism. Morefield explores the way this unhoused, unstable perspective enables contrapuntal engagement with those histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, and racialized logics of extraction and dispossession that went into the creation of modern liberal democratic states in the first place. Ultimately, she argues, it is only by reflecting on this constitutive history that citizens in the global North can create the kind of solidaristic, compassionate, and authentically democratic practices necessary to fight the rise of white nationalism and the decline of liberal democracy on a global scale.

The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

Edward Said’s lifelong commitment to Romance philology and the discipline of Comparative Literature gave him an unusual and critical angle on the globalization of culture and ideas. This chapter explains that heritage and demonstrates the usefulness and power of that critique.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

This chapter makes a case for the persistent salience of the Jewish Holocaust in postcolonial cultural discourse and especially literary production. It adopts the term contrapuntal memory to describe these entanglements, and considers what figures of world and history this archive offers. It is organized into three sections. The first examines how the colonial ordering of the world globalized the Holocaust, and considers two novels about Jewish internment in the British colonies. The second concerns the role of Holocaust memory in postcolonial Europe, as a means for both the assimilation and exclusion of migrant and minoritarian subjects. The final section reconsiders 1945 as a temporal threshold and historical rupture, and examines how the Holocaust might be situated in relation to the longue durée of racial modernity.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘late style’, as defined by Edward Said in his last book, in the work of recent and contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. It explores the anachronistic and untimely as productive ways of thinking about the critical function of art in the three poets, who are all preoccupied with what means to have come ‘too late’ to history, and to poetry. The essay explores the extent to which ‘late style’ can be understood as a function of the ‘exiled’ relationship between the artist and his audience, and to what extent it is a historical consequence of late modernity.

Richard Strauss's late operatic and instrumental works exemplify a positive meaning of lateness in the context of creative production: not to be "late" in an artistic or stylistic sense, but rather a fulfillment and purification of both compositional technique and content. Discussing Strauss's lateness in the larger context of the musical and philosophical debate (considering the positions of Gottfried Benn, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, as well as Auguste Rodin's ideas on antiquity), the author offers a new perspective in joining that intense period of the composer with James Hillman's consideration of aging as the culmination of a creative life. Thus, Strauss's last period exemplifies what the American psychologist calls the "force of character."

Following the arrival of over a million ‘refugees and migrants’ to Europe in 2015, the EU and individual member states attempted to increase opportunities for migrants and refugees to access university. These measures aimed to address some of the difficulties that refugees faced in accessing higher education, but they stem from and reiterate a European ‘integration infrastructure’ that sees refugees as cultural others. ‘Refugees’ are reduced to a series of intervenable problems centred around the question of how they may be integrated into existing systems of work, education or ‘society’. This chapter explores two projects to incorporate refugees into higher education: the European Qualifications Passport (EQP) and Central European University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) programme. The EQP is an ambitious attempt to codify the educational qualifications that refugees hold. OLIve runs programmes to assist people of refugee background to enter into higher education using funding received from the EU. Both projects question the integration framework, but both also encounter limitations. The chapter ends by arguing for policies based on Paolo Freire’s writings on how universities reproduce inequalities.