Hating Empire Properly The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism

In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century American self-conceptions evolved. Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.

Sunil M. Agnani is Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.