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Book Cover for: Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other, John E. Drabinski

Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other

John E. Drabinski

The idea of the Other is central to both Levinas' philosophy and to postcolonialism, but they both apply the concept in different ways. Now, John Drabinski asks what we can learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference. Drawing on the works of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant and Subcommandante Marcos, he rethinks ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics and politics.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 10th, 2013
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.60in - 0.75lb
  • EAN: 9780748677283
  • Categories: PoliticalCriticism

About the Author

Drabinski, John E.: - John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of At the Margins of Nihilism (Fordham University Press, 2025, forthcoming), Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern University Press, 2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (EUP, 2012), Godard Between Identity and Difference (Continuum, 2008) and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (SUNY, 2001).

Praise for this book

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
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