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Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing BOOK REVIEWS / 111 thing but naïve, and her discussions often turn precisely toward the blind spots revealed by psychoanalytic theory as it travels through spaces inhabited by different cultures, languages, histories, genders, and sexualities. Ultimately, she is most interested in tracing what she calls the “spectral afterlife” (xv) of psychoanalytic concepts and in considering the role these concepts have played in shaping the particular forms of identification, loss, and longing expressed through national narratives. In this sense, the living on of psychoanalysis represents another form of haunting, akin to the ghostly persistence of empire and nation in the global present: “If psychoanalysis is dead, it is dead in the same sense that empire is past” (xvi). In Cooppan’s view, psychoanalysis offers particularly powerful tools for thinking and writing about national identification precisely because the nation is never quite what we imagine or wish it to be: “All national subjects live their nationalism in the mode of loss, for all must contend with the difficult process of identifying with something that is not entirely there, that exists in the present yet recedes into the deep past of national history, and that seems to promise future inclusion but constantly http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Britto, Karl Ashoka
Comparative Literature , Volume 64 (1) – Dec 21, 2012
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-1539235
Publisher site
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Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS / 111 thing but naïve, and her discussions often turn precisely toward the blind spots revealed by psychoanalytic theory as it travels through spaces inhabited by different cultures, languages, histories, genders, and sexualities. Ultimately, she is most interested in tracing what she calls the “spectral afterlife” (xv) of psychoanalytic concepts and in considering the role these concepts have played in shaping the particular forms of identification, loss, and longing expressed through national narratives. In this sense, the living on of psychoanalysis represents another form of haunting, akin to the ghostly persistence of empire and nation in the global present: “If psychoanalysis is dead, it is dead in the same sense that empire is past” (xvi). In Cooppan’s view, psychoanalysis offers particularly powerful tools for thinking and writing about national identification precisely because the nation is never quite what we imagine or wish it to be: “All national subjects live their nationalism in the mode of loss, for all must contend with the difficult process of identifying with something that is not entirely there, that exists in the present yet recedes into the deep past of national history, and that seems to promise future inclusion but constantly

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 21, 2012

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