Hating empire properly : the two Indies and the limits of Enlightenment anticolonialism / Sunil M. Agnani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Agnani, Sunil M.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imperialism--History.

Imperialism.

Imperialism--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India and Haiti, he demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution—the defining event of modernity— as shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, he nonetheless challenges recent understandings of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, Agnani asks what it means to critique empire “properly.” Drawing his method from Theodor Adorno’s quip that “one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly,” he proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment.Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Enlightenment, Colonialism, Modernity

Introduction: Companies, Colonies, and Their Critics

1 Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Consensual Colonialism in Diderot’s Thought

2 On the Use and Abuse of Anger for Life: Ressentiment and Revenge in the Histoire des deux Indes

3 Between France and India in 1790: Custom and Arithmetic Reason in a Country of Conquest

4 Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity

5 Atlantic Revolutions and Their Indian Echoes: The Place of America in Burke’s Asia Writings

Epilogue. Hating Empire Properly: European Anticolonialism at Its Limit

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780823252152

0823252159

9780823252169

0823252167

9780823253050

0823253058

9780823251810

0823251810

OCLC:

847005639