Spectral nationality : passages of freedom from Kant to postcolonial literatures of liberation / / Pheng Cheah

• Autore: Cheah Pheng
• Pubblicazione: New York : , : Columbia University Press, , 2003; ©2003
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xvi, 408 pages)
• Disciplina: 325/.3/01
• Soggetto topico: Postcolonialism; Decolonization; Nationalism; State, The; National characteristics; Nation-state; Culture; Liberty; Internationalism; Philosophy, German - 18th century; Philosophy, German - 19th century
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- LIST OF SELECTED WORKS CITED AND ABBREVIATIONS -- Introduction. The Death of the Nation? -- PART I. CULTURE AS FREEDOM: TERRITORIALIZATIONS AND DETERRITORIALIZATIONS -- 1. The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the Social and Political Body -- 2. Kant's Cosmopolitanism and the Technic of Nature -- 3. Incarnations of the Ideal: Nation and State in Fichte and Hegel -- 4. Revolutions That Take Place in the Head: Marx and the National Question in Socialist Decolonization -- PART II. SURVIVING (POSTCOLONIALITY) -- 5. Novel Nation: The Bildung of the Postcolonial Nation as Sociological Organism -- 6. The Haunting of the People: The Spectral Public Sphere in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet -- 7. Afterlives: The Mutual Haunting of the State and Nation -- 8. The Neocolonial State and Other Prostheses of the Postcolonial National Body: Ngūgī wa Thiong'o's Project of Revolutionary National Culture -- Epilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization
• Sommario/riassunto: This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.
• Titolo autorizzato: Spectral nationality
• ISBN: 1-283-00835-1; 9786613008350; 0-231-50360-1
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910817371403321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II