Inter-imperiality

“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

“This ambitious and truly global book provides a new framework for analyzing literature and culture across time and space. Located in the "shatterzone" between empires, both old and new, this ingenious work creates enlivening intersections among literature, language, feminism, resistance, and decoloniality.” - Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, and Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

"Among the most important books in literary studies in the last decade, Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality deserves sustained attention. Situated between comparative literary studies, world history, decolonial theory and gender studies, Inter-Imperiality recasts literary history as a counterpoint to the world history of empires. Profoundly interdisciplinary, it makes a forceful case for the relevance of literary analysis to the comparative study of empires—and coloniality." - Anca Parvulescu, Modernism/Modernity

“[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 durée 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 durée 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