Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature by Don Johnston

Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is a fresh and needed intervention into the study of postcolonial literature and the postcolonial condition. Deleuze's notion that literature is an enterprise of health, and that great authors consequently are diagnosticians of their culture, can be applied to postcolonial literature. The methodology, however, goes beyond the Deleuzian approach and offers a rich synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari with a range of different frameworks including health and human rights issues, the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, and the quantitative formalism of Moretti. This book majorly seeks to combine the study of postcolonial literature (a field in which Deleuze and Guattari are often used) with social sciences and quantitative methods. The work is genuinely interdisciplinary and breaks new ground both for the study of postcolonial literature and applications of Deleuze and Guattari. It does this while maintaining a focus on 'health', broadly conceived in as an assemblage, in Deleuzian fashion.