Levinas and the Postcolonial - by John E Drabinski

About the Book

This monograph initiates the conversation between Levinas and postcolonial theory through a zig-zag reading, asking both how postcolonial theory challenges so many Levinasian concepts and how a Levinasian ethics is crucial for the normative dimension of postcolonial thinking.

Book Synopsis

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference?With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

From the Back Cover

AUTHOR APPROVED

To think of postcolonial critique as a philosophy of difference and an ethical relation to the Other is inconceivable without taking into account the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas and the Postcolonial refuses all theoretical ghettos to bring welcome intellectual rigor, depth, and insight to the critique of global colonialism.

Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University

Drabinski resolutely places himself in the unacknowledged double bind between the ethical and the political in Levinas's work and, with an impressive and erudite humility, attempts to rethink Levinas for 'those of us with a materialist sensibility.'

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference?

With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

John Drabinski is Visiting Associate Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Sensibility and Singularity (SUNY, 2001) and Godard Between Identity and Difference (Continuum, 2008).

Review Quotes

Drabinski resolutely places himself in the unacknowledged double bind between the ethical and the political in Levinas's work and, with an impressive and erudite humility, attempts to rethink Levinas for "those of us with a materialist sensibility."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities Columbia University

To think postcolonial critique as a philosophy of difference and an ethical relation to the Other is inconceivable without taking into account the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas and the Postcolonial refuses all theoretical ghettos to bring welcome intellectual rigor, depth, and insight to the critique of global colonialism.--Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University

About the Author

John Drabinski is Associate Professor of Black Studies at the Amherst College.