Description
Book SynopsisDobie explores the place of the colonial world in the culture of the French Enlightenment, tracing the displacement of colonial questions onto two familiar aspects of Enlightenment thought: Orientalism and fascination with Amerindian cultures.
Trade Review"Trading Places is both hugely ambitious and carried off brilliantly. Madeleine Dobie shows how the theme of slavery is displaced into an Orientalist context and explains why Atlantic slavery was unrepresentable until the 1770s, when economic theories were developed to frame it in acceptable ways. By going beyond text and image to explore the material culture of textiles and furnishings, Dobie demonstrates that cultural studies can be both historical and humane."—Dena Goodman, University of Michigan, author of Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters
"Trading Places deals with an epochal cultural repression—the absence, in the early period of French colonialism, of depictions of conquest and its consequences. Madeleine Dobie reads this absence through the contradictions, displacements, denegations, and maskings that surround its seeming silence. Trading Places restores a fundamental element to French literary history, and to the history of colonialism's economic and social effects and its material culture. It helps us to understand economic, geopolitical, and racial domination in a period when such domination suppressed its own representations. This is a pathbreaking book of literary, cultural, and historical analysis."—Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Trading PlacesPart I: East Meets West
1. Reorienting Slavery
2. Oriental Veneers
3. The "Fabric of Two Worlds"Part II: Savages and Slaves
4. The Trope of Colonial Encounter
5. Slaves and the Noble SavagePart III: Liberty, Equality, Economy
6. Colonial Political Economy
7. Economic SentimentsConclusion: Slavery and Postcolonial MemoryAppendix: The Colonies and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Literature
Works Cited
Index
