Speaking Politically

<p>In this monograph Theodor Adorno’s philosophy engages with postcolonial texts and authors that emerge out of situations of political extremity – apartheid South Africa war-torn Sri Lanka Pinochet’s dictatorship and the Greek military junta. This book is ground-breaking in two key ways: first it argues that Adorno can speak to texts with which he is not historically associated; and second it uses Adorno’s theory to unlock the liberatory potential of authors or novels traditionally understood to be apolitical. While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world the book also showcases Adorno’s unique reading of the literary text both in terms of its innate historical content and formal aesthetic attributes. Such a reading refuses to read postcolonial texts exclusively as political documents a problematic (but changing) tendency within postcolonial studies. In short the book operates as a two-way conversation asking: What can Adorno’s concepts give to certain literary texts? but also reciprocally What can those texts give to our conventional understanding of Adorno and his applicability? This book is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms and rethinking Adorno through the literary.</p>