Suchergebnisse

Presents a Foucauldian genealogy of the convergence of women, nation, & empire in postcolonial discourses of religion, property, & selfhood in an analysis of the controversial case of 73-year-old Shahbano, a destitute Muslim woman in India granted a small monthly allowance by the government under a colonial secular code, that compares to the figure of the female as individualist in Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) & a silenced rape victim in the records of the East-India Co. The trope of the female as individualist in Defoe is read in the context of the history of colonialism as a structuration that reorganizes private & public space in colonial England. The text of the trial involving the rape of a woman in the premises of the East-India Co is interpreted as another instance of the covert exercise of colonial authority through the construction of distinctions between the personal & the legal. It is suggested that these arbitrary divisions ingrained in colonialist practice were undone by Shahbano, who was able to move between the bourgeois discourse of liberal rights & the Muslim shariat (family-related religious law). Her ambivalent status between these discourses is taken to explain her ability to provoke a national crisis. D. M. Smith

Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 27 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will travel through a blockbuster special feature on the topic of worldmaking and other worlds—on the Enlightenment zest for the discovery, charting, imagining, and evaluating of new worlds, envisioned worlds, utopian worlds, and worlds of the future. Essays in this enthusiastically extraterritorial offering escort readers through the science-fictional worlds of Lady Cavendish, around European gardens, over the high seas, across the American frontiers, into forests and exotic ecosystems, and, in sum, into the unlimited expanses of the Enlightenment mind. Further enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews evaluating the latest in eighteenth-century scholarship