Africa Beyond The Post Colonial

The poor economic performance of some African countries since independence has been a major concern to both African leaders and policy makers. This volume, which draws together contributions from academics based in Africa and its diaspora, situates the continent within its historic and socio-political background: from the 1960s, the decade of independence, through to its development outlook as the new millennium unfolds. It examines a broad range of contemporary issues -- from development and culture to linguistics and is unique in identifying and examining issues that are common both to Africa and the diaspora.

The contributors not only study state breakdown but compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

Out of Africa rethinks the relationship between post-structuralism and postcolonialism to deepen our understanding of the origins of social knowledge. It explores the intricate subjectivities, intellectual currents and cultural memories that social theorists carry within them. Out of Africa is no conventional paean to syncretism or hybridity. In it, the major French thinkers on colonialism emerge not merely as Europeans with an Algerian connection, but as creative minds crucially shaped by Maghreb and Africa. Ahluwalia defies the intellectual culture that has to disown the wider cultural and psychological repertoire beyond the reach of conventional political sociology of knowledge. This important and provocative book brings together two familiar themes, first, that the war for Algerian independence had a profound impact on French culture, and on French theory in particular, and second, that post-colonialism is basically a child of post-structuralism and post-modernism. In his powerful reconsideration of the first theme, Ahluwalia draws on Edward Said's insights to frame a reworking of the second, revealing that post-structuralism itself, with its figures of ambivalence, deconstruction, mimicry, irony, etc., can be seen as a post-colonial response to the complexity of the Franco-Maghrebian intersection that fails to properly acknowledge the colonial experience. This book could come to be regarded as the first draft of a new way of looking at postmodernism. To excavate a repressed colonial question,' tying together in philosophical kinship the likes of Althusser, Sartre, Cixous, Camus, Lyotard, Foucault, Fanon, Derrida, and Bourdieu, is to excavate more than postmodernism's roots, it is to reveal the centrality of colonialism to some of the most exciting trends within contemporary French philosophical thought. Through interesting vignettes of lives and travels, through theoretical argument and combative debate, Ahluwalia engages with those in-between spaces, opened up by dislocation and a connection to the Algerian `colonial question.' He demonstrates how this encounter profoundly marked the thoughts and words of these important thinkers and, in so doing, he has produced a work of scholarship that is as novel as it is exciting.

This groundbreaking book makes sense of the complexities and dynamics of post-colonial politics, illustrating how post-colonial theory has marginalised a huge part of its constituency, namely Africa. Politics and Post-Colonial Theory traces how African identity has been constituted and reconstituted by examining issues such as: * negritude * the rise of nationalism * decolonisation. The book also questions how helpful post-colonial analysis can be in understanding the complexities which define institutions including: * the nation-state * civil society * human rights * citizenship. Politics and Post-colonial Theory bravely breaks down disciplinary boundaries. Its radical vision will be essential reading for all those engaged in Politics, post-colonial studies and African studies.

This interdisciplinary volume attempts to expand the temporal and geographic agenda of postcolonial studies.

At the heart of this book is the argument that the fact that so many post-structuralist French intellectuals have a strong ‘colonial’ connection, usually with Algeria, cannot be a coincidence. The ‘biographical’ fact that so many French intellectuals were born in or otherwise connected with French Algeria has often been noted, but it has never been theorised. Ahluwalia makes a convincing case that post-structuralism in fact has colonial and postcolonial roots. This is an important argument, and one that ‘connects’ two theoretical currents that continue to be of great interest, post-structuralism and postcolonialism. The re-reading of what is now familiar material against the background of de-colonial struggles demonstrates the extent to which it is this new condition that prompted theory to question long-held assumptions inscribed in the European colonial enterprise. The wide-ranging discussion, ranging across authors as different as Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, Althusser, Cixous, Bourdieu and Lyotard, enables the reader to make connections that have remained unnoticed or been neglected. It also brings back into view a history of struggles, both political and theoretical, that has shaped the landscape of critique in the social sciences and humanities. This clear and lucid discussion of important and often difficult thinkers will be widely read and widely debated by students and academics alike.

With the backdrop of new global powers, this volume interrogates the state of writing in English. Strongly interdisciplinary, it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of postcolonial literary theory. An insistence on fieldwork and linguistics makes this book scene-changing in its approach to understanding and reading emerging literature in English.

Opposing the orthodoxies of establishment postcolonialism, Beyond Postcolonial Theory posits acts of resistance and subversion by people of color as central to the unfolding dialogue with Western hegemony. The testimonies and signifying practices of Rigoberta Menchu, C.L.R. James, various "minority" writers in the United States, and intellectuals from Africa, Latin America, and Asia are counterposed against the dogmas of contingency, borderland nomadism, panethnicity, and the ideology of identity politics and transcultural postmodern pastiche. Reappropriating ideas from Gramsci, Bakhtin, Althusser, Freire, and others in the radical democratic tradition, San Juan deploys them to recover the memory of national liberation struggles (Fanon, Cabral, Che Guevara) on the face of the triumphal march of globalized capitalism.