Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (Explorations Postcolon Studies) - Softcover

López, Alfred J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791449947 ISBN 13: 9780791449943

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2001

Synopsis

Deconstructs the field of postcolonial studies.

In Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism, Alfred J. Lopez argues for a formulation of postcolonial studies which diverges in three significant ways from current academic and institutional practices: 1) the postcolonial as diasporic, constituted by a series of dispersed and irregular criticisms not at all containable within a single set of parameters, whether historical, geographical, or socioeconomic; 2) the postcolonial as a distinct ontological moment in the life of a nation or people, in which it conceives itself as doubly haunted―on the one hand by the "memory in advance" of a collective national future and on the other by its colonial past; and 3) the postcolonial as a distinct phenomenological moment, a radical break in the history of a relation between lords and bonds-women and -men.

Going further than previous studies to address the postcolonial as a diasporic body of texts and discourses, it looks at a remarkable variety of writers-Joseph Conrad, Wilson Harris, Jose Marti, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Franz Fanon, Gabriel Marcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie.

About this title

About the Author

Alfred J. Lopez is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University.

From the Back Cover

Argues for a formulation of postcolonial studies which diverges in three significant ways from current academic and institutional practices: 1) the postcolonial as diasporic, constituted by a series of dispersed and irregular criticisms not at all containable within a single set of parameters, whether historical, geographical, or socioeconomic; 2) the postcolonial as a distinct ontological moment in the life of a nation or people, in which it conceives itself as doubly haunted--on the one hand by the "memory in advance" of a collective national future and on the other by its colonial past; and 3) the postcolonial as a distinct phenomenological moment, a radical break in the history of a relation between lords and bonds-women and -men.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791449947
• ISBN 13: 9780791449943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288