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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Sartre's writing on colonialism and anti-colonial critique is diverse, protean and frequently self-contradictory, and for this reason has generated a good deal of controversy. His celebrated and notorious 'Orphée noir', written as the preface to Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, has been read as both veneration and critique of the negritude movement, and he has been named both spokesman and traitor of anti-colonial resistance in Africa. Explicating the dynamics of an assertion of black (...) identity in contradistinction to colonial influence, Sartre introduced revolutionary black poetry to the European audience it was directed against, only to be condemned by some of the other negritude thinkers, such as Alioune Diop, as eurocentric and blinded by his own position as a metropolitan, and therefore colonial, intellectual. The version of negritude promoted in 'Orphée noir' was criticised by such thinkers for being too rigid and essentialist, yet conversely, Fanon objected that Sartre's stress on the movement as transitory and provisional meant that was insufficiently immersed in 'authentic black experience'. In addition, Sartre's more journalistic writing, which called for the withdrawal of the French presence in Algeria during the war of independence, aptly served to draw attention to dissension about the Algerian question within French society, but, as Robert Young points out, the Marxist approach underpinning many of these pieces has also been seen as universalising. (shrink)

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the (...) face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression. (shrink)

This article explores the changing position of Lyotard's writing on Algeria within his corpus. The essays gathered together in La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits 1956–63, and published much later in 1989, are certainly among his most overtly politically engaged. These pieces track the progress of the War of Independence from the early signs of unrest in 1952 to what Lyotard perceives as the divisive effects of FLN ideology in the aftermath of independence, and the collection as a whole underlines not (...) only the conflict between coloniser and colonised but also that between the rural masses and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to Algerian independence at the time of writing, Lyotard later lamented the failings of these essays. He also alters his stance on his own use of Marxism, and condemns his attempts to offer a Marxist revolutionary critique. He then chose to republish the work in 1989, yet this volte-face testifies to the author's ongoing ambivalence towards his own writing on decolonization. At one moment, Lyotard mocks and undermines his own efforts to understand and systematize the mechanics of the liberation movement. Yet he then goes on to suggest that the Algerian conflict exemplifies his later concept of the ‘differend’. This unease both within and towards the volume La Guerre des Algériens will be the focus of this article. The essays’ eclecticism, and Lyotard's own altering response to them, can be understood as an early testimony to an increasing scepticism towards Marxism in French critical thought, and, at the same time, towards what Lyotard conceived as dogmatic ‘theory’, in the context of decolonization in Algeria. (shrink)

This article examines both the persistence and the deconstruction of authenticity in francophone modernist and postmodernist representations of black women. The discussion takes as a starting point...