The Postcolonial Unconscious

by Neil Lazarus

• ISBN13: 9780521186261
• ISBN10: 0521186269
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Postcolonial Unconscious is a major attempt to reconstruct the whole field of postcolonial studies. In this magisterial and, at times, polemical study, Neil Lazarus argues that the key critical concepts that form the very foundation of the field need to be re-assessed and questioned. Drawing on a vast range of literary sources, Lazarus investigates works and authors from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Arab world, South, Southeast and East Asia, to reconsider them from a postcolonial perspective. Alongside this, he offers bold new readings of some of the most influential figures in the field: Fredric Jameson, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. A tour de force of postcolonial studies, this book will set the agenda for the future, probing how the field has come to develop in the directions it has and why and how it can grow further.

Author Biography

Neil Lazarus is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has published extensively in postcolonial studies and critical social and cultural theory. Previous books include Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (1990) and Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004) and co-editor of Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. viii
Introduction: The political unconscious of postcolonial studies	p. 1
The politics of postcolonial modernism	p. 21
on Third-World Literature': a defence	p. 89
'A figure glimpsed in a rear-view mirror': the question of representation in 'postcolonial' fiction	p. 114
after the postcolonial prerogative'	p. 161
The battle over Edward Said	p. 183
Notes	p. 204
Works cited	p. 260
Index	p. 290
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