Suchergebnisse

1 Introduction: after colonialism2 Thinking otherwise: a brief intellectual history3 Postcolonialism and the new humanities4 Edward Said and his critics5 Postcolonialism and feminism6 Imagining community: the question of nationalism7 One world: the vision of postnationalism8 Postcolonial literatures9 Conclusion: the limits of postcolonial theoryBibliographyIndex

Introduction: moral imperfection: an ethics for democracy -- After virtue: the strange case of belle époque socialist antimaterialism -- On descent: stories from the gurus of modern India -- Elementary virtues: Great War and the crisis of European man -- Inconsequence: some little-known mutinies around 1946 -- Epilogue: paths of ahimsaic historiography.

This is an ethical history of democracy in the first half of the 20th century. In this era, Gandhi argues, the concept of ethics had obtained a ubiquitous application. No longer the denominator for right and wrong or good and bad behaviour, merely, it came to designate all projects of disciplined self-fashioning. These could tend either toward exclusivity and hierarchy or toward a more inclusive universalism, depending on the players. Gandhi discloses a shared ethos of perfectionist values across imperialism, fascism, and new liberalism.

Investigates friendships between anti-colonial Indians and anti-imperial 'westerners' in late-19th and early 20th centuries, claiming that such inter-cultural collaborations need to be added to annals of non-violent historiography.

Believers insist that the ghost of utopianism returned to Europe in May 1968, and that it has been haunting the ruins of 'the political' ever since. This paper is written in the spirit of belief. It has two claims: first, and incidentally, that utopianism—namely, a politics of alternatives poised at the limits of thought and being, epistemology and ontology—is both expedient and inevitable in regard to a terrain where, à la Foucault, power is everywhere, 'immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of citizens'; and second, and here is the crux of my argument, the movement in our time from nihilism to utopianism has required a careful renegotiation with ideas of community, communication, sociability, conatus. This process, most apparent within contemporary postmodernism, I would like to call, after Derrida, the politics of friendship. The rest of this paper is an attempt to describe the restless itinerary of such a politics, which entails, in the main, postmodernism's departure from the cult of the hybrid subject toward a non-communitarian understanding of community.

This essay considers recent critiques of postcolonial theory and proposes democracy as a theme likely to prove crucial for the future of the field. It argues that a properly postcolonial turn toward democracy demands a new philosophical, political, and ethical valuation of the concept of naïveté.