This death which is not one

the postcolonial author as public intellectual

Nicole Simek

pp. 79-93

in: Peter Hitchcock (ed), The new public intellectual, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

In a neoliberal age marked by intense pressures both to privatize and to instrumentalize intellectual labor, the possibilities for public interventions by theorists and academics more broadly can appear alarmingly restricted. Public intellectualism seems to be on the verge of dying, if it is not already dead, as the shrinking public sphere, and the logics dominant within it, are reshaped by neoliberal economic principles and values. Yet like theory, whose death has been repeatedly announced (and met variously with joy and mourning), public intellectualism lives on, and the future of its afterlife has yet to be fully determined.