Hating empire properly [[electronic resource] ] : the two Indies and the limits of Enlightenment anticolonialism / / Sunil M. Agnani

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910463266703321
• Autore: Agnani Sunil M
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Fordham University Press, 2013
• ISBN: 0-8232-5215-9; 0-8232-5216-7; 0-8232-5305-8; 0-8232-5181-0
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (304 p.)
• Disciplina: 325/.3
• Soggetti: Imperialism - History; Imperialism - Philosophy; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue: Enlightenment, Colonialism, Modernity -- Introduction: Companies, Colonies, and Their Critics -- 1 Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Consensual Colonialism in Diderot’s Thought -- 2 On the Use and Abuse of Anger for Life: Ressentiment and Revenge in the Histoire des deux Indes -- 3 Between France and India in 1790: Custom and Arithmetic Reason in a Country of Conquest -- 4 Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity -- 5 Atlantic Revolutions and Their Indian Echoes: The Place of America in Burke’s Asia Writings -- Epilogue. Hating Empire Properly: European Anticolonialism at Its Limit -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In Hating Empire Properly, 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— 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.Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.