Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism

This book complements and balances the attention given by postcolonial theory to the revitalisation and recognition of the agency of colonised peoples. It offers new conceptual scaffolding to those who have inherited the legacy of colonial privilege, and who now seek to responsibly transform this historical injustice. Simone Bignall attends to a minor tradition within Western philosophy including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, to argue that a non-imperial concept of social and political agency and a postcolonial philosophy of material transformation are embedded within aspects of poststructuralist social philosophy.Postcolonial Agency provides readers with a significantly new understanding of the processes of social transformation faced by many societies as they struggle with the aftermath of empire. It does so by engaging readers with respect to their affective communities and their concrete ethics of relationship, providing them with a valuable new way of conceptualising practices of postcolonial sociability. It is of interest to students in political and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, critical theory and Continental philosophy.Contributing to contemporary philosophical inquiry about desire, power and transformative agency, Postcolonial Agency constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. Beginning with a critical treatment of the dialectical notions that dominate much postcolonial theory, Bignall then outlines a constructive and transformative theory of practice by drawing from Foucault and Deleuze. The resulting rapprochement between poststructuralism and postcolonialism coincidentally provides a fresh perspective on the political potential of Deleuzian thought.