Michael SYROTINSKI, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial : At the Limits of Theory

Michael SYROTINSKI, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial : At the Limits of Theory, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press (Postcolonialism across the Disciplines), 2007, 288 p.
ISBN 9781846310560


RÉSUMÉ

Postcolonial studies, and the rich body of theory that it applies in its analyses, has transformed and unsettled the ways in which, across a whole range of disciplines, we think about notions such as subjectivity, national identity, globalization, history, language, literature or international politics. Until recently, the emphasis of the groundbreaking work being carried out in these areas has been almost exclusively within an Anglophone context, but increasingly the focus of postcolonial studies is shifting to a more comparative approach. One of the most intriguing developments in this shift of emphasis has been within the Francophone world, given that a number of genealogical lines of influence are now being drawn connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory - Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak - to an earlier generation of French (predominantly ‘poststructuralist’) theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida, and the status of deconstruction generally, has been acknowledged, but has not until now been adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski teases out the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a ‘deconstructive postcolonialism’, and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.