Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation

Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation
Pheng Cheah | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | Columbia University Press | 432 | Asian

-- John Kraniauskas, Radical Philosophy

Reviews
Cheah (Univ. of California, Berkeley) attempts to assimilate the insight of several movements within contemporary scholarship, including cultural studies and deconstructionism, in order to articulate a defense of a properly defined "postcolonial" nationalism. The book offers a coherent, albeit questionable, argument against inherited theories of "organismic vitalism" and a justification for a new nationalism based on indigenous cultural sources; and it develops a political theory of freedom predicated on the author's definition of the concept. The book is divided into two parts. The first half serves as a critique of freedom as a faulty organic construct in the thought of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, and socialist political philosophy. The second half is a search for thinkers who integrate their own cultural milieu into the context of nationalism, utilizing figures from Southeast Asia (Pramoedya) and Kenya (Ngugi). The work is heavily influenced by the writings of Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, and evinces the literary idiom of postmodernism. The author's reluctance to ponder the potential contribution of capitalism and less radically egalitarian measures to achieve his ends presents a major obstacle to his enterprise. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate and research collections.



H. Lee Cheek, Jr., Ph.D.

Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science

Athens State University

www.drleecheek.com

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