Description:
Through a reappraisal of the work of four major figures in critical theory - Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin - Filippo Menozzi rethinks the tradition of critical theory in relation to pressing concerns in postcolonial studies.
Revealing these authors' continued relevance to urgent issues in the 21st century, from struggles against racism to social movements and the transmutations of global capitalism, Menozzi reimagines them as central to an alternative genealogy of critical theory that moves beyond their European provenance and the limitations of "Western Marxism". In doing so, this book challenges, more broadly, the view of critical theory as steeped in Eurocentrism, culturally conservative, and politically defeatist. Contesting this in four chapters, Postcolonial Historical Materialism inserts Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and Benjamin into key contemporary sites of militancy and debate.
Engaging with a wide range of European and non-European sources, Menozzi proposes a new concept of "postcolonial historical materialism", indicating how the heritage of critical theory can reopen global possibilities of utopia and revolution in a non-utopian age of global emergencies, social unrest, and the unfinished history of decolonisation.
Brief description: Filippo Menozzi is Reader in Postcolonial Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Review Quotes: Finally, someone has done it: demonstrate that a postcolonialist impulse lies at the heart of critical theory and the Marxian tradition. Menozzi succeeds in showing how critical theory's commitment to reason and the rational origins of Western Marxism forged an anti-colonial and anti-racist position well before the bloated and misguided diatribes of the present. To those discourses that advocate anti-rationalism and a critique of progress and the Enlightenment, Menozzi provides us with a crucial corrective: that critical theory's defense of the critical power of reason was at the heart of an emancipatory critical project that has yet to be realized.
Michael J. Thompson, Professor of Political Theory, William Paterson University, USA