The Intimacies of Four Continents

[Dave Monroe]

The Intimacies of Four Continents
Author(s): Lisa Lowe
Published: 2015
Pages: 328


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.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-intimacies-of-four-continents/
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