Beyond the Straits: Postcolonial Allegories of the Globe

Abstract

The conference on which this volume is based asked its speakers to reflect on the future directions that postcolonial studies might take. This paper begins by suggesting what new horizons might be glimpsed across the straits that have appeared in recent years to encircle postcolonial studies, defining it in narrow and restrictive ways. But it is also concerned to follow the implications of its title in ways literal, historical, and theoretical. The paper was written in the shadow of the re-establishment of one of the world’s most influential frontiers, between southwest Europe and northwest Africa. It revisits the shape of the earth that was verified by the European journeys from that portal. And it speculates on the survival of the allegories of globality that flowed from those journeys, and which might seem irredeemably tainted by the association with European imperial hegemony which they helped establish. On its own journey the paper sails close to the contentious debates about globalisation and cosmopolitanism which currently enrich postcolonial studies, but it takes too idiosyncratic and meditative a course to contribute anything of substance to them.