Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism’s relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought—hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism.
The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking—as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
1. After Colonialism
2. Thinking Otherwise: A Brief Intellectual History
3. Postcolonialism and the New Humanities
4. Edward Said and His Critics
5. Postcolonialism and Feminism
6. Imagining Community: The Question of Nationalism
7. One World: The Vision of Postnationalism
8. Postcolonial Literatures
9. The Limits of Postcolonial Theory
Epilogue: If This Were a Manifesto for Postcolonial Thinking
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Leela Gandhi is John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. She is author of
Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006) and
The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955 (2014).
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