Reading the global : troubling perspectives on Britain's empire in Asia / Sanjay Krishnan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Krishnan, Sanjay.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Smith, Adam, 1723-1790--Criticism and interpretation.

Smith, Adam.

De Quincey, Thomas, 1785-1859--Criticism and interpretation.

De Quincey, Thomas.

Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924--Criticism and interpretation.

Conrad, Joseph.

Abdullah, Munshi, 1796-1854--Criticism and interpretation.

Abdullah.

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

Globalization in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Capitalism in literature.

Great Britain--Colonies--Asia--History--19th century.

Great Britain.

Asia--In literature.

Asia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (255 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The global is an instituted perspective, not just an empirical process. Adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire, the global perspective served to make heterogeneous spaces and nonwhite subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonizers and modern anticolonial nationalists.In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire. These works offer some of the most explicit and sophisticated discussions of the world as a single, interconnected entity, inducting their readers into comprehensive and objective descriptions of the world.The perspective organizing these authors' conception of the global-the frame or code through which the world came into view-is indebted to the material and discursive possibilities set in motion by European conquest. The global, therefore, is not just a peculiar mode of thematization; it is aligned to a conception of historical development unique to European colonial capitalism. Krishnan troubles this dominant perspective. Drawing on the poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and challenging the recent historiography of empire and economic histories of globalization, he elaborates a bold new approach to the humanities in the age of globalization.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: How to Read the Global

1. Adam Smith and the Claims of Subsistence

2. Opium Confessions: Narcotic, Commodity, and the Malay Amuk

3. Native Agent: Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir's Global Perspective

4. Animality and the Global Subject in Conrad's Lord Jim

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-229) and index.

ISBN:

9786613008855

9781283008853

1283008858

9780231511742

0231511744

OCLC:

746580182