Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Methodology of the oppressed

Cosmopolitics : thinking and feeling beyond the nation

In the recent "culture wars" over canon, curriculum, and multiculturalism, enraged voices repeatedly claim that the academy has failed in its duty to "the public." These cries echo older charges against the schools and the media for failing to produce active, informed citizens and, more recently, against race and gender politics for dividing the body politic against itself. The Phantom Public Sphere interrogates the concept of the public in whose name all such charges are leveled. The public sphere is presented as something already lost, an unrepresented absence. In the heterogeneous, electronically mediated society we call postmodern, can we still speak meaningfully of a public sphere? On the other hand, can supporters of democracy afford not to speak of it? In The Phantom Public Sphere, voices from numerous disciplines and perspectives share a common concern with what the public means now - not as an object of nostalgia, but as a presence within the institutions, movements, and events that have redefined contemporary life, including Jesse Helm's censorship campaign and the televised Senate hearing that made the names of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill household words. Provocative and disturbing, The Phantom Public Sphere both engages the challenge Walter Lippmann posed for democracy in 1925 when he called the public a "phantom" and speaks in the name of democracy and its radical possibilities.

The phantom public sphere

Is global culture merely a pale and sinister reflection of capitalist globalization? Bruce Robbins responds to this and other questions in Feeling Global, a crucial document on nationalism, culturalism, and the role of intellectuals in the age of globalization. Building on his previous work, Robbins here takes up the question of the status of international human rights. Robbins' conception of internationalism is driven not only by the imperatives of global human rights policy, but by an understanding of transnational cultures, thus linking practical policy making to cultural politics at the expense of neither. Robbins' cultural criticism, in other words, affords us much more than an understanding of how culture "shapes our lives." Instead, Robbins shows, particularly in his discussions of Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Michael Walzer and others, how "culture" itself has become a term that blocks-for commentators on both the right and the left-serious engagement with the contemporary cosmopolitan ideal of a nonuniversalist discourse of human rights. Rescuing "cosmopolitanism" itself from its connotations of leisured individuals loyal to no one and willing to sample all cultures at will, Feeling Global presents a compelling way to think about the ethical obligations of intellectuals at a time when their place in the new world order is profoundly uncertain.

Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

During the 1980s, university-based intellectuals came under heavy fire from both radicals and conservatives. They were accused by the former of betraying their public duty as general critics of society, and by the latter of promulgating radical ideologies and corrupting the young. In this work, the author counters both left and right, arguing that the professionalization of literary study was inevitable and fortuitous. Robbins undertakes close studies of such figures as Edward Said, Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams, while considering the major trends in contemporary cultural studies and giving significant attention to relevant developments in such disciplines as ethnology and sociology. "Secular Vocations" ranges over materials from Britain, France and the US, knitting them together in a synthesis that places, in bold relief, many of the major controversies in contemporary intellectual life. It concludes with a plea for what Robbins calls "comparative cosmopolitanism" to displace the more militantly particularist projects that have come to dominate the human sciences.

Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture

A work of innovative literary and cultural history, The Servant's Hand examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the ordinary people they are taken to represent. Robbins's argument offers a new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), The Servant's Hand is appearing for the first time in paperback.

Bruce Robbins

Papers

Cosmopolitics : thinking and feeling beyond the nation

The phantom public sphere

Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture

The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below