Читать книгу The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation - Li-Chun Hsiao - Страница 4

This book attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, a number of key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what it conceives of as “the primal scene of postcoloniality”—the Haitian Revolution. Theoretically, it unpacks and critiques the poststructuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Édouard Glissant’s, C. L. R. James’s, and Derek Walcott’s representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses aim to approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal/the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. This book argues that postcolonial intellectuals’ characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesn’t really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustain the “living on” of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while evoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.