Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of LiberationThis far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. |
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 17 |
Section 3 | 20 |
Section 4 | 34 |
Section 5 | 61 |
Section 6 | 80 |
Section 7 | 99 |
Section 8 | 115 |
Section 14 | 208 |
Section 15 | 235 |
Section 16 | 249 |
Section 17 | 269 |
Section 18 | 273 |
Section 19 | 302 |
Section 20 | 307 |
Section 21 | 329 |
Section 9 | 125 |
Section 10 | 149 |
Section 11 | 179 |
Section 12 | 181 |
Section 13 | 191 |
Section 22 | 331 |
Section 23 | 349 |
Section 24 | 354 |
Section 25 | 381 |
Other editions - View all
Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial ... Pheng Cheah Limited preview - 2003 |
Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial ... Pheng Cheah Limited preview - 2003 |
Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial ... Pheng Cheah No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
References to this book
Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts Bill Ashcroft,Gareth Griffiths,Helen Tiffin No preview available - 2007 |