ABSTRACT
The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre's militancy is underpinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention, but their first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the others intractability that initially provides the basis for political liberation. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant's evolving trajectory, and in Said's movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost political, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction.
