The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation. Li-Chun Hsiao

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The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation - Li-Chun Hsiao

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      ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

      Table of Contents

       Abstract

       Introduction

       Chapter 1 The Postcolonial Paradigm/Paradox: Theorizing between the Universal and the Particular

       Chapter 2 Toussaint, Mimicry, and the Primal Scene of Postcoloniality

       Chapter 3 In the Name of the Father: Representing Postcolonial Nationalisms

       Chapter 4 Toussaint, Globalization, and the Postcolonial Spectacle

       Epilogue

       About the author

       Bibliography

      This book attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, a number of key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what it conceives of as “the primal scene of postcoloniality”—the Haitian Revolution. Theoretically, it unpacks and critiques the poststructuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Édouard Glissant’s, C. L. R. James’s, and Derek Walcott’s representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses aim to approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal/the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. This book argues that postcolonial intellectuals’ characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesn’t really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustain the “living on” of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while evoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

      The Postcolonial Problematic

      Who is Toussaint?

      This, no doubt, is meant to be more of a rhetorical question. Rather than supplying a biographical account or historical documentation, I’d draw attention to the historical disjunction or discontinuities in historiography through which Toussaint is largely forgotten in the Western memory of colonial slavery—a forgetfulness that is the background against which this question, in its literal sense, has to be asked, especially for those stumbling into the field of postcolonialism: no, really . . . who is Toussaint?

      Maybe it would be easier to reawaken the memory of Toussaint by citing a work of canonical Western literature which treats Toussaint as its subject matter. One such rare case can be found in William Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”:

      Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

      Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

      Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

      Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—

      O miserable chieftain! Yet die not; do thou

      Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

      Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

      Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

      Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

      There is not a breathing of the common wind

      That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

      Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

      And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. (Poems 577)

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