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This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

It is a curious and little-known fact that the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe was in the Middle East. For two long decades, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the uncontested champion of the Arab intelligentsia. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy nourished the post-colonial Arab quest for a new Arab subjectivity, or, as they called it, a “New Arab Man.” Sartre’s political writing manifested itself in unflinching support for the cause of Third Worldism, thus framing the liberationist struggle against neo-colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. His influence on Arab thought and action and his two-way relationship with an important circle of Arab thinkers was therefore very significant. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, No Exit reconstructs the forgotten global milieu of the post-colonial Arab generation. Drawing extensively on new Arabic and Hebrew archival sources, No Exit examines the multiple cultural functions of Arab existentialism and, especially, the rise and fall of the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Arab intellectuals due to Sartre’s decision to side with Israel on the eve of the 1967 war.