Postcolonial approaches to understanding economies are of increasing academic and political significance as questions about the nature of globalisation, transnational flows of capital and workers and the making and re-making of territorial borders assume centre stage in debates about contemporary economies and policy. Despite the growing academic and political urgency in understanding how 'other' cultures encounter 'the west', economics-oriented approaches within social sciences (e.g. Development Economics, Economic Geography and the discipline of Economics itself) have been slow to engage with the ideas and challenges posed by postcolonial critiques. In turn, postcolonial approaches have been criticised for their simplistic treatment of 'the economic' and for not engaging with existing economic analyses of poverty and wealth creation. This book aims to break new ground in providing a space for nascent debates about postcolonialism and its treatment of 'the economic' and brings together scholars in a range of disciplines, including Geography, Economics, Development Studies, History, and Women's Studies.
Introduction: Postcolonial Economic Lives - The Editors Section 1: Theorising the economic 1. Can Political Economy be Postcolonial? A Note - Dipesh Chakrabarty 2. Postcolonial Theory and Economics: Orthodox and Heterodox - Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin 3. Acts of theory and violence : Can the worlds of economic geographies be left in tact? - Roger Lee 4. Economic Geographies as Situated Knowledges - Wendy Larner Section 2: Postcolonial understandings of the economic 5. Cultural Econo-Mixes of the Bazaar - Nitasha Kaul, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London 6. Bridging the Legal Abyss: Hawala and the Waqf? - Hilary Lim 7. Postcolonial geographies of Latin American migration to London: towards a materialist perspective - Cathy McIlwaine Section 3: Postcolonial economies: policy and practice 8. Development and Postcolonial Takes on Biopolitics and Economy - Christine Sylvester 9. Postcolonial economies of development volunteering - Pat Noxolo Conclusion - The Editors
