Table of Contents

1. The Intimacies of Four Continents 1

2. Autobiography Out of Empire 43

3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities 73

4. The Ruses of Liberty 101

5. Freedoms Yet to Come 135

Acknowledgments 177

Notes 181

References 269

Index  305
 

About the Author

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University . She is the author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and the coeditor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. ...There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world."
*Theory, Culture & Society*

"Lisa Lowe’s ambitious new book is a reminder of the deft footwork now required of anyone attempting to negotiate this tricky terrain. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she aligns herself with postcolonial scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, or Nayan Shah who have each provided a distinctive take on how ‘the “intimate” sphere of sexual, reproductive, or household relations’ served as ‘a site of empire’.”
*New Formations*

"[An] important asset to anyone interested in not just themes of colonialism, labour, trade, and slavery, and of Chinese Canadian prairie history respectively, but also critical methodologies—of how to read intimately for relations between people and communities and in relation across time and space—in order to grasp the possibilities of knowing that lie among what has been assumed unknowable, erased, or forgotten."
*Canadian Literature*

"Among the many fascinating contributions of the book, I found one of the most arresting to be Lowe’s suggestion in her voluminous discursive footnotes that contemporary neoliberalism, with its emphasis on 'human capital' around the world, needs to be linked with its prehistory of racialized commodification of people. For that insight alone, Lowe’s panoramic study is more than worth reading."
*Canadian Journal of History*

"Reading The Intimacies of Four Continents will change the way we look at global (and national) histories forever."
*Journal of American History*

"The Intimacies of Four Continents will undoubtedly remain a touchstone text for those working...and struggling against those operations that continue to pronounce colonial divisions of humanity at once globally and in their local, regional, and differential instantiations."
*Qui Parle*

"[A] work crucial for thinking not only about the history of modernity and empire but also about our enduring and decisive enterprise as readers."
*MELUS*