Rethinking Postcolonialism challenges postcolonial discourse analysis and proposes a new model of interpretation that resituates the historical, ideological and conceptual denseness of the Colonial Idea. It questions key issues, including hybridity, Otherness and territoriality, and expands the postcolonial field by introducing valuable, ground-breaking theoretical concepts: colonialism-as-grafting, colonialist discourse as a rhetorical and ideological palimpsest, métissage as the space of the impossible.

Amar Acheraïou explores imperial intellectual history and shows how the classical writers’ ideas on race, culture, identity and Otherness served as a template for modern colonialist ideology. Besides mapping the multi-layered Western imperial consciousness, the book probes Europe’s anti-colonial tradition. It integrates the discussion of modernist literature with a critique of European post-Enlightenment philosophical concepts.

In this interdisciplinary study, Acheraïou addresses both ancient and modern canonical texts, and offers insightful textual analyses of works by Aristotle, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, André Gide and Albert Camus.