The Intimacies of Four Continents
Author: Lisa Lowe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Print Length: 328 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Social Science, History, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies
Area: Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South/Latin America
Topic: Migration, Colonialism & Postcolonialism, Slavery, Trade, Western Liberalism, Politics & Power, Racism, Equality & Inequality, Scholarship & Knowledge, Capitalism, Imperialism
In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten.
Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. The Intimacies of Four Continents
Chapter 2. Autobiography Out of Empire
Chapter 3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities
Chapter 4. The Ruses of Liberty
Chapter 5. Freedoms Yet to Come
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, & Migration at Yale University. She received her B.A. in History from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Source: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/lisa-lowe
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