Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism

by Alfred J. López

In Posts and 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 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.

274 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Born in New York City to Cuban parents and raised in Miami, Alfred J. López is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. López was the founding editor of The Global South, a leading globalization studies journal, and his work has also appeared in top journals such as American Literature, Comparative Literature, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among many others.