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 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.
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.
This innovative book provides an incisive critique of well-established positions in postcolonial theory and a dramatic expansion in the range of interpretative tools available. Peter Hallward gives substantial readings of four significant writers whose work invites, to varying degrees, a singular interpretation of postcolonialism: Edouard Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, and Severo Sarduy. Using a singular interpretation of postcolonialism is central to the argument this book makes, and to understanding the postcolonial paradigm.
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.
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.
The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G
Cultural theory has often been criticized for covert Eurocentric and universalist tendencies. Its concepts and ideas are implicitly applicable to everyone, ironing over any individuality or cultural difference. Postcolonial theory has challenged these limitations of cultural theory, and Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography addresses the central challenge posed by its autobiographical turn. Despite the fact that autobiography is frequently dismissed for its Western, masculine bias, David Huddart argues for its continued relevance as a central explanatory category in understanding postcolonial theory and its relation to subjectivity. Focusing on the influence of post-structuralist theory on postcolonial theory and vice versa, this study suggests that autobiography constitutes a general philosophical resistance to universal concepts and theories. Offering a fresh perspective on familiar critical figures like Edward W. Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, by putting them in the context of readings of the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, this book relates the theory of autobiography to expressions of new universalisms that, together with postcolonial theory, rethink and extend norms of experience, investigation, and knowledge.
This book analyses the resolution of the psychic problem of diasporic existence from a postcolonial feminist perspective, by inscribing and defining the meaning of “virtual diaspora” through the lens of the East/India and the West. It explores the situation that arises when one leaves one’s country and becomes an emigrant/immigrant, which often causes pain both in the departure from one’s motherland and in the adaptation to a new environment. The book employs the theory of Deleuze and Guattari and explores the interstices of real and virtual diaspora and the aftermath of diaspora as a mental journey. Adding a new interpretation of transcendence, taken from the Indian perspective, the book examines the Deleuze’s theory of immanence and transcendence and the two major concepts of “becoming” and “real/virtual.” The book also examines the works of Helene Cixous, J.M. Coetzee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kunal Basu, and Tagore in light of the concept of virtual diaspora and from a postcolonial feminist angle. It does so by raising the following questions: When one has emigrated to a different country, can one conceive of that existence as real or virtual or both? Do emigrants or diasporic individuals live a life of both real and virtual diaspora? This comes from the idea that both real and virtual diaspora, under different paradigms, may be related to the power struggle and master-slave dialectic that affects all of humanity. A valuable addition to the study of postcolonial literature, the book will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of diaspora studies, postcolonial feminist theory, postcolonial literature, feminist philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian Studies.