ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

part I|82 pages

Intellectual history

chapter 2|19 pages

“Le mot du poète, le mot primitif”

Aimé Césaire and Vico’s civic humanism

chapter 3|20 pages

Rabindranath Tagore’s postcolonialism

A vision of decolonization and a modernist idealism

chapter 4|25 pages

Voyages of the self

Muslims as anticolonial subjects in Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophy of history

part II|59 pages

Literary history

chapter 5|18 pages

Lu Xun’s indigenous modernity

Philology and resistance in Old Tales Retold

chapter 6|17 pages

Circuits of influence

Brodsky’s Platonov and the ontology of alienation

chapter 7|22 pages

Aesthetic re-imaginings of Mexican sovereignty

Estridentismo’s anti-imperialist avant-garde

part III|68 pages

Poetic history

chapter 8|12 pages

Vichian language and the Irish Troubles

Brian Friel’s Translations

chapter 9|16 pages

The heavens look down upon us

José Enrique Rodó and the spirit of América

chapter 11|16 pages

Übermenschen and Untermenschen

Global Nietzsche and postcolonial fiction