Representing Bushmen

"Shows how the fine-grained study of a colonial archive can generate an expansive examination of 'the after-image of the colonial subject,' as well as a powerful critique of postcolonial neoliberalism. From the work of nineteenth-century philologist W. H. I. Bleek, Shane Moran culls a tradition-stretching from the early colonization of southern Africa to post-apartheid South Africa and running through philology, ethnography, political economy, philosophy, and history-of representing the Bushmen as exemplary indigenes. Along the way, Moran examines the entanglement of cultural essentialism and linguistic theory; the articulation of racism and capitalism; the productive encounters between deconstruction and historicism; the tensions between reconciliation and social, political, and economic restructuring; the role of the colonial and post-colonial intellectual; and the ongoing life of that which we think we have mourned to death. --" David Kazanjian, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania