Explains why the post-colonial critique has altered forever the landscape of postmodern discourse. This work examines the displacement of the colonizer's legitimizing cultural authority and looks at the cultural and political boundaries which exist in gender, race, class and sexuality.

"Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contrast to prior readings of this fiction, William V. Spanos's interpretation takes as its point of departure the theme of spectrality precipitated by the metaphor of orphanage - disaffiliation from the symbolic fatherland, on the one hand, and the myth of American exceptionalism on the other - that emerged...