Introduction: Foreign fields that will be forever England -- The politics of postimperial melancholia and rural heritage in the 1980s: W.G. Sebald's The rings of Saturn -- Rural routes of empire, colonial nostalgia and the thatcher years: V.S. Naipaul's The enigma of arrival -- Contemporary Black Britain and the English countryside: David Dabydeen's Disappearance and Caryl Phillips's A distant shore -- Towards a provincial cosmopolitanism: Amitava Kumar's Bombay London New York -- A distinctly uncosmopolitan present: the postcolonial rural in Amitav Ghosh's The hungry tide and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary maps -- Historicising neocolonial globalisation and political revolution: Jamaica Kincaid's A small place -- Epilogue: Local futures, global fissures.
