Radical revisions: Barbara Harlow and criticism beyond Partition

This article argues that Barbara Harlow revised her critical commitments in the early 1990s as she sought to intervene at that political conjuncture. While retaining her established engagement with cultural production documenting the persistence of imperial violence and resistances to it, Harlow’s position pivoted to meet the changing global conditions, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first US war in Iraq (Desert Storm), the Oslo Accords, the end of apartheid and negotiations in the North of Ireland and Central America. These major events, which came to be associated with the New World Order, signalled the eclipsing of the revolutionary modes of resistance that appeared in the 1960s and produced not only new cultural responses to neo-imperialism, but also a distinct critical perspective, which Harlow elaborated as she addressed the contextual constraints of that political conjuncture