Download or read book The Postcolonial Enlightenment written by Daniel Carey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial practices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledged role in this discussion, alternately reviled and venerated as the harbinger of colonial dominion and avatar of liberation, as target and shield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas - eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory - in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial aspirations. With essays by leading scholars in the field, Postcolonial Enlightenment address issues central not only to literature and philosophy but also to natural history, religion, law, and the emerging sciences of man. The contributors situate a range of writers - from Hobbes and Herder, Behn and Burke, to Defoe and Diderot - in relation both to eighteenth-century colonial practices and to key concepts within current postcolonial theory concerning race, globalization, human rights, sovereignty, and national and personal identity. By enlarging the temporal and geographic framework through which we read, the essays in this volume open up alternate genealogies for categories, events and ideas central to the emergence of global modernity.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Enlightenment written by Daniel Carey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial practices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledged role in this discussion, alternately reviled and venerated as the harbinger of colonial dominion and avatar of liberation, as target and shield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas - eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory - in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial aspirations. With essays by leading scholars in the field, Postcolonial Enlightenment address issues central not only to literature and philosophy but also to natural history, religion, law, and the emerging sciences of man. The contributors situate a range of writers - from Hobbes and Herder, Behn and Burke, to Defoe and Diderot - in relation both to eighteenth-century colonial practices and to key concepts within current postcolonial theory concerning race, globalization, human rights, sovereignty, and national and personal identity. By enlarging the temporal and geographic framework through which we read, the essays in this volume open up alternate genealogies for categories, events and ideas central to the emergence of global modernity.
Download or read book Enlightenment in the Colony written by Aamir R. Mufti and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.
Download or read book Conscripts of Modernity written by David Scott and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.
Download or read book Enlightened Colonialism written by Damien Tricoire and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book further qualifies the postcolonial thesis and shows its limits. To reach these goals, it links text analysis and political history on a global comparative scale. Focusing on imperial agents, their narratives of progress, and their political aims and strategies, it asks whether Enlightenment gave birth to a new colonialism between 1760 and 1820. Has Enlightenment provided the cultural and intellectual origins of modern colonialism? For decades, historians of political thought, philosophy, and literature have debated this question. On one side, many postcolonial authors believe that enlightened rationalism helped delegitimize non-European cultures. On the other side, some historians of ideas and literature are willing to defend at least some eighteenth-century philosophers whom they consider to have been “anti-colonialists”. Surprisingly enough, both sides have focused on literary and philosophical texts, but have rarely taken political and social practice into account.
Download or read book Decolonizing Enlightenment written by Nikita Dhawan and published by Verlag Barbara Budrich. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do norms of justice, human rights and democracy enable disenfranchised communities? Or do they simply reinforce relations of domination between those who are constituted as dispensers of justice, rights and aid, and those who are coded as receivers? Critical race theorists, feminists and queer and postcolonial theorists confront these questions and offer critical perspectives.
Download or read book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital written by Vivek Chibber and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.
Download or read book Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament written by Carol A. Breckenridge and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies written by Graham Huggan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest scholarship in postcolonial studies, while also considering possible future developments in the field. Original chapters written by a worldwide team of contritbuors are organised into five cross-referenced sections, 'The Imperial Past', 'The Colonial Present', 'Theory and Practice', 'Across the Disciplines', and 'Across the World'. The chapters offer both country-specific and comparative approaches to current issues, offering a wide range of new and interesting perspectives. The Handbook reflects the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies and reiterates its continuing relevance to the study of both the colonial past—in its multiple manifestations— and the contemporary globalized world. Taken together, these essays, the dialogues they pursue, and the editorial comments that surround them constitute nothing less than a blueprint for the future of a much-contested but intellectually vibrant and politically engaged field.
Download or read book Enlightenment Governance and Reform in Spain and its Empire 1759 1808 written by G. Paquette and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in Spain and its American empire in the second half of the Eighteenth century. It examines the intellectual foundation of commercial, administrative and colonial policy during the tumultuous reigns of Charles III and Charles IV.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by John Robertson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.
Download or read book The Stillbirth of Capital written by Siraj Ahmed and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy. In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.
Download or read book This Is Enlightenment written by Clifford Siskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
Download or read book The Sign of the Cannibal written by Geoffrey Sanborn and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring cannibalism in the work of Herman Melville, Sanborn argues that Melville produced a postcolonial perspective even as nations were building colonial empires.
Download or read book Nuclear Desire written by Shampa Biswas and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its enactment in 1970, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has become one node of a massive, sprawling, multibillion-dollar regime that is considered essential to slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. However, according to Shampa Biswas, these well-intentioned efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons deflect attention from a hierarchical global nuclear order dominated by powerful states and capitalist interests that benefit from the status quo. In Nuclear Desire, Biswas proposes that pursuit and production of nuclear power is sustained by this unequal global order whose persistent and daily harmful effects are experienced by some of the most vulnerable bodies around the world. Making a compelling case for nuclear abolition, she shows that the path to nuclear zero is more successfully traversed through the perspective of postcolonialism and the political economy of injustice?rather than through the prism of “security.” In the end, the nonproliferation regime maintains a hierarchy of haves and have-nots, one that reinforces inequalities that run counter to the NPT’s broader goal. Innovative, forcefully argued, and long overdue, Nuclear Desire moves beyond conventional critiques to give scholars and students of international relations new insights into how a more secure world might simultaneously be more peaceful and just.
Download or read book Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain written by Thomas C. Neal and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1931-07-31 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did literary discourse about empire contribute to discussions about the implications of modernity and progress in eighteenth-century Spain? Writing the Americas seeks to answer this question by examining how novels, plays and short stories imagined and contested core notions about enlightened knowledge. Expanding upon recent transatlantic and postcolonial approaches to Spain's Enlightenment that have focused mostly on historiographical and scientific texts, this book disputes the long-standing perception of the Spanish Enlightenment as an "imitative" movement best defined best by its similarities with French and British contexts. Instead, through readings of major and minor texts by authors such as José Cadalso, Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Pedro Montengón and José María Blanco White, Writing the Americas argues that literary texts advanced a unique exploration of the compatibility between supposed universal principles and local histories, one which often diverged noticeably from dominant trends and patterns in Enlightenment thought elsewhere. The authors studied often drew directly from Spain's own imperial experiences to submit prevailing ideas about culture, commerce, education and political organization to scrutiny. Writing the Americas provides a new critical lens through which to reexamine the aesthetic and political content of eighteenth-century Spanish cultural production. While in the past, much of the debate about whether Spanish neoclassicism was "modern" literature has centered on formalistic qualities or romantic notions of "originality" or "subjectivity," ultimately, Writing the Americas locates the modernity of these literary works within the very ideological tensions they display towards the prevailing intellectual trends of the time. The interdisciplinary content and approach of Writing the Americas make it a valuable resource for a broad range of scholars including specialists in eighteenth-century and modern Hispanic literature and culture, colonial Hispanic literature and culture, transatlantic American studies, European Enlightenment studies, and modernity studies.
Download or read book Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670 1840 written by Humberto Garcia and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century. Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty. This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.
