Li-Chun Hsiao attempts to rethink under the rubric of globalization several key notions in
postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what he conceives as the primal scene of
postcoloniality-the Haitian Revolution. He unpacks and critiques the post-structuralist
penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not
reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Edouard Glissant's C. L. R. James's and
Derek Walcott's representations of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution the
textual analyses approach the issues of colonial mimicry postcolonial nationalism and
postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal and the particular in
critical theories and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma identity and jouissance. Hsiao
argues that postcolonial intellectuals' characteristic celebration of the Particular together
with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution doesn't really
do away with the category of the Universal nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of
difference equivalence that sustains the living on of the nation-state despite an ever
expanding globality rather such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed
traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience
while invoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.
