Ex Plus Ultra

Ex Plus Ultra is a new international postgraduate journal of colonial and imperial history and post colonial theory.

The name Ex Plus Ultra is a play on the old Roman warning non plus ultra meaning ‘nothing further beyond’ found by sailors and navigators at the borders of empire. The warning defines the geographical limits of empire and marks the ‘beyond’ as nothingness. It labels that which empire does not know and that where empire does not go as a non-place and non-time. There is nothing further beyond.

Here is fiction announcing itself as fact; temptation packaged as prohibition; polemic written as edict. Ex Plus Ultra meaning ‘out from further beyond’, although nonsense Latin, is a response and rejoinder to non plus ultra.

Ex Plus Ultra is a journal that encourages work that goes beyond merely unearthing ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ worlds and which seeks to contest those very categories.

There was no cataclysmic rupture heralding the arrival of the ‘post-colonial’ nor was the advent of colonialism defined, uncontested or in some cases even as significant for the colonised as has previously been assumed. The very categories of ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial,’ insofar as they subscribe to linear, progressive time, are themselves imperial legacies.

This is a journal committed to thinking of new ways to configure the broad, contradictory and diffuse processes of imperialism. Imperialism should not just refer to British imperialism or its privileged epistemic schemes. Imperialism is less to do with temporality (post or not post) as it is to do with relationships between empires, within empires and the constitution of colonised and colonising subjects.