Culture and Eurocentrism [Hardcover]

A lively, provocative and original work. Ismails vigorous arguments will stimulate debate across many fields, including postcolonial studies, cultural studies and global studies.How scandalous is eurocentrism? The question is embarrassing: the larger eurocentrisms vestiges seem to loom, the less room for scandal they leave. Qadri Ismails provocation, as sassy as it is erudite, aims a renewed postcolonial studies full in the face of this embarrassment.A postcolonialist reading of the deployment of the concept of culture in literature, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies. It argues that modernity as understood in the Anglo-US episteme is structured around eurocentrism.The conviction that we all have, possess or inhabit a discrete culture, and have done so for centuries, is one of the more dominant default assumptions of our contemporary politico-intellectual moment. However, the concept of culture as a signifier of subjectivity only entered the modern Anglo-U.S. episteme in the late nineteenth century. Culture and Eurocentrism seeks to account for the terms relatively recent emergence and movement through the episteme, networked with many other concepts  nature, race, society, imagination, savage, and civilization at the confluence of several disciplines. Culture, it contends, doesnt describe difference but produces it, hierarchically. In so doing, it seeks to recharge postcoloniality, the critique of eurocentrism.Introduction: Culture as Problem / 1. Culture/Race/Nature: Arnold, Tylor / 2. (Civil) Society/Nature: Hobbes, Locke, Macaulay / 3. Imagination/Imitation: Shelley, Hobbes, Macaulay, Kipling, Malinowski. / 4. Culture/s: Williams, Leavis, Spencer / 5. Race/Cultures: Du Bois, Fletcher, Boas, Turner, Jefferson / Conclusion: Modernity, Eurocentrism, Postcoloniality / Bibliography / IndexQadri Ismail is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.Brings together a range of texts from the seventeenth century tol/