Sean Meighoo, Postcolonial Derrida – Edinburgh University Press, November 2025

Brings Derrida into conversation with postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia

• Crosses disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, literature and postcolonial theory
• Addresses issues of colonialism, race, migration, diaspora, language, gender, violence and social justice
• Critically revisits some of Derrida’s most famous texts as well as many of his lesser-known ones, opening up new areas of scholarly research and writing on Derrida’s work
• Brings Derrida into conversation with thinkers such as Toni Morrison, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Hélène Cixous, V.S. Naipaul, Nelson Mandela, M.K Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jacques Derrida remains one of the most renowned intellectuals in the areas of philosophy, literary studies and cultural criticism today. Yet the close relationship between Derrida’s philosophical work and postcolonial theory – or their ‘affinity,’ as he once put it himself – has been largely neglected within contemporary scholarship. This book makes the case that Derrida’s work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Rather than rehearse the biographical details of his personal life, it provides a postcolonial reading of Derrida’s work by bringing him into conversation with a diverse array of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as well as various African American and French feminist thinkers and writers.