Colonialism in question : theory, knowledge, history / Frederick Cooper.

ISBN:

9780520938618

9781598755244

9781282445758

Title:

Colonialism in question : theory, knowledge, history / Frederick Cooper.

Author:

Cooper, Frederick, 1947-

Personal Author:

Cooper, Frederick, 1947-

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 327 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Introduction : colonial questions, historical trajectories -- The rise, fall, and rise of colonial studies, 1951/2001 -- Identity / with Rogers Brubaker -- Globalization -- Modernity -- States, empires, and political imagination -- Labor, politics, and the end of empire in French Africa -- Colonialism, history, politics.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Decolonization -- Africa -- Historiography.

Imperialism -- Historiography.

Decolonization -- Historiography.

Geographic Term:

Africa -- Colonization -- Historiography.

Afrique -- Colonisation -- Historiographie.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2005

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
325.6 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

Cooper Frederick :

Frederick Cooper, Professor of History at New York University, is author of Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002) and coeditor, with Ann Laura Stoler, of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (California, 1997), among other books.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

In a sophisticated way, this book interrogates (throws into disarray?) many prevalent theoretical questions in the study of colonialism and postcolonialism. Although a well-noted expert in African history, Cooper (New York Univ.) exhibits here an admirable range of historical knowledge beyond his field: he cites examples in Western colonies in Africa and Latin America, the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, and Qing China in East Asia. This broad knowledge base enables him to discern awkward applications of such terms as "identity," "modernity," and "globalization" in historical study. He advocates the idea that "the world is interconnected and unequal" and advises that historians and others eschew the use of overarching concepts in their analysis of historical development. That is, the complexity of history requires one to adopt a historical approach, not to truncate and sacrifice the richness of history to fit within a theoretical framework. Cooper presents specific historical evidence to demonstrate that in the general transition from empires to nation-states, there have occurred many seemingly inconsistent undercurrents. The outcome of this development in today's world has also been far more complex than the term "globalization" connotes. A dense, provocative, and "rebellious" book! ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students/faculty. Q. E. Wang Rowan University