Introduction: Navigating Differential Futures, (Un)making Colonial Pasts

Abstract

In the fifteen years that have followed Robert Young’s seminal rereading of the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism as a desiring-machine’s production, coding and re/deterritorialization of colonial desire, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to ‘think through’ (Young 1995, p. 173) postcoloniality, few have followed Young’s lead and ventured into the difficult domain of Deleuze and the postcolonial. Christopher Miller’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad and rhizome as conceptual tools for theorizing the (post)identity politics of postcolonialism has perhaps come closest to setting the parameters of a Deleuzian postcolonial analysis: today both nomadology and rhizomatic thought continue to find privileged resonance with the work of postcolonial theorists and critics (cf. Glissant 1997; Huggan 2008, pp. 28–30; Miller 1998). Without denying the relevance of these terms to postcolonial studies, this volume promotes a more fundamental alignment of the fields of Deleuzian thought and postcolonialism. In doing so, it forms part of a growing awareness within postcolonial studies of the critical potential of this dialogue, as evidenced by the recent work of Simone Bignall and Paul Patton — in both their co-edited volume Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010) and their individual works Deleuzian Concepts (Patton 2010), and Postcolonial Agency (Bignall 2010) — as well as by the work of contemporary literary scholars including Mrinalini Greedharry (2008), Ronald Bogue (2010), Eva Aldea (2011), and, of course, as we shall see, Peter Hallward in his Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2001).