The Intimacies of Four Continents

Lisa Lowe

Published by Duke University Press 2015

The Intimacies of Four Continents

Lisa Lowe

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375647

Overview
Contents

About this book

Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive.

Author / Editor information

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University . She is the author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and the coeditor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. ...There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world."

-- John Holmwood Theory, Culture & Society

"Lisa Lowe’s ambitious new book is a reminder of the deft footwork now required of anyone attempting to negotiate this tricky terrain. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she aligns herself with postcolonial scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, or Nayan Shah who have each provided a distinctive take on how ‘the “intimate” sphere of sexual, reproductive, or household relations’ served as ‘a site of empire’.”

-- David Glover New Formations

"[An] important asset to anyone interested in not just themes of colonialism, labour, trade, and slavery, and of Chinese Canadian prairie history respectively, but also critical methodologies—of how to read intimately for relations between people and communities and in relation across time and space—in order to grasp the possibilities of knowing that lie among what has been assumed unknowable, erased, or forgotten."

-- Stephanie Fung Canadian Literature

"Among the many fascinating contributions of the book, I found one of the most arresting to be Lowe’s suggestion in her voluminous discursive footnotes that contemporary neoliberalism, with its emphasis on 'human capital' around the world, needs to be linked with its prehistory of racialized commodification of people. For that insight alone, Lowe’s panoramic study is more than worth reading."

-- Samuel Moyn Canadian Journal of History

"Reading The Intimacies of Four Continents will change the way we look at global (and national) histories forever."

-- Etsuko Taketani Journal of American History

"The Intimacies of Four Continents will undoubtedly remain a touchstone text for those working...and struggling against those operations that continue to pronounce colonial divisions of humanity at once globally and in their local, regional, and differential instantiations."

-- Hossein Ayazi Qui Parle

"[A] work crucial for thinking not only about the history of modernity and empire but also about our enduring and decisive enterprise as readers."

-- Harrod J Suarez MELUS

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Chapter 1. The Intimacies of Four Continents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. Autobiography Out of Empire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Chapter 3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Chapter 4. The Ruses of Liberty Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Chapter 5. Freedoms Yet to Come Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 328
Illustrations
- Other: 10 illustrations

eBook

Published: June 27, 2015
ISBN: 9780822375647