Overview

Li-Chun Hsiao attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, several key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what he conceives as ""the primal scene of postcoloniality""-the Haitian Revolution. He unpacks and critiques the post-structuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Edouard Glissant's, C. L. R. James's, and Derek Walcott's representations of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal and the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. Hsiao 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 sustains 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 invoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

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9783838215242

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Dr. Li-Chun Hsiao studied Comparative Literature at Buffalo State (University of New York), specializing in Postcolonial Studies, Literary and Cultural Theories, and Caribbean Literatures. Having taught at National Chiao Tung University and National Taiwan University, Hsiao is currently Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies as well as Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of Chung Wai Literary Quarterly, served on the Editorial Board of Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and at UCLA. Hsiao edited, introduced, and contributed a chapter to the book “This Shipwreck of Fragments”: Historical Memory, Imaginary Identities, and Postcolonial Geography in Caribbean Culture and Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009), and has book chapters collected in the edited volumes Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror (Purdue UP 2010), Comparatizing Taiwan (Routledge 2015), and Keywords of Taiwan Theory (Unitas 2019). His papers have been published by, among other outlets, Chungwai Literary Quarterly (2014), Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (2010), CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (2009), and M/MLA Journal (2008).

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