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

by Pheng Cheah

Overview

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231503600
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/24/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Pheng Cheah is assistant professor in the department of rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Thinking through the Body of the Law and Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Death of the Nation?
Part I: Culture as Freedom: Territorializations and Deterritorializations
The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the Social and Political Body
Kant's Cosmopolitanism and the Technic of Nature
Incarnations of the Ideal: Nation and State in Fichte and Hegel
Revolutions That Take Place in the Head: Marx and the National Question in Socialist Decolonizaton
Part II: Surviving (Postcoloniality)
Novel Nation: The Buildung of the Postcolonial Nation as Sociological Organism
The Haunting of the People: The Spectral Public Sphere in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet
Afterlives: The Mutual Haunting of the State and Nation
The Neocolonial State and Other Prostheses of the Postcolonial National Body: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Project of Revolutionary National Culture
Epilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization

What People are Saying About This

Michael Hardt

Spectral Nationality is a beautiful and startling book. It is dazzlingly, relentlessly erudite, but also remarkably clear and simple in its focus: how freedom has been pursued in the past and how we can best realize it today. This is an extremely important intellectual and political project.

— Michael Hardt, associate professor of literature and Romance studies, Duke University, and coauthor of Empire

Peter Fenves

A rare scholarly achievement, Spectral Nationality adds a critical new dimension to the work from which it draws much of its inspiration, namely Derrida's Spectres of Marx. Cheah's exemplary account of the development of organicism from Kant through Marx will doubtless change the manner in which this difficult and delicate topic will henceforth be discussed.

— Peter Fenves, professor of German and comparative literature, Northwestern University

Harry Harootunian

Pheng Cheah has written an important book that will genuinely stir up productive discussion, breathe new life into postcolonial discourse, and raise the subject to a new and necessary level of serious engagement.

— Harry Harootunian, professor of history and director of East Asian studies, New York University, and author of History's Disquiet

Craig Calhoun

Elegantly argued, original, and deeply insightful, Pheng Cheah's new book situates nationalism at the heart of the Western intellectual tradition. Its examination of organicism shows this to be anything but an innocent metaphor. Philosophy's dualisms did not remain stable, and Western philosophy did not stay at home. Cheah brilliantly shows how its implications intertwined with different material circumstances and cultural traditions in postcolonial Asia and Africa. Bildung and Bandung were not quite worlds apart. A must read.

— Craig Calhoun, professor of sociology, New York University, and president of the Social Science Research Council

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Pheng Cheah's stimulating contribution to postcolonial studies stands out on two counts: for the sustained attention it gives to European thought and for shifting the focus of the discussion to Southeast Asia and Kenya. It is the combination of these two elements that gives Spectral Nationality its distinctive vigor and merit.

— Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Editorial Reviews

Cheah's text is one of those rare occasions where scholarship and political commitment become supplementary to each other.

Interventions - Baidik Bhattcharya

Cheah does a superb job in outlining the organic and ultimately cultural forms the struggle for freedom has taken.

Research in African Literatures - Gregory Jusdanis

The book offers a coherent argument against inherited theories of "organismic vitalism"...and evinces the literary idiom of postmodernism.

Choice

Pheng Cheah traces a constellation of concepts...with confidence

MLN - Matthew Scherer

Pheng Cheah traces a constellation of concepts...with confidence

— Matthew Scherer

MLN

Cheah does a superb job in outlining the organic and ultimately cultural forms the struggle for freedom has taken.

— Gregory Jusdanis

Research in African Literatures

Cheah's text is one of those rare occasions where scholarship and political commitment become supplementary to each other.

— Baidik Bhattcharya

Interventions