Addressing this legacy’s manifestations in Fanon and Cabra’s theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o’s nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the spectre, glimpsed and misunderstood by Marx and Derida, rather than the living organism.