Overview

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.

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9781399554817

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Reviews

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.--Jane Hiddleston, Exeter College, University of Oxford

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. -- Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Duke University 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. -- Jane Hiddleston, Exeter College, University of Oxford

Author Information

Sean Meighoo is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and author of The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales (Columbia UP, 2016). His work has also appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Critique, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Humanimalia, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) as well as in the volumes Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Indiana UP, 2001), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia UP, 2015).

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