The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

by Carey, Daniel; Festa, Lynn

• ISBN13: 9780199229147
• ISBN10: 0199229147
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 andvenerated 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 earlyEuropean 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, toDefoe 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 weread, the essays in this volume open up alternate genealogies for categories, events and ideas central to the emergence of global modernity.

Author Biography

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	p. x
List of Illustrations	p. xii
Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: 'What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?'	p. 1
Provincializing Enlightenment	p. 5
Enlightenment without others	p. 17
Postcolonial Enlightenment(s)	p. 22
Subjects and Sovereignty
Hobbes and America	p. 37
The early colonial history of Virginia and Bermuda	p. 43
The theoretical reduction of America to Company colonization	p. 53
From theoretical reduction to oceanic expansion	p. 64
The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context	p. 71
Aesthetic culture	p. 71
The narrative of development	p. 76
The abyss of blackness	p. 95
Enlightenment Categories and Postcolonial Classifications
Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory	p. 105
Contrapuntal reading	p. 109
Robinson Crusoe and the subject of slavery	p. 112
Rereading Robinson Crusoe	p. 125
Conclusion	p. 135
Between 'Oriental' and 'Blacks So Called', 1688-1788	p. 137
Shades of blackness	p. 142
Africa Orientalized	p. 153
Postcolonial theory and the eighteenth century	p. 164
Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War	p. 167
Precolonial and early colonial Orientalism	p. 176
Jones and mythic law	p. 184
Precolonial and early colonial sovereignty	p. 191
A spatio-temporal fix for Bengal	p. 196
Nation, Colony, and Enlightenment Universality
Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism	p. 207
Mimicry and hybridity in Lahontan's Dialogues avec un sauvage	p. 211
Parodic mimicry and utopia in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville	p. 220
Dialogue, critique, and the imagined consent of the colonized	p. 233
Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment	p. 240
Enlightenment and diversity: three contexts	p. 243
Kant's universalism	p. 254
German Ethnographic and universal history	p. 267
The German critique of colonialism	p. 273
Universalism and diversity?	p. 277
'These Nations Newton Made his Own': Poetry, Knowledge, and British Imperial Globalization	p. 281
Newtonian laws of empire	p. 287
Cowper and the moral order of knowledge	p. 299
	p. 305
Bibliography	p. 328
Index	p. 363
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