Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities is a ground-breaking work that revaluates the cultural and political understandings of the world today from the perspective of the south. Largely located in the Mediterranean, and in understandings of a ‘southern question’ that extends beyond local and national confines, the arguments and perspectives proposed seek to explore the historical formation and political configurations of a multiple modernity. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary lines of thought developed within cultural and postcolonial studies, the work develops a concept of heritage beyond the concerns and obsessions of the Anglo-American world. It offers a counter-hegemony construction of the figure of the migrant and ‘other’ as a disruptive force in the construction of the idea of the West. It proposes a rethinking of the geo-political economies of knowledge and power, lived and viewed from elsewhere. This accessibility written book should be of interest to anyone interested in the construction of modernity and the future of postcolonial studies.

"Iain Chambers shows the impossibility of making the world transparent, fully understandable and unilaterally controllable, that is, the morbid dream Western reason has cultivated during the last five centuries." - Cultural Sociology

"Chambers does a powerful job at exposing the ways in which what I call subliminal indebtedness is constantly disowned by the political denial enforced by Occidental colonialism. … Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities has to be embraced as an opportunity for a deconstructing act of — individual and collective — introspection. To the extent that the book exhorts us to think of colonialism as an historical process that is actively (re)producing the cultural and political order that best suits its perpetuation … Lastly, one of the most laudable aspects of Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities is its virtuosity… ." - Public Seminar

"If one should summarise Chambers’ study in one sentence, one could say that it endeavours to postcolonially deconstruct the long five centuries of modern/colonial epistemology, to use the vocabulary of the decolonial thinking, with the obstinate interruptions of the critical waves of the southern seas and of the arts." - De Genere

"It is a rare experience entering the first page of an academic book and leaving its last page with the feeling that you were reading a novel. Iain Chambers’ volume, in fact, is a journey suspended between the multiple fault-lines that separate, therefore connect, the innumerable tensions, unexpected vertigos and whispering silences that shape and deform the living tissue of critical thinking, cultural sociology and postcolonial theory." - Cultural Sociology

"As Chambers insists, this is not a scholarly paper or monograph, but essayistic prose that interrupts and fractures illusions of “discursive rationality” (p.13). Indeed, the book reads like an extended meditation on the making and (potential) unmaking of Euro-American dominated modernity. It maps pulse points of postcolonial studies, synthesises and pushes further different strands of postcolonial argument, and offers a rich resource of thought and method. It throws up questions and suggests avenues for investigation, rather than giving definite or final answers." - Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography