Postcolonial Derrida

Jacques Derrida remains one of the most renowned intellectuals in the areas of philosophy, literary studies, and cultural criticism today. Yet the close relationship between Derrida’s philosophical work and postcolonial theory or their ‘affinity,’ as he once put it himself has been largely neglected within contemporary scholarship. This book makes the case that Derrida’s work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration, and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Rather than rehearse the biographical details of his personal life, it provides a postcolonial reading of Derrida’s work by bringing him into conversation with a diverse array of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, as well as various African American and French feminist thinkers and writers.

Author Biography

Sean Meighoo is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and author of The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales (Columbia UP, 2016). His work has also appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Critique, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Humanimalia, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) as well as in the volumes Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Indiana UP, 2001), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia UP, 2015).