CM20: PostWest

Shanon Shah suggests PostWest is a speculative concept that obscures as much as it explains, Jasper M Trautsch explores the concept of the ‘West’, Roger van Zwanenberg explains how the West became a dominant world power, Gordon Blaine Steffey suffers from PostWest anxieties, Amrita Ghosh goes in search of the ‘East’, Shiv Visvanathan imagines India’s rise to a second rate power, Julia Sveshnikova comes to terms with Russia’s identity crisis, Jalal Afhim marvels at China’s balancing act, Boyd Tonkin is not impressed by the narratives of rise and decline, Carool Kersten analyses the ‘post-everything’ thought of the American-Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi, Andrew Brown insists that liberal democracy is a (partial) fraud, Giles Goddard thinks it is the beginning of the end of capitalism, Avaes Mohammad dissects ‘the clash of civilisations’, Scott Jordan argues the West as the valiant cowboy will not ride into the sunset, Hassan Mahamdallie needs radical hope to survive a PostWest world, and Jim Dator declares ‘the West is Dead’ – get over it!

Also in this issue: Bina Shah on Thar women and Pakistani art, Tamim Sadikali on Britain through Muslim eyes, Ana Maria Pacheco’s ‘Dark Events’, poems by Fawda Suleiman and Amir Darwish, a short story by Imaan Irfan, and Samia Rahman’s list of top ten PostWest films.