Edge of Empire

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.

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