Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton
Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton

Author: Ben Grant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-11-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1134106432

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By engaging closely with the work of Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), the iconic nineteenth-century imperial spy, explorer, anthropologist and translator, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton explores the White Man’s ‘imperial fantasies’, and the ways in which the many metropolitan discourses to which Burton contributed drew upon and reinforced an intimate connection between fantasy and power in the space of Empire. This original study sheds new light on the mechanisms of imperial appropriation and pays particular attention to Burton’s relationship with his alter ego, Abdullah, the name by which he famously travelled to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. In this context, Grant also provides insightful readings of a number of Burton’s contemporaries, such as Müller, du Chaillu, Darwin and Huxley, and engages with postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory in order to highlight the problematic relationship between the individual and imperialism, and to encourage readers to think about what it means to read colonial history and imperial narrative today.

Making a World after Empire
Making a World after Empire

Author: Christopher J. Lee

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0896804682

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In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union. The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history. Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

Cultivating Belief
Cultivating Belief

Author: Sebastian Lecourt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0192540599

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This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency and toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reinscription of religion as an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.

Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Author: Margaret T. Hodgen

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-09-16

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 0812206711

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Although social sciences such as anthropology are often thought to have been organized as academic specialties in the nineteenth century, the ideas upon which these disciplines were founded actually developed centuries earlier. In fact, the foundational concepts can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples in the New World led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of some of the ideas adopted to help understand the origin of culture, the diversity of traits, the significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations, the course of cultural change, and the theory of social evolution. It is a book that not only illuminates the thinking of a bygone age but also sheds light on the sources of attitudes still prevalent today.

The Highly Civilized Man
The Highly Civilized Man

Author: Dane Kennedy

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0674039483

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Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Richard Burton contributed so forcefully to his generation that he provides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era.