Posts and Pasts

A Theory of Postcolonialism

Alfred J. Lopez

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780791449943, 9780791449936
• eBook ISBN: 9780791490525
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

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.

Table of contents

• Posts and Pasts
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: "The Other! The Other!": Conrad, Wilson Harris, and the Postcolonial "Threshold of Capacity"
• Chapter Two: Specters of the Nation: Resistance, Criollismo, and the Ambivalence of the "Neo-"
• Chapter Three: Whiteness and the Colonial Unconscious
• Chapter Four: "Toward a New Humanism....": Fanon, Hegel, and the Crisis of Mastery
• Chapter Five: Reason, "The Nature," and Desire: A Theory of "Magical Realism"
• Conclusion: Magic, "Realism," and the "Post-"
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index