The Intimacies of Four Continents - 9780822358633

The Intimacies of Four ContinentsAuthor(s): Lisa Lowe\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Duke University Press, United States\nImprint: Duke University Press\nISBN-13: 9780822358633, 978-0822358633\nSynopsis\nIn 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 forgot.