| Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History Contributor(s): Cooper, Frederick (Author) |
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ISBN: 0520244141 ISBN-13: 9780520244146 Publisher: University of California Press OUR PRICE: $34.60 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 2005 Annotation: "Probably the most important historian of Africa currently writing in the English language. His intellectual reach and ambition have even taken influence far beyond African studies as such, and he has become one of the major voices contributing to debates over empire, colonialism and their aftermaths. This book is a call to reinvigorate the critical way in which history can be written. Cooper takes on many of the standard beliefs passing as postcolonial theory and breathes fresh air onto them."--Michael Watts, Director of the Institute of International Studies, Berkeley "This is a very much needed book: on Africa, on intellectual artisanship and on engagement in emancipatory projects. Drawing on his enormous erudition in colonial history, Cooper brings together an intellectual and a moral-political argument against a series of linked developments that privilege 'taking a stance' and in favor of studying processes of struggle through engaged scholarship."--Jane I. Guyer, author of "Marginal Gains |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Africa - General - Social Science | Emigration & Immigration - Social Science | Anthropology - General |
| Dewey: 325.6 |
| LCCN: 2004021043 |
| Physical Information: 0.82" H x 6.12" W x 9.02" (0.97 lbs) 339 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - African |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the West. Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism--including citizenship and equality--were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts. |