Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse In Modern Literatures And The Legacy Of Classical Writers

Rethinking Postcolonialism challenges postcolonial discourse analysis and proposes a new model of interpretation that resituates the historical, ideological and conceptual denseness of the Colonial Idea. It questions key issues, including hybridity, Otherness and territoriality, and expands the postcolonial field by introducing valuable, ground-breaking theoretical concepts: colonialism-as-grafting, colonialist discourse as a rhetorical and ideological palimpsest, metissage as the space of the impossible.

Amar Acheraiou explores imperial intellectual history and shows how the classical writers' ideas on race, culture, identity and Otherness served as a template for modern colonialist ideology. Besides mapping the multilayered Western imperial consciousness, the book probes Europe's anticolonial tradition. It integrates the discussion of modernist literature with a critique of European post-Enlightenment philosophical concepts.

In this interdisciplinary study, Acheraiou addresses both ancient and modern canonical texts, and offers insightful textual analyses of works by Aristotle, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Andre Gide and Albert Camus.