Overview
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 and venerated 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 early European 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, to Defoe 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 we read, the essays in this volume open up alternate genealogies for categories, events and ideas central to the emergence of global modernity.
Full Product Details
Author: Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway) ,
Lynn Festa (Rutgers University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.30cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 24.10cm
Weight: 0.811kg
ISBN: 9780199229147
ISBN 10: 0199229147
Pages: 394
Publication Date: 26 February 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, is a significant publication. The eight essays, substantial introduction, and coda that make up this collection mark an important development in both Enlightenment studies and postcolonial criticism: each is considered in relation to the other, addressing the previous critical neglect of the role which Enlightenment thought played in the construction and critique of European colonial ideology. The Year's Work in English Studies
Author Information
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.
