The Intimacies of Four Continents

by Lisa Lowe

Overview

In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822358756
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/08/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.89(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and the coeditor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, both also published by Duke UniversityPress.

Table of Contents

1. The Intimacies of Four Continents 1

2. Autobiography Out of Empire 43

3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities 73

4. The Ruses of Liberty 101

5. Freedoms Yet to Come 135

Acknowledgments 177

Notes 181

References 269

Index  305
 

What People are Saying About This

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - Dipesh Charkrabarty

"Lowe combines a sustained and critical interrogation of some key archival, literary, and philosophical texts with a probing analysis of the entangled histories of settler-colonialism, African slave trade, and trade in Asian goods and peoples in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The outcome is nothing short of a world-history of liberal thought that pays unwavering attention to the coercive and discriminatory practices that make such thought possible. This is 'history of the present' in the best sense of that expression; it troubles our most familiar and intimate assumptions. A serious and remarkable achievement."

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence - Judith Butler

"The Intimacies of Four Continents is an unprecedented work of literary, social, and political inquiry. Lisa Lowe patiently interweaves disparate global histories of economic and racial subjection and in the process opens up a new future for comparative literary studies both more critical and capacious. At stake in Lowe's analysis is not only a rethinking of the relation between the political and the aesthetic, but also the very ideas of culture and universality that has come to dominate academic thought."