In Inter-imperiality Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue duree. Weaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, she shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered, racialized labor, while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order. To study literature is therefore, Doyle argues, to attend to world-historical processes of imaginative and material co-formation as they have unfolded through successive eras of vying empires. It is also to understand oral, performed, and written literatures as power-transforming resources for the present and future. To make this case, Doyle analyzes imperial-economic processes across centuries and continents in tandem with inter-imperially entangled literatures, from A Thousand and One Nights to recent Caribbean fiction. Her trenchant interdisciplinary method reveals the structural centrality of imaginative literature in the politics and possibilities of earthly life.

About the Author
Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of several books, including Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"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 duree 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 duree 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478011095
Author Laura Doyle
Format Paperback
Page Count 392
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 544g