In the twenty-first century, the terms "representation" and "identity" seem to have gone out of fashion. The essays collected here, however, seek to demonstrate the extent to which they continue to matter in the social, political and cultural struggles waged by marginalized communities across our postcolonial and globalizing world. The volume starts by offering contingent readings of prominent identity-related concepts - hybridity, insularity, the west, ubuntu, and orientalism - which ask how these concepts translate into practical, situated ways of grappling with the legacies of colonialism....