Postcolonial Derrida
Brings Derrida into conversation with postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia
- Crosses disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, literature and postcolonial theory
- Addresses issues of colonialism, race, migration, diaspora, language, gender, violence and social justice
- Critically revisits some of Derrida’s most famous texts as well as many of his lesser-known ones, opening up new areas of scholarly research and writing on Derrida’s work
- Brings Derrida into conversation with thinkers such as Toni Morrison, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Hélène Cixous, V.S. Naipaul, Nelson Mandela, M.K Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jacques Derrida remains one of the most renowned intellectuals in the areas of philosophy, literary studies and cultural criticism today. Yet the close relationship between Derrida’s philosophical work and postcolonial theory – or their 'affinity,' as he once put it himself – has been largely neglected within contemporary scholarship. This book makes the case that Derrida’s work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Rather than rehearse the biographical details of his personal life, it provides a postcolonial reading of Derrida’s work by bringing him into conversation with a diverse array of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as well as various African American and French feminist thinkers and writers.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Derrida’s Performative Postcoloniality
Part I. A Postcolonial Critique
Chapter 1. Derrida’s Chinese Prejudice
Chapter 2. Derrida’s Last Word
Interlude: The Space Between
Part II. A Postcolonial Reading
Chapter 3. Orality, Literacy, and the Ruses of Logocentrism
Chapter 4. The Ghosts of Slavery, or Derrida Reads Beloved
Chapter 5. The Enigma of L’Arrivant, or Incompossible Literatures of Arrival
Chapter 6. Law, Justice, and the Politics of Undeconstructibility
Works Cited
What does "deconstruction of the West" mean? Elucidating the writings of Ong, Morrison, Naipaul, Mandela, King, Gandhi, and numerous other authors alongside those of Derrida, Sean Meighoo does full justice to the latter's signature move of honoring language's equivocality even as he teases out the ethnocentrism that characteristically shapes western anti-ethnocentric rhetoric. This book is a compelling study of critique and reading by an exceptionally talented scholar.
This is a thoroughgoing analysis of Derrida’s significance for postcolonial thinking, analysing both Derrida’s own engagements with colonialism and his dialogue with a range of other postcolonial writers and thinkers. Meighoo’s study lucidly draws out both the potential and the limits of Derrida’s postcolonial resonance, and in so doing it offers both a proper elucidation of this question and successfully updates our understanding of Derrida’s work as a source of insight into postcolonial literary criticism.
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