The intimacies of four continents / Lisa Lowe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lowe, Lisa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Liberalism.

Liberty.

Slave trade.

Commerce.

Civilization, Modern.

Physical Description:

319 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham [North Carolina] : Duke University Press, 2015.

Summary:

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, she 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, culture, and ultimately knowledge itself. Book jacket.

Contents:

The intimacies of four continents

Autobiography out of empire

A fetishism of colonial commodities

The ruses of liberty

Freedoms yet to come.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-304) and index.

ISBN:

9780822358633

0822358638

9780822358756

0822358751

OCLC:

885231594