Edge of Empire - Postcolonialism and the City (Hardcover)

This text examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities: London, Perth and Brisbane. Through these examples the spatialised cultural politics of a number of "postcolonial" processes are unravelled: the imperial nostalgias of the one-time heart of empire, the City of London; the struggle of diasporic groups to make a homespace in the old imperial heartlands; the unsettling presence of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city; and the emergence of hybrid spaces in the contemporary city. This book is about the unruly spatial politics of race and nation, nature and culture, past and present. This is a "global geography of the local" that takes theories of colonialism and postcolonialism to the space of the city - giving real space to the spatial metaphors of much contemporary social theory. If the contemporary city is a postmodern space it has not-so-hidden geographies of imperialism and postcolonialism.