History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature (Routledge Research on Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms)

This book examines anti-imperialist thought in European philosophy. It features an international group of both emerging and established scholars who directly respond to Timothy Brennan’s far-reaching call to rethink intellectual histories, literary histories, and the reading habits of postcolonialism, in relation to the anti-imperialist tradition of critique. Each contributor rethinks postcolonial and world literature, Continental thought, and intellectual history in relation to anti-imperialist histories and traditions of critique, through geographically diverse analysis. This book provides a forum for the next generation of scholars to draw on and engage with the marginal yet influential work of the first generation of dissidents within postcolonial studies. It will appeal to researchers and students in the field of postcolonial studies, world literature, geography, and Continental thought. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Introduction The chapters Notes Works cited PART I: Intellectual history Chapter 1: World literature, the Geist, and the East, 1907–1942 I II Notes Works cited Chapter 2: “Le mot du poète, le mot primitif”: Aimé Césaire and Vico’s civic humanism Reading Vico Culture in the French imperial nation-state Situating Aimé Césaire Conclusion: poetry and knowledge Notes Works cited Chapter 3: Rabindranath Tagore’s postcolonialism: a vision of decolonization and a modernist idealism Notes Works cited Chapter 4: Voyages of the self: Muslims as anticolonial subjects in Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophy of history Hegel, British idealism, and Iqbal’s concept of self Iqbal in Britain after the Second Boer War Iqbal, Nietzsche, and the Russian Revolution Muslim modernity, plebeian poetics, and orature Notes Works cited PART II: Literary history Chapter 5: Lu Xun’s indigenous modernity: philology and resistance in Old Tales Retold Philologists for the future Peripheral imperialisms Conflicts over translation Old Tales Retold, or how one philologizes with a hammer Conclusion Notes Works cited Chapter 6: Circuits of influence: Brodsky’s Platonov and the ontology of alienation Two Platonovs A challenge Victims of language The turn The proletarian writer in the house of being First political corollary: fallen nature Second political corollary: empty transcendence Lessons in modernism Notes Works cited Chapter 7: Aesthetic re-imaginings of Mexican sovereignty: Estridentismo’s anti-imperialist avant-garde Anti-imperialist aesthetics History as farce: Panchito Chapopote Avant-garde commitment: Horizonte Notes Works cited PART III: Poetic history Chapter 8: Vichian language and the Irish Troubles: Brian Friel’s Translations I II III Notes Works cited Chapter 9: The heavens look down upon us: José Enrique Rodó and the spirit of América Postcolonial America poised for a new form of conquest Rodó’s remedies: spirit The state A call to cosmopolitanize Ariel in the twenty-first century Notes Works cited Chapter 10: Historicizing language and temporality in José María Arguedas’ Deep Rivers Representing Quechua language as stasis El patio interior: spatiality ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ The Freudian psyche Against universalizing notions of language and psyche in postcolonial thought The zumbayllu: a symbol of harmony or fragmentation? The zumbayllu as mythic/ritual object What kind of psyche, what kind of collective? Conclusion Notes Works cited Chapter 11: Übermenschen and Untermenschen: global Nietzsche and postcolonial fiction Astrologers of revolution Revolution and ressentiment Black Power Impersonating Nietzsche Notes Works cited Afterword Works cited Acknowledgements Index "This book examines anti-imperialist thought in European philosophy. It features an international group of both emerging and established scholars who directly respond to Timothy Brennan's far-reaching call to rethink intellectual histories, literary histories, and the reading habits of postcolonialism, in relation to anti-imperialist tradition of critique. This book offers a long overdue engagement with the theoretical and literary contributions of Timothy Brennan in post-colonial studies, deepening our understanding of Brennan's insights in literary traditions and ecologies. Each contributor rethinks postcolonial and world literature, Continental thought, and intellectual history in relation to anti-imperialist histories and traditions of critique, through geographically diverse analysis. This book provides a forum for the next generation of scholars to draw on and engage with the marginal yet influential work of the first generation of dissidents within postcolonial studies. It will appeal to researchers and students in the field of postcolonial studies, world literature, and Continental Thought" .. This book examines the imprint of anti-imperialist thought upon European philosophy. It features an international group of both emerging and established scholars who directly respond to Timothy Brennan’s far-reaching call to rethink intellectual histories, literary histories, and the reading habits of postcolonialism in relation to anti-imperialist tradition of critique.