Author: Iain Chambers File Type: pdf Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities is a ground-breaking work that revaluates the cultural and political understandings of the world today from the perspective of the south. Largely located in the Mediterranean, and in understandings of a southern question that extends beyond local and national confines, the arguments and perspectives proposed seek to explore the historical formation and political configurations of a multiple modernity. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary lines of thought developed within cultural and postcolonial studies, the work develops a concept of heritage beyond the concerns and obsessions of the Anglo-American world. It offers a counter-hegemony construction of the figure of the migrant and other as a disruptive force in the construction of the idea of the West. It proposes a rethinking of the geo-political economies of knowledge and power, lived and viewed from elsewhere. This accessibility written book should be of interest to anyone interested in the construction of modernity and the future of postcolonial studies.**ReviewIn this compelling book Iain Chambers shows migration from, and connections with, the South to be central to the story of Europe, but in paradoxical ways. This globality has been both systematically denied and cited in framing Europe as exception and exceptional, at odds with people and traditions from an imagined elsewhere. Chambers locates this duality at the heart of the European apparatus of power, suggesting that if not addressed as such, it will always obstruct a more extensive understanding of Europe as trans-cultural. An original, powerful and much needed book in these terrifying times. (Ash Amin, Professor, University of Cambridge, author of Land of Strangers, Polity, 2012) This is an intellectual tour de force that gives us a fresh take on postcolonial interrogations and confrontations. Celebrating interruptions, gaps and dissonances, the book is an ode to broken archives and submerged histories, marked by cruelty and violence but also offering new imaginaries for the future. Beautifully written, with the recognizable poetic style that distinguishes Chambers theoretical engagement, the book also takes on art, photography and cinema as a way of rethinking modernity, incorporating other bodies and voices. (Sandra Ponzanesi, Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands) Iain Chambers is concerned to link in an elegant and powerful manner knowledges appropriate to the Mediterranean region, together with the south of the world more generally, with the critical interrogation of received ideas about identification within existing political and cultural boundaries. He is one of the most important writers making the legacy of Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci relevant today. In this post truth era, Chambers insists on questioning both who is speaking and where they are speaking from. I have benefited immensely both from his work, as well as his specific interest in contemporary art practice, including my own, that I have been able to pursue in conversations in London, Naples and elsewhere. (Isaac Julien, artist, filmmaker and Chair of Global Arts, University of the Arts, London) Moving seamlessly across centuries, continents and genres, this collection of essays offers a persistent and urgent interrogation of our contemporary global colonial order. As with the works of art discussed, the essay form itself, composed through Chambers flowing prose, functions as a form of heresy as part of an unauthorized, southern archive that interrupts and fractures hegemonic modernity, re-assembling its ruins. (Shela Sheikh, Lecturer, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London) Erudite and decidedly planetary in orientation, Chambers not only poses a compelling epistemological and methodological challenge to the European social sciences. In an era of rapidly contracting borders and ever-shrinking space for dissenting narratives, his appeal to turn the outside in is also an urgently needed call to imagine alternative futures, premised on our intersections and framed by our imbrications. (Rachel Busbridge, Research Associate, La Trobe University, Australia) Iain Chambers profound meditation on the figure of the migrant recasts contemporary migration, not as an exceptional crisis, but as expressive of the generative structures and colonial origins of European modernity. Chambers penetrating epistemological critique identifies the colonial imperatives that continue to condition and authorize academic disciplines. A timely and eloquent call to reassemble the broken archive of Western knowledge through an engagement with alternative rationalities and creative practices. (Sarah Casteel, Associate Professor, Carleton University, Canada) Iain Chambers shows the impossibility of making the world transparent, fully understandable and unilaterally controllable, that is, the morbid dream Western reason has cultivated during the last five centuries. (Cultural Sociology) About the Author Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world. He is known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean.

Author: Donald E. Chipman File Type: pdf Though the Aztec Empire fell to Spain in 1521, three principal heirs of the last emperor, Moctezuma II, survived the conquest and were later acknowledged by the Spanish victors as reyes naturales (natural kings or monarchs) who possessed certain inalienable rights as Indian royalty. For their part, the descendants of Moctezuma II used Spanish law and customs to maintain and enhance their status throughout the colonial period, achieving titles of knighthood and nobility in Mexico and Spain. So respected were they that a Moctezuma descendant by marriage became Viceroy of New Spain (colonial Mexicos highest governmental office) in 1696.This authoritative history follows the fortunes of the principal heirs of Moctezuma II across nearly two centuries. Drawing on extensive research in both Mexican and Spanish archives, Donald E. Chipman shows how daughters Isabel and Mariana and son Pedro and their offspring used lawsuits, strategic marriages, and political maneuvers and alliances to gain pensions, rights of entailment, admission to military orders, and titles of nobility from the Spanish government. Chipman also discusses how the Moctezuma family history illuminates several larger issues in colonial Latin American history, including womens status and opportunities and trans-Atlantic relations between Spain and its New World colonies.(200602)ReviewThis book furnishes us with a rich, valuable appreciation of the circumstance and heritage of the great Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotls most prestigious descendants. (Susan Schroeder American Historical Review ) About the AuthorDONALD E. CHIPMAN is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Texas in Denton. In 2003, King Juan Carlos I of Spain knighted him as a Caballero of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic, the highest honor that can be accorded to a non-Spaniard.