Postcolonial Bergson

Postcolonial Bergson
Author: Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823285847

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson’s thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson’s work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson’s conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the “reconstruction of religious thought in Islam,” a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future. At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson’s thought in a postcolonial context.

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy
Author: Donna V. Jones
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231518609

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.

Interpreting Bergson

Interpreting Bergson
Author: Alexandre Lefebvre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1108421156

This book is the first collection in twenty years in English to address the whole of Bergson's philosophy, including his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, aesthetics, ethics, political thought, and religion.

Beyond Bergson

Beyond Bergson
Author: Andrea J. Pitts
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438473516

Examines Bergson’s work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America. Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson’s social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson’s writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson’s work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine Bergson’s influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson’s writings—for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues. “This is an exceptionally strong volume that excites and inspires the philosophical imagination; it shows the centrality of questions of race and gender to philosophical inquiry and appropriation.” — Keith Ansell-Pearson, author of Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition

Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature

Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature
Author: Aleksandar Mijatovic
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149858067X

This book examines the theoretical devices of "Yugoslav" and "post-Yugoslav" literature. The author analyzes selected literary examples from the region through the lens of a contemporary post-Deleuzean philosophy of time, extricating discussions of post-ism from traditional chronological framing.

Getting Bergson Straight: The Contributions of Intuition to the Sciences

Getting Bergson Straight: The Contributions of Intuition to the Sciences
Author: Pete A.Y. Gunter
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1648896332

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson’s ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of his most basic contentions. Bergson’s conception of intuition—his fundamental insight into reality—was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson’s ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson’s ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson’s physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history.

Postcolonial Parabola

Postcolonial Parabola
Author: Jay Rajiva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501325345

"An innovative study of literary representations of postcolonial trauma, exploring how they both expand and limit the reader's experience of trauma"--

The Bergsonian Mind

The Bergsonian Mind
Author: Mark Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429665261

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work explored a rich panoply of subjects, including time, memory, free will and humour and we owe the popular term élan vital to a fundamental insight of Bergson’s. His books provoked responses from some of the leading thinkers and philosophers of his time, including Albert Einstein, William James and Bertrand Russell, and he is acknowledged as a fundamental influence on Marcel Proust. The Bergsonian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging volume covering the major aspects of Bergson’s thought, from his early influences to his continued relevance and legacy. Thirty-six chapters by an international team of leading Bergson scholars are divided into five clear parts: Sources and Scene Mind and World Ethics and Politics Reception Bergson and Contemporary Thought. In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including time, freedom and determinism, memory, perception, evolutionary theory, pragmatism and art. Bergson’s impact beyond philosophy is also explored in chapters on Bergson and spiritualism, physics, biology, cinema and post-colonial thought. An indispensable resource for anyone in Philosophy studying and researching Bergson’s work, The Bergsonian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines, such as Literature, Religion, Sociology and French Studies.

Virtual Diaspora, Postcolonial Literature and Feminism

Virtual Diaspora, Postcolonial Literature and Feminism
Author: Ashmita Khasnabish
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2022-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000802884

This book analyses the resolution of the psychic problem of diasporic existence from a postcolonial feminist perspective, by inscribing and defining the meaning of “virtual diaspora” through the lens of the East/India and the West. It explores the situation that arises when one leaves one’s country and becomes an emigrant/immigrant, which often causes pain both in the departure from one’s motherland and in the adaptation to a new environment. The book employs the theory of Deleuze and Guattari and explores the interstices of real and virtual diaspora and the aftermath of diaspora as a mental journey. Adding a new interpretation of transcendence, taken from the Indian perspective, the book examines the Deleuze’s theory of immanence and transcendence and the two major concepts of “becoming” and “real/virtual.” The book also examines the works of Helene Cixous, J.M. Coetzee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kunal Basu, and Tagore in light of the concept of virtual diaspora and from a postcolonial feminist angle. It does so by raising the following questions: When one has emigrated to a different country, can one conceive of that existence as real or virtual or both? Do emigrants or diasporic individuals live a life of both real and virtual diaspora? This comes from the idea that both real and virtual diaspora, under different paradigms, may be related to the power struggle and master-slave dialectic that affects all of humanity. A valuable addition to the study of postcolonial literature, the book will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of diaspora studies, postcolonial feminist theory, postcolonial literature, feminist philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian Studies.

Deleuze and the Postcolonial

Deleuze and the Postcolonial
Author: Simone Bignall
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 074863701X

This is the first collection of essays bringing together Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory. Bignall and Patton assemble some of the world's leading figures in these fields - including Reda Bensmaia, Timothy Bewes, Rey Chow, Philip Leonard, Nick Nesbitt, John K. Noyes, Patricia Pisters, Marcelo Svirsky and Simon Tormey - to explore rich linkages between two previously unrelated areas of study. They deal with colonial and postcolonial social, cultural and political issues in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Palestine. Topics include colonial government, nation building and ethics in the contemporary context of globalisation and decolonisation; issues relating to resistance, transformation and agency; and questions of 'representation' and discursive power as practiced through postcolonial art, cinema and literature. This book constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. It will be of interest to students in cultural studies, cinema and film studies, languages and literature, political and postcolonial studies, critical theory, social and political philosophy.