Contested Communities

This interdisciplinary volume critically investigates the value and topicality of the concept of community in postcolonial language situations as well as in postcolonial texts and media. Both in actual and in imagined communities, membership is constructed on an assumption of shared features - be it common values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, professional group or joint interests and practices. But how is membership in such communities achieved, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms of community have developed in the wake of globalisation, translocation and digital media communication? Eighteen contributions by scholars in linguistics, literary and cultural studies explore the role of communication, narratives, memory and trauma in processes of belonging or unbelonging in postcolonial contexts.