Since completing Conscripts of Modernity I have turned my attention to the question of Third World sovereignty. It is almost axiomatic to say, today, that the state as the sovereign political actor, the pre-eminent if not exclusive source and adjudicator of political identity and the boundaries of political community, is being challenged, and in the Third World, perhaps decisively challenged. What are the new local and global conditions in which the problem of sovereignty arises in – and for – the Third World? Do we live, as is suggested in some quarters, in a post-sovereign world? Is the idea of an international system of political community in which the state occupies the supreme position of adjudication now eclipsed, obsolete? Does the concept of sovereignty no longer constitute a plausible or credible way of organizing our thinking about power in the contemporary Third World? If indeed the age of sovereignty is now over, what prospect is there for the Third World which emerged geopolitically precisely within the terms of a normative discourse of sovereignty? These are among the central questions with which I am concerned. I also continue to edit the journal Small Axe.

Representative Publications:

Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

“The Permanence of Pluralism” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (eds.) Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000).

“Culture in Political Theory” Political Theory 31(1)(February 2003), 93-116.

“Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern” Small Axe 14(September 2003), 1-22.

“Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sydney Mintz’s Caribbean” History Workshop Journal #58, Autumn 2004 [a special issue on “Caribbean Historiography” edited by Catherine Hall, Bill Schwarz and Mary Chamberlain], 196-215.

Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

“Stuart Hall’s Ethics” Small Axe 17(March 2005), 1-16.

"The 'Social Construction' of Postcolonial Studies" in Ania Loomba et al (eds.) Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

“The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad” in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds.) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).