Reading Post-Coloniality Through. Kierkegaard
Abrahim Khan

Post-colonial writing today show a turn from resistance to self-expression. from decentering the subject constructed along the lines colonial categories to the relating of authorial intention and personal identity to literary production. In taking this turn post-colonial writers are moving to the heart of philosophical questions that have preoccupied some other writers and thinkers preceding them. One such writer is Kierkegaard, a nineteenth century Socrates of Denmark.

Though post-colonial writers do not all share presuppositions of the West they nonetheless acknowledge a historical indebtedness to it. Western scholars such Cadava and Culler would like to see them tackle as part of their ongoing struggle with nation building questions of the sef. Some, such as Okri or Arenas, seem to share a definition of self that is removed from scholastic essentialism and approximate an understanding of it as relational, not unlike what the Kierkegaard literature presents. Others such as Naipual, Glissant, and Chen opt for literary excellence. By putting art before nation-construction, they draw suspicion about the postcolonial subject having not yet been fully deconstructed or thoroughly emerged. But it may be that the deconstruction cannot take place, as Susan Ritchie thinks, without invoking privileged status as subject

These aspects of post-colonialism today have a bearing on Kierkegaard's thought. His use of pseudonyms for decentering, the relating of himself by means of irony to his aesthetic literary production, and his presentation of a self as relational amount to a reconfiguring of the subject on the basis of choice (agency), and without having to invoke privileged status as subject. This study draws in particular on his Either/Or, Postscript, and Two Ages.