Imagining the Postcolonial

A comparative study of Latin American and francophone postcoloniality.Imagining the Postcolonial is the first book dedicated to comparative analysis of Latin American and francophone postcolonial identity. Jaime Hanneken examines the disciplinary, theoretical, and political stakes involved in postcolonial identification in non-anglophone cultural spheres through readings of Jose Lezama Lima and Edouard Glissant's poetics of place, the symbolic value of Paris in modernista writing and in Congolese Societes des Ambianceurs et Personnes Elegantes (sape) rituals, and the scandals surrounding Rigoberta Menchu and Yambo Ouologuem. Hanneken argues that reorienting comparative critique to the priority of the object of study can transform rather than replicate existing conceptual formats of postcoloniality.