Hating empire properly : the two Indies and the limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism
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 unack...
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| Language: | English |
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| Summary: | 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-was 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. |
| Physical Description: | xxiii, 280 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-265) and index. |
| Published: |
New York :
Fordham University Press,
2013.
|
| ISBN: | 9780823251803 0823251802 9780823267392 (pbk) 0823267393 (pbk) |
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| 100 | 1 | |a Agnani, Sunil M. | |
| 245 | 1 | 0 | |a Hating empire properly : |b the two Indies and the limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism / |c Sunil M. Agnani. |
| 264 | 1 | |a New York : |b Fordham University Press, |c 2013. | |
| 300 | |a xxiii, 280 pages : |b illustrations ; |c 23 cm | ||
| 336 | |a text |b txt |2 rdacontent | ||
| 337 | |a unmediated |b n |2 rdamedia | ||
| 338 | |a volume |b nc |2 rdacarrier | ||
| 504 | |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-265) and index. | ||
| 505 | 0 | 0 | |g Prologue: Enlightenment, colonialism, modernity -- |t Introduction: companies, colonies, and their critics -- |g Part I: |t Denis Diderot: the two Indies of the French Enlightenment -- |t Doux commerce, douce colonisation: consensual colonialism in Diderot's thought -- |t On the use and abuse of anger for life: ressentiment and revenge in the Histoire des deux Indes -- |g Part II: |t Edmund Burke: political analogy and Enlightenment critique -- |t Between France and India in 1790: custom and arithmetic reason in a country of conquest -- |t Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: fearing the Enlightenment and colonial modernity with Edmund Burke -- |t Atlantic revolutions and their Indian echoes: the place of America in Burke's Asia writings -- |t Reflections on the revolution in St. Domingue/Haiti -- |t Compensation in the East, or, From Virginia to Hindostan -- |g Epilogue. |t Hating empire properly: European anticolonialism at its limit. |
| 520 | |a 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-was 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. | ||
| 650 | 0 | |a Imperialism |x History. | |
| 650 | 0 | |a Imperialism |x Philosophy. | |
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| 952 | f | f | |a Skidmore College |b Main |c Lucy Scribner Library |d 3rd floor |t 0 |e JC359 .A55 2013 |h Library of Congress classification |i physical |m 33048007307200 |n 1 |