Sean Meighoo is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and author of The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales (Columbia UP, 2016). His work has also appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Critique, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Humanimalia, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) as well as in the volumes Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Indiana UP, 2001), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia UP, 2015).

What does "deconstruction of the West" mean? Elucidating the writings of Ong, Morrison, Naipaul, Mandela, King, Gandhi, and numerous other authors alongside those of Derrida, Sean Meighoo does full justice to the latter's signature move of honoring language's equivocality even as he teases out the ethnocentrism that characteristically shapes western anti-ethnocentric rhetoric. This book is a compelling study of critique and reading by an exceptionally talented scholar.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Derrida’s Performative PostcolonialityPart I. A Postcolonial CritiqueChapter 1. Derrida’s Chinese PrejudiceChapter 2. Derrida’s Last WordInterlude: The Space BetweenPart II. A Postcolonial ReadingChapter 3. Orality, Literacy, and the Ruses of LogocentrismChapter 4. The Ghosts of Slavery, or Derrida Reads BelovedChapter 5. The Enigma of L’Arrivant, or Incompossible Literatures of ArrivalChapter 6. Law, Justice, and the Politics of UndeconstructibilityWorks Cited