Postcolonial Derrida

Why It Matters

The book reopens influential theoretical resources for contemporary debates about colonialism, race, and migration, suggesting renewed value in cross‑disciplinary readings of canonical thinkers. By challenging narratives that theory is ‘dead,’ it seeks to influence how scholars and institutions approach cultural and legal questions tied to colonial histories.

Summary

In a talk accompanying the new open‑access book Postcolonial Derrida, the author frames Jacques Derrida’s Algerian‑French legacy as deeply entwined with postcolonial questions and reads Derrida alongside anti‑colonial, feminist, and diasporic thinkers. Using textual close readings and cultural snapshots—like colonial inscriptions in Edinburgh—the speaker argues that Derrida’s work both informs and is reshaped by postcolonial theory. Rejecting claims that theory (including deconstruction and postcolonial studies) is obsolete, the book holds Derrida and postcolonial thought in productive tension to recover analytic resources for debates about race, migration, law, and justice. The project aims to complicate simple claims that Derrida is either fully postcolonial or wholly outside that tradition.

Original Description

OpenAccess: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-postcolonial-derrida.html

Postcolonial Derrida: A Book Reading and Conversation

Sean Meighoo (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University) will present a reading from his book, Postcolonial Derrida, to be followed by a conversation with Edinburgh Philosophy students and staff members on the complicated relationship between Derrida’s philosophical work and postcolonial theory.

In #Postcolonial #Derrida, Sean Meighoo argues that Derrida’s philosophical work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration, and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Critically reading some of Derrida’s most famous texts in addition to some of his lesser-known ones, Meighoo brings Derrida into conversation with a diverse range of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia as well as African American and French feminist thinkers and writers including Toni Morrison, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Hélène #Cixous, V.S. #Naipaul, Nelson #Mandela, M.K. #Gandhi, and Martin Luther #King, Jr.