Poststructuralism And Postcoloniality

This book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing.Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self.The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.

Offers a lucid introduction to postcolonial studies, one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies.

Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory: A New Cosmopolitanism examines and interrogates recent work on nationality in literal, critical and cultural theory. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Spivak, and Bhabha, it explores how, for these theorists, the concepts of community, the new International, nomadism, deterritorialization, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, the native informant, hybridity and postcolonial agency can provoke a different understanding of national identity.

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 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.

In the heated, often rancorous debates that are the "culture wars", identity politics has been at the centre of both popular and academic discussion. In this series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, R. Radhakrishnan probes the intersections of poststructuralism and postcoloniality that lie at the heart of contemporary controversies over identity difference. This book records Radhakrishnan's attempt to make theory accountable to the world, even while eschewing narrow methodologies or "isms". Rather than embracing one totalizing point of view, these essays move in the spaces "between" to establish a productive dialogue between different disciplines and critical practices - to elaborate what the author calls "common ground". Considering issues of location, language, tradition, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, culture, and history, Radhakrishnan reclaims poststructuralism as a tool for both understanding postcolonial reality and working for social change. Momentous and wise, this book provides thought-provoking considerations of contemporary issues surrounding identity, serving as a map of the postcolonial condition, or, in the author's words, of how to be "both past- and future-oriented within the history of the present".

Postcolonialism offers challenging and provocative ways of thinking about colonial and neocolonial power, about self and other, and about the discourses that perpetuate postcolonial inequality and violence. Much of the seminal work in postcolonialism has been shaped by currents in philosophy, notably Marxism and ethics. "Understanding Postcolonialism" examines the philosophy of postcolonialism in order to reveal the often conflicting systems of thought which underpin it. In so doing, the book presents a reappraisal of the major postcolonial thinkers of the twentieth century.Ranging beyond the narrow selection of theorists to which the field is often restricted, the book explores the work of Fanon and Sartre, Gandhi, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Group, Foucault and Said, Derrida and Bhabha, Khatibi and Glissant, and Spivak, Mbembe and Mudimbe. A clear and accessible introduction to the subject, "Understanding Postcolonialism" reveals how, almost half a century after decolonisation, the complex relation between politics and ethics continues to shape postcolonial thought.

Offering an introduction to the major poststructuralist thinkers, this text shows how Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek expose the depoliticization found in conventional international relations theory. poststructuralists are concerned with the big questions of international politics: it is precisely their work that analyzes the political and explains the processes of depoliticization and technologization.