The global is an instituted perspective, not just an empirical process. Adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire, the global perspective served to make heterogeneous spaces and nonwhite subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonizers and modern anticolonial nationalists. In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire. These works offer some of the most explicit and sophisticated discussions of the world as a single, interconnected entity, inducting their readers into comprehensive and objective descriptions of the world. The perspective organizing these authors' conception of the global-the frame or code through which the world came into view-is indebted to the material and discursive possibilities set in motion by European conquest. The global, therefore, is not just a peculiar mode of thematization; it is aligned to a conception of historical development unique to European colonial capitalism. Krishnan troubles this dominant perspective. Drawing on the poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and challenging the recent historiography of empire and economic histories of globalization, he elaborates a bold new approach to the humanities in the age of globalization.

Refreshingly perspectival, Sanjay Krishnan's Reading the Global does not flinch from submitting globalization to rigorous ethico-political evaluation. Rather than acquiesce to globalization as a fait accompli, this work offers a significant, symptomatic reading of what after all is a highly contradictory, uneven, and fissured phenomenon. -- R. Radhakrishnan, professor of English and comparative literature, University of California, Irvine Reading the Global is a penetrating study that singles out a particular region--the Malay Archipelago--that has been underrepresented in recent literary and cultural interpretations of colonialism, empire, and globalization. Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates that Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah Munshi, and Joseph Conrad plot 'troubling perspectives' while using Southeast Asian locations as a kind of conceptual raw material. This book is a must-read for the cultural historian or literary scholar who wants to discover how globalization as a nonindigenous perspective nonetheless intersects with the fascinating colonial histories of seemingly neutral terms such as 'subsistence,' 'opium,' and 'running amok.' By his bravura close readings, Krishnan makes the specificity of literature and the generality of globalization matter to each other without reducing one to the other. -- Srinivas Aravamudan, professor of English, director of John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, author of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency: 1688-1804 and Guru English: South Asian Religion In A Cosmopolitan Language

About the Author
Sanjay Krishnan is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews
Recommended. CHOICE Reading the Global is unapologetically literary, and brilliantly so. -- Chi-Ming Yang Postcolonial Studies An enterprising study...a stimulating work. -- Krishnan Kumar The International History Review A startling and welcome counterpoint. -- Weihsin Gui Novel Exemplary. -- Karen Steigman Modern Fiction Studies In the four chapters of the book, Krishnan proceeds to demonstrate [his]contention with admirable care, creativity, and skill. -- Simona Sawhney, Bryn Mawr University Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature



Book Information
ISBN 9780231140706
Author Sanjay Krishnan
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press