Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature

Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is an exceptional interdisciplinary achievement. Taking seriously Deleuze's claims that 'the world is the set of symptoms whose illness emerges with man' and that literature 'appears as an enterprise in health', Don Johnston draws from his extensive experience in humanitarian praxis to advance a 'symptomatological' approach to reading postcolonial literature. This highly original book investigates how the cultural exercise of producing and consuming literature can stoke a transformative energy for postcolonial politics by revealing the material conditions that render life vulnerable. Sensitive to contemporary legacies of colonial relations of force that impinge upon a body's generative vitality at the points of material attachment that define experiences of embodiment and embeddedness, Johnston presents a rubric for evaluating syndromes of social malaise described in exemplary works of postcolonial fiction from Angola and Sudan. Conceived as imaginative aids for discerning the affective capabilities of human bodies in the full potential of health and in contexts of real-world conditions of diminishment, works of postcolonial literature become critical tools able to assist readers to identify and contest dehumanizing relations of force in the world. This vital and timely book proposes a novel method of reading postcolonial fiction, enabling us to bring the fields of postcolonial studies, philosophy, literary studies and cultural theory into a valuable new and viable proximity with those of public health and international and human development. -- Simone Bignall, author of Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism