Description

Examining liberal ideas of citizenship, wage labour, and free trade, in light of transatlantic and transpacific encounters between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, this lecture revisits the policy of ‘free trade’ by way of a discussion of the colonial trades in cotton, silk, and opium, and observes that liberal ‘free trade’ arguments not only rationalized British and American engagements with India and China, but they inaugurated new modes of imperial sovereignty.

Lisa Lowe is currently Professor of European and American Studies in the Department of English at Tufts University. Lowe is the author of “Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms,” and “Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics.” She is the co-editor of “The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital,” and a third book, “Metaphors of Globalization,” is forthcoming. Her current project, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” is a study of the convergence of colonialisms in the early Americas as the conditions for modern humanism and humanistic knowledge. Lowe is the 2012-13 F. Ross Johnson Visiting Scholar in American Studies, Centre for the Study of the United States.