Edge of empire

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Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in four contemporary first world cities: two sites in London and two sites in the Australian cities of 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'. The book is distinctive in that it takes theories of colonialism and postcolonialism to the space of the city - it gives 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. The global reach of the book - its focus of two poles of one trajectory of British imperialism - provides a global assemblage which form a basis for understanding the unruly fortunes of imperialism over space and time. This is not simply a material geography of territory, it is also an imaginative geography of desire and memory.