Enlightenment in the Colony by Aamir R Mufti

Enlightenment in the Colony by Aamir R Mufti

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.

"By the late eighteenth-century..the 'protean Jew' was...'neither outsider nor one of us'. Mufti begins with the 'paradigmatic narratives' of minority existence within a liberal nation state...which constituted the so-called Jewish Question in modern Europe. He is especially concerned with the processes of secularization...[and focuses] on the connections between the violent resolution of the 'Jewish Question' and the formation of 'majoritarian' cultures. Mufti [provides] nuanced and historically grounded accounts of the 'Jewish Question'. At a time when these issues have assumed a renewed urgency--under the febrile sign of a 'new' anti-Semitism--[this] outstanding [book offers] a contextualized and scholarly approach to the subject."--Bryan Cheyette, Times Literary Supplement "Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture offers the most substantial theoretical intervention, one that is likely to have a significant impact on the field in future years."--New Literatures

Aamir R. Mufti is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the coeditor of "Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives" and the editor of "Critical Secularism," a special issue of the journal "boundary 2".

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691057323
ISBN 10	069105732X
Title	Enlightenment in the Colony
Author	Aamir R Mufti
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2007-05-01
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable