Deleuze And The Postcolonial

Bringing together high profile scholars in the fields of Deleuze and postcolonial studies, this book highlights the overlooked connections between two major schools of contemporary criticism and establishes a new critical discourse for postcolonial literature and theory.

This is the first collection of essays bringing together Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory. Bignall and Patton assemble some of the world's leading figures in these fields - including Reda Bensmaia, Timothy Bewes, Rey Chow, Philip Leonard, Nick Nesbitt, John K. Noyes, Patricia Pisters, Marcelo Svirsky and Simon Tormey - to explore rich linkages between two previously unrelated areas of study. They deal with colonial and postcolonial social, cultural and political issues in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Palestine. Topics include colonial government, nation building and ethics in the contemporary context of globalisation and decolonisation; issues relating to resistance, transformation and agency; and questions of 'representation' and discursive power as practiced through postcolonial art, cinema and literature. This book constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. It will be of interest to students in cultural studies, cinema and film studies, languages and literature, political and postcolonial studies, critical theory, social and political philosophy.

Does a philosopher have an 'identity'? What kind of 'identity' is mobilized when the work of a philosopher becomes a major reference for certain schools of thought, as in the case of Gilles Deleuze and postcolonial theory? Have the promoters of a generalized Deleuzeanism taken care their usage of his specialized work does him justice? Few exponents of postcolonial and subaltern theories now dispute the influence that Deleuze's work exerted on the intellectuals and theorists who developed those theories. However, this book contends that postcolonial and subaltern theorists have engaged with Deleuzean thought in ways that have perhaps produced a long series of misunderstandings – for which Deleuze himself is not responsible. By engaging with recent innovations in North African culture and by examining the dissemination of Deleuze's identities across a broad range of postcolonial theory, Réda Bensmaïa shows that the 'encounter' between Deleuze and the postcolonial movement can only be understood through the idea of a 'transcendental' field, in which Deleuze and his postcolonial followers find themselves captured.

Does a philosopher have an `identity'? What kind of `identity' is mobilized when the work of a philosopher becomes a major reference for certain schools of thought, as in the case of Gilles Deleuze and postcolonial theory? Have the promoters of a generalized Deleuzeanism taken care their usage of his specialized work does him justice? Few exponents of postcolonial and subaltern theories now dispute the influence that Deleuze's work exerted on the intellectuals and theorists who developed those theories. However, this book contends that postcolonial and subaltern theorists have engaged with Deleuzean thought in ways that have perhaps produced a long series of misunderstandings - for which Deleuze himself is not responsible. By engaging with recent innovations in North African culture and by examining the dissemination of Deleuze's identities across a broad range of postcolonial theory, Reda Bensmaia shows that the `encounter' between Deleuze and the postcolonial movement can only be understood through the idea of a `transcendental' field, in which Deleuze and his postcolonial followers find themselves captured.

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

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This book presents a pragmatic engagement between the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and various facets of Indian society, culture and art. The universal appeal of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari finds its due place in India with a set of innovative analyses and radical interpretations that reimagine India as a complex multiplicity. The volume brings together scholars from various disciplines and theoretical orientations to explore a wide range of issues in contemporary India, like dalit and caste studies, nationalism, gender question, art and cinema, and so on under the rubric of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This interdisciplinary book will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.

Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is a fresh and needed intervention into the study of postcolonial literature and the postcolonial condition. Deleuze's notion that literature is an enterprise of health, and that great authors consequently are diagnosticians of their culture, can be applied to postcolonial literature. The methodology, however, goes beyond the Deleuzian approach and offers a rich synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari with a range of different frameworks including health and human rights issues, the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, and the quantitative formalism of Moretti. This book majorly seeks to combine the study of postcolonial literature (a field in which Deleuze and Guattari are often used) with social sciences and quantitative methods. The work is genuinely interdisciplinary and breaks new ground both for the study of postcolonial literature and applications of Deleuze and Guattari. It does this while maintaining a focus on 'health', broadly conceived in as an assemblage, in Deleuzian fashion.