Postcolonialism's negative dialectic. Hegel and the fate of negativity after empire.
John Noyes

This paper will address the fate of negativity in some of the founding concepts of postcolonialism. It will do this via a genealogy of the Hegelian dialectic through its reception and dissemination in France in the teaching of Kojeve, where it is submerged in the poststructuralist revisions, then on to the initial impusles of postcolonial theory in theBritish and American readings of the poststructuralists. My thesis is that in adopting and perpetuating the complex poststructuralist approach to Hegel, poststructuralist theory displaced some of the debates on the dialectic that had issued from Hegel in other theoretical quarters (most notably Adorno). In conclusion, I will argue that much is to be gained in postcolonial theory by reintroducing the debates around negativity and the dialectic. This last point will be made through a re-reading of Fanon's initial formulations of postcolonial theory.