General & world history
Hating Empire Properly
The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism
by Sunil M. Agnani
Description
In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of_x000B_the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis_x000B_Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely_x000B_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._x000B__x000B_Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.
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Author Biography
Sunil M. Agnani is Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held previous positions at the Princeton Society of Fellows and the University of Michigan.
Fordham University Press
The Fordham University Press is a publishing house which produces scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences, as well as trade books of interest to the general public.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Fordham University Press
- Publication Date January 2016
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9780823267392
- Publication Country or regionUnited States
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 27 USD
- Pages320
- ReadershipProfessional and Scholarly
- Publish StatusPublished
- Illustration7
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