The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

by Daniel Carey (Editor), Lynn Festa (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191607813
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	02/26/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Daniel Carey is the author of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006), and editor of Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Blackwell, 2004) and Les voyages de Gulliver: mondes lointains ou mondes proches (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2002). He is senior lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Lynn Festa is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins, 2006). She has taught at Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is currently associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors x

List of Illustrations xii

Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: 'What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?' Lynn Festa Daniel Carey 1

I Provincializing Enlightenment 5

II Enlightenment without others 17

III Postcolonial Enlightenment(s) 22

Part 1 Subjects and Sovereignty

1 Hobbes and America Srinivas Aravamudan 37

I The early colonial history of Virginia and Bermuda 43

II The theoretical reduction of America to Company colonization 53

III From theoretical reduction to oceanic expansion 64

2 The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context David Lloyd 71

I Aesthetic culture 71

II The narrative of development 76

III The abyss of blackness 95

Part 2 Enlightenment Categories and Postcolonial Classifications

3 Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory Daniel Carey 105

I Contrapuntal reading 109

II Robinson Crusoe and the subject of slavery 112

III Rereading Robinson Crusoe 125

IV Conclusion 135

4 Between 'Oriental' and 'Blacks So Called', 1688-1788 Felicity A. Nussbaum 137

I Shades of blackness 142

II Africa Orientalized 153

III Postcolonial theory and the eighteenth century 164

5 Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War Siraj Ahmed 167

I Precolonial and early colonial Orientalism 176

II Jones and mythic law 184

III Precolonial and early colonial sovereignty 191

IV A spatio-temporal fix for Bengal 196

Part 3 Nation, Colony, and Enlightenment Universality

6 Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism Doris L. Garraway 207

I Mimicry and hybridity in Lahontan'sDialogues avec un sauvage 211

II Parodic mimicry and utopia in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville 220

III Dialogue, critique, and the imagined consent of the colonized 233

7 Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment Daniel Carey Sven Trakulhun 240

I Enlightenment and diversity: three contexts 243

II Kant's universalism 254

III German Ethnographic and universal history 267

IV The German critique of colonialism 273

V Universalism and diversity? 277

8 'These Nations Newton Made his Own': Poetry, Knowledge, and British Imperial Globalization Karen O'Brien 281

I Newtonian laws of empire 287

II Cowper and the moral order of knowledge 299

Coda: How to Write Postcolonial Histories of-Empire? Suvir Kaul 305

Bibliography 328

Index 363

Editorial Reviews

"[B]rings together an impressive array of scholars...[T]he essays collected in The Postcolonial Enlightenment are without exception valuable reconsiderations of the place of the postcolonial within Enlightenment studies." —Eighteenth-Century Fiction

From the Publisher