Description
Book SynopsisWeaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée.
Trade Review“Notable for its recognition of the crucial, but often ignored, dialectical relationship between political economy and literary production,
Inter-imperiality provides powerful examples of how a scholar can engage with one problematic across disciplines, using literary texts as an anchor. This big, bold book is a major intervention in continuing debates on the emergence of literature in relation to a world defined by the phenomenon of empires of time and space.” -- Simon Gikandi, author of * Slavery and the Culture of Taste *
“[
Inter-imperiality] offers a transhistorical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial analysis of the fundamentally relational processes that constitute imperial powers and individual lives. Polities and persons alike are enmeshed in shifting entanglements that enable coercion and violence as well as care and community. Aiming to ‘honor the struggles and the sustaining practices’ that are elided when this existential interdependence is disavowed, Doyle chronicles a longue durée of dialectical state and identity (co)formation that spans the eleventh to the twentieth centuries.” * American Literature *
“
Inter-imperiality might be described as an attempt to reiterate the ontological insights of Hegel regarding the dialectical truth of our lived identity, extended and expanded through the
longue durée of Braudel, but couched crucially in the terminology of feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought. It is a paean, among other things, to the untold history of female, non-Western labor. . . . There is a fervor and a seriousness to Doyle’s desire to expand and decenter contemporary global historiography, which is inspiring to read.” -- Ian Almond * Comparative Literature *
“How did European colonialism happen? Why is racism still permeating many quarters of life? How can we prevent the existence of colonialism and racism?
Inter-imperiality innovatively engages these questions. . . . Doyle’s call for a return to the avowal of the materialist dialectic and for ‘care, and cure’ presents inspiring new ways for thinking about the future of decolonial studies.” -- Lidan Lin * Modern Fiction Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Theoretical Introduction. Between States 1
Part I. Co-Constituted Worlds
1. Dialectics in the Longue Durée 35
2. Refusing Labor's (Re)production in
The Thousand and One Nights 68
Part II. Convergence and Revolt
3. Remapping Orientalism among Eurasian Empires 95
4. Global Revolts and Gothic Interventions 121
5. Infrastructure, Activism, and Literary Dialectics in the Early Twentieth Century 156
Part III. Persisting Temporalities
6. Rape, Revolution, and Queer Male Longing in Carpentier's
The Kingdom of This World 195
7. Inter-imperially Neocolonial: The Queer Returns of Writing in Powell's
The Pagoda 227
Conclusion. A River Between 251
Notes 255
Bibliography 331
Index
