This is a pre-print July 2014 draft of the second chapter of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, co-authored with the Warwick Research Collective (Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme MacDonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, Stephen Shapiro).

The last decade theoretical accumulation on peripheries has turned this concept into a fundamental tool to approach contemporaneity. It has become an effective key to rethink the complex morphology of modernities, in particular when the modernization processes don’t seem completely to entail the diversities of the generated modern forms. After a synoptic genealogy of peripheral thoughts, inscribed in the synthetic categorial circle of Periferic, the concept key is adopted to draft the very particular profile of Portuguese colonialism, historically grounded on a paradoxical “weak force” that fed a mythology of exceptionalism of the Portuguese Overseas case. In this sense, a modern peripheral discourse may become an international work of articulation of fake forms and narratives. Such a rethorical and ideological device, defined by the ideology of Luso-Tropicalism - set up in Brazil, that is in an ex-colony with the decisive contribution of Gilberto Freyre, but after recycled by the contemporary metropolis, Portugal and the Salazarian regime, in order to justify the maintenance of the African colonies - shows a crucial but hidden aspect and risk of the postcolonial theories. If it isn’t assumed with a particular ethics of discourse care, uncritical postcolonial arguments may be turned as a exceptional colonial alibi to feed the immagination of a necessary colonial relation. Therefore, postcolonial theory has to keep a very strict link to the metacritcal dimension of the discourse.

The Identity Crisis of Art History Maverick Cold War Modernism Regional Pride: The Post-Cold War Empowerment of the Margins National Art History Fights Back The Hungarian Patient What is to be Dona with regional Art history

This special issue seeks to explore new vantage points for tackling discontents, contradictions, and unexplored alternatives in Southeast Europe by thinking with post- and decolonial theory and practice. We argue that decolonial thinking can be helpful in appreciating the region’s imperial and (quasi-)colonial legacy, in analysing contemporary forms of domination, hierarchy and resistance, and for identifying their corresponding practices of complicity and collaboration, but also of struggle, protest and reversals of the current neoliberal trajectory. FREE DOWNLOAD: https://dialoguingposts.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/special-issue.pdf

More than two and a half decades after the demise of actually existing socialism, much of the contemporary literature produced about CEE is still organized around a dichotomy between socialism and post-socialism, transforming the region in an epistemic enclave. This paper clarifies the agencies of CEE scholars in producing these epistemic landscapes and adds to the analyses that describe the devices developed in peripheries that contribute to the asymmetries between the core and their academic hinterlands. I address the positioning games played by the CEE scholars, the modalities in which their various critical agendas became embedded in global fluxes of ideas, and their important role in co-producing the self-Orientalizing narrative on "socialism" and "post-socialism". Following the debate between Thelen (2011, 2012) and Dunn & Verdery (2011) over postsocialism as a strategic case, my contention is that the various degrees of epistemic enclavisation of the region spring from the various types of global partnerships, which forge critical alliances predicated on attributing history to West and taking out the East from the "normal" flow of history, coevalness being denied. I further develop this point by making appeal to an example, the understanding of socialist urbanization in the 1980s and 1990s. I illustrate why the over-emphasis on differences between socialism and capitalism, and socialism and post-socialism, and the underestimation of similarities, such as accumulation by dispossession and class decomposition, is a wrong analytical option. I plead for a more Gramsian understanding of counter-hegemonic alliances making.

This article argues that location, as both geography and epistemology, can be a place of innovation in the discipline of international relations (IR). Specifically, it suggests that a re-appropriation of IR as a product of a global history in which the Global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, played an important role can help displace the moral and historical centrality of Western theory where it has failed to give credence to 'peripheral' experience and social thought. This belief coincides with a commonsense according to which the production of knowledge is by necessity inseparable from the intellectual conventions, traditions and lineages of the place of production. This means that African universities in particular have the opportunity to generate new perspectives in IR based on the analyses of the historical events that marked the life of the continent. In this manner, thinking and teaching IR in Africa would consist of revisiting the received truths about the evolution of the international order and society by revising their historical underpinnings, where necessary, and by interrogating the 'unit-ideas' that structure disciplinary impulses.

This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual, material and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the multiple dialogues that developed between Classics and colonialism in this period and argues that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at various levels. Most at issue in the contexts where Classics and empire converge is the critical question of ownership: to whom does the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre-eminent ownership of the visual, literary and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of Northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non-European communities and powers – Africa, India, America – commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, this volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of Classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, this volume contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimised and evaluated using classical models.