The Intimacies of Four Continents

Lowe's interdisciplinary approach unequivocally demonstrates why Literature matters.

An interesting study of the far reaches and intimacies of globalization

Ties together historical trends that we rarely understand are connected. Will improve our ability to analyze current controversies and develop policies that better address the underlying factors shaping our world.

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Brilliant, Timely, Important

Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of Four Continents is a tour-de-force piece of scholarship that has much to offer in its breadth and depth of analysis. I would highly recommend this text to scholars and students in the field of critical race studies, sociology and history. In Chapter One, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe lays out the trajectory of her impressive book. Lowe’s study involves exposing and analyzing what she calls the “archive of liberalism” (p. 4). In this chapter, Lowe also defines what she means by the intimacy between continents as “the circuits, connections, associations and mixings of differentially laboring peoples, eclipsed by the operations that universalize the Anglo-American individual” (p.21). That is, Lowe posits that it is through the universalization of the modern liberal human as Anglo-American, that the intimacies between people who have historically been exploited for labour, including those who originate from the continents Africa, Asia, and North America, have been obscured and hidden. This is by no means an exhaustive review of the text, but just some observations and highlights that I thought may be useful to include.Lowe observes that the establishment of the modern liberal human also serves to delineate those who fit into this category and those who did not. Those who do not are subordinated in various ways including dispossession, colonization, enslavement, etc. In turn, labour was constructed as the condition through which freedom could be achieved. In Chapter one, Lowe traces the figure of the Chinese labourer within the colonial archive and its role in the establishment of a racial and colonial order, but also as part of the structure of modern liberalism and what we know as the human. The figure of the Chinese labourer played multiple roles in that this figure served as a barrier between enslaved Black people and white European settlers through the imagining of the Chinese as more proximal to whiteness and the universal modern human. The construction of the Chinese as a free race of laborers necessarily meant that foreclosure of freedom from Indigenous peoples, enslaved peoples and some indentured labourers. This is one example of the intimacy of the continents that Lowe is so carefully mapping.In chapter two, Autobiography out of Empire, Lowe reads the autobiography as the genre that most fully reflects the narrative expression of the modern individual subject, which provides the structure for modern liberalism. More specifically, in chapter two, Lowe takes up the famous autobiography of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano. As a genre, autobiography emphasizes individualism and liberty, but by necessity, only at the expense of obscuring collective violence and enslavement. The narrative present in Equiano’s autobiography speaks to the ways in which the slave cum freedman narrative is a structuring feature of liberal modernity. Throughout the autobiography, Lowe notes, Equiano’s relationship to slavery is perpetually haunted by the spectre of falling back into enslavement.In chapter four, The Ruses of Liberty, Lowe examines the question of the liberal government and its role in maintaining the freedom of some and the enslavement and subjugation of others. She writes “liberal trade and government…linked the transatlantic world of plantation slavery to colonial expansion and brokered emigration in the treaty ports, constituting the conditions of possibility for the ascension of the British empire…” (p. 133). That is, it is liberalism and its many features that foreclosed freedom to some while securing the possibility of British empirical growth.Overall, Lowe meticulously conducts a genealogy of modern liberalism and that exposes its links to the human and the racial. By examining the often-obscured connections between settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the East Indies and China trade, Lowe drives home the point that the relentless and ever-present figure of the human is not only defined, but constitutive of modern liberalism. Further, Lowe explores the intimacies between various understandings of the new world. In doing so, Lowe makes an invaluable contribution to multiple disciplines including history and sociology. While scholarship currently exists that individually interrogates the transatlantic slave trade and the East Indies and China Trade, Lowe weaves them together and reads these seemingly disparate histories across one another to reveal their connections.

This is the single most important and brilliant alternative story of New World colonization I have read. Actually New Worlds. Plural. With brilliance and eloquence Lowe redraws the map of settlement, exploitation, desire, and appropriation.

a capacious and brilliant book.

Lisa Lowe has come out with yet another field-changing monograph. It is based on her article of the same name written a few years before, but I can’t help but see its continuities with her work throughout her career. While her previous books (Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms and Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics) are usually cited as contributing to the field of Asian/American studies, and Intimacies more broadly discusses EuroAmerican modernity by departing from critical indigenous and black scholarship, I feel like Intimacies of Four Continents was a 25-year argument in the making...an argument that perhaps couldn't have been done without the thinking and theorizing that had to be done in her other books first. Producing this type of argument (just the sheer amount of work one has to do familiarizing oneself with different archives and literatures that are often separated!) requires a certain comfort with many different geohistorical contexts, a deep knowledge of ongoing conversations between fields, and of course a critical or acute sense of what methodologies are made available and unavailable to us when we talk about settler colonial racial capitalism.Lowe’s work has been useful for me not just because I also study Asian racialization and modernities (her first two monographs are really canon texts in that respect), but also in the way they consistently try to articulate the contradictions and continuities of different wars, across states, and whole empires. Her theorization of Asian/America/Europe (theory, history, politics) as a useful index of various capitalist expansion projects that simultaneously deny and mask ongoing antiblackness and settler colonialism was--while not part of her central argument in this book--was, I think, a necessary insight for the making of this book insofar as Lowe spatializes the genealogy of modern liberalism as a genealogy of colonial divisions of humanity. Through her investigation of modern historicism and liberal accounts of progress, she draws a cartography of connections between settler colonialism, slavery and indentured labour across the globe that have been obscured or forgotten, but were the very conditions of possibility for liberal ideas of reason, civilization, and freedom.The arguments in this book are not surprising for those of us who research colonialism. It is even unexpectedly modest in length given the excitement surrounding it and the depth of research in it.So what makes this book totally worth the hype (there is definitely a hype)? Intimacies is a Beautiful. Geometric. Proof. She really makes the connections so categorically clear...this book is not only beautifully written, but indisputable proof of the geometry of relations that were created in the creation of the modern world.Lowe critically juxtaposes the history of modernity with the heterogeneous pasts of conquest, trade, and dominion to connect liberalism with the colonial archive from which it is usually separated. She specifically uses this method to unsettle the dominant archives of liberalism/liberal modernity (that is, the “given-ness” of the transition from slavery to freedom, industrialization and wage labor, the commencement of free trade, and the establishment of liberal democracy through representative government) to investigate often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late 18th –early 19th centuries. The formation of the modern (political) subject is intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity—liberal ideas of human freedom, reason, free trade, rights, wage labor and progress—and both trace and deny the materiality of transatlantic, transpacific, and settler encounters/connections in “New World” Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, their colonial conditions of possibility, and their continued organization in relation to “the telos of modern European form.”Reading primary archival documents, and literary, cultural, and philosophical texts, she considers liberal genres of autobiography, the novel, and political philosophy to discuss the fundamental role of modern historicism in the organization, constitution, and meaning of the past, present, and future, and most importantly, what was lost in the process. Lowe describes this scene as the “past conditional temporality” of the “what could have been.” This temporality, she says, demands a thinking to both the “positive objects and methods of history and social science, and also the matters absent, entangled, and unavailable by its methods.” The relation between the intimacies of the possessive individual to the intimacies of four continents requires a past conditional temporality to bear witness to the asymmetrical archives in which each are represented. It is to stay and reflect at the scene of violent affirmation and forgetting,” and to recognize its continuation in “the history of the present” in the form of liberal humanist institutions, discourses, and practices that forget its conditions of possibility as a European colonial imperative.Cons? It’s a short and concise book. Because of this, it doesn’t explicate the mechanisms of settler colonialism in as much detail as it promises--it says more about slavery and antiblackness. It focuses on settler colonialism as land theft (which it is) but doesn’t talk about it in more complex ways or what else happens to indigenous folk.Who is this book for? This book isn’t just for scholars who research colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, the New World, modernity...etc. (I feel like this group will probably have already heard of this book and have put it on their reading lists because there was so much excitement about it already in social justice themed academia). It is an academic text--there is no beating around the bush about that; it may be too jargony for those outside academia--but I also think it gives important lessons on how the past is authorized and what to do with lives that have yet to live because of an imperial archive that makes them/us illegible. And that’s a social justice imperative too. It gestures toward the imaginative and radical re-memory work that needs to be done in order to stretch our humanity and think beyond/out of our current colonial condition in search of a different future. No, it doesn’t give us easy answers for how to narrate our political goals and desires for freedom beyond liberal political enfranchisement or through the expansion of capital, but it does gives us ways to understand how we often reproduce this violence in our struggles over the life of the human.

Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of Four Continents is a tour-de-force piece of scholarship that has much to offer in its breadth and depth of analysis. I would highly recommend this text to scholars and students in the field of critical race studies, sociology and history. In Chapter One, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe lays out the trajectory of her impressive book. Lowe’s study involves exposing and analyzing what she calls the “archive of liberalism” (p. 4). In this chapter, Lowe also defines what she means by the intimacy between continents as “the circuits, connections, associations and mixings of differentially laboring peoples, eclipsed by the operations that universalize the Anglo-American individual” (p.21). That is, Lowe posits that it is through the universalization of the modern liberal human as Anglo-American, that the intimacies between people who have historically been exploited for labour, including those who originate from the continents Africa, Asia, and North America, have been obscured and hidden. This is by no means an exhaustive review of the text, but just some observations and highlights that I thought may be useful to include.Lowe observes that the establishment of the modern liberal human also serves to delineate those who fit into this category and those who did not. Those who do not are subordinated in various ways including dispossession, colonization, enslavement, etc. In turn, labour was constructed as the condition through which freedom could be achieved. In Chapter one, Lowe traces the figure of the Chinese labourer within the colonial archive and its role in the establishment of a racial and colonial order, but also as part of the structure of modern liberalism and what we know as the human. The figure of the Chinese labourer played multiple roles in that this figure served as a barrier between enslaved Black people and white European settlers through the imagining of the Chinese as more proximal to whiteness and the universal modern human. The construction of the Chinese as a free race of laborers necessarily meant that foreclosure of freedom from Indigenous peoples, enslaved peoples and some indentured labourers. This is one example of the intimacy of the continents that Lowe is so carefully mapping.In chapter two, Autobiography out of Empire, Lowe reads the autobiography as the genre that most fully reflects the narrative expression of the modern individual subject, which provides the structure for modern liberalism. More specifically, in chapter two, Lowe takes up the famous autobiography of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano. As a genre, autobiography emphasizes individualism and liberty, but by necessity, only at the expense of obscuring collective violence and enslavement. The narrative present in Equiano’s autobiography speaks to the ways in which the slave cum freedman narrative is a structuring feature of liberal modernity. Throughout the autobiography, Lowe notes, Equiano’s relationship to slavery is perpetually haunted by the spectre of falling back into enslavement.In chapter four, The Ruses of Liberty, Lowe examines the question of the liberal government and its role in maintaining the freedom of some and the enslavement and subjugation of others. She writes “liberal trade and government…linked the transatlantic world of plantation slavery to colonial expansion and brokered emigration in the treaty ports, constituting the conditions of possibility for the ascension of the British empire…” (p. 133). That is, it is liberalism and its many features that foreclosed freedom to some while securing the possibility of British empirical growth.Overall, Lowe meticulously conducts a genealogy of modern liberalism and that exposes its links to the human and the racial. By examining the often-obscured connections between settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the East Indies and China trade, Lowe drives home the point that the relentless and ever-present figure of the human is not only defined, but constitutive of modern liberalism. Further, Lowe explores the intimacies between various understandings of the new world. In doing so, Lowe makes an invaluable contribution to multiple disciplines including history and sociology. While scholarship currently exists that individually interrogates the transatlantic slave trade and the East Indies and China Trade, Lowe weaves them together and reads these seemingly disparate histories across one another to reveal their connections.

As a young white female body attempting to understand the complex relationships between anti-blackness, indigeneity, and settler colonialism, this book The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe (2015) is a powerful and thought-provoking read. Throughout much of my academic and scholarly career as a research assistant for a prominent global research project, I have often reviewed and written extensively about democracy, freedoms, and ultimately the ‘liberal traditions’ across North America. Additionally, as a young child in western ‘democratic’ societies, one is usually taught that the very existence of social justice and equity is based upon values of freedom, liberalism, and humanity. This publication draws away from hegemonic understandings of democracy and liberal modernity and provides a critical counter narrative that disrupts and resists the simple notions of democratic freedoms and values. This publication has critically added to my knowledge production and caused me to pause and reflect upon many concepts, such as the very foundation of liberalism and democracy in Canada. Lowe eloquently investigates the complex and often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism and settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lowe highlights and contextualizes, with caution, the ‘economy of affirmation’, an economy that civilizes ‘man’ in modern North American and European societies, while simultaneously regulating and marginalizing others to spaces and narratives often described as uncivilized or backwards. Forms of modern liberalism such as culture, the political economy, history, and systems of governance propose dominating narratives of freedom, justice, and equality in overcoming enslavement while subsequently denying colonial slavery, erasing the seizure of lands from indigenous people, displacing migrations and connections across continents, and obscuring how such processes are implicated and internalized within the empire. Lowe powerfully contents that the vast levels of social inequalities that we now face are a legacy of such processes. Processes, for example, in which certain ‘humans’ were freed by liberal forms of emancipation and modernity, while other subjects, contexts, stories and practices were displaced, erased, or forgotten because they were not viewed as valuable within modern class systems of settler colonialism. The Intimacies of Four Continents examines the dynamic and complex relationships and connections between the present but different manifestations, available histories, and social forces of our past and present as a means to disrupt our assumptions and prescribed knowledge’s. The chapters throughout this publication provide the reader with critical opportunities to conceptualize ideals of liberal modernity, such as how the political emancipation or the free market economy have been employed and utilized in the expansion of imperialism and the empire. The five chapters provide an important journey as they offer an opportunity to travel along a critical and important path that describes and illuminates the mutual entailments of freedom, privilege, and possession. Lowe investigates the fundamental roles and influences of liberal freedoms of wages, rights, and trade in regard to their literary and cultural forms across Europe and North America. This investigation is employed within a more complex and broader historical context of Anglo-American empire that recognizes the intersectionalities of colonial labour, the transatlantic African slave system, and Asian indenture in the Americas. In the words of Lowe, “it is necessary to conceive settler colonialism, slavery, indenture, imperial war, and trade together, as braided parts of a world process that involved Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, permitting an optic on early 19th century liberalism and empire, which might otherwise be unavailable” (p. 76). Following notions put forth by prominent and distinguishing scholars such Fernando Ortiz (1940) and C. L. R. James (1938), Lowe works with the understanding that the ‘new world’ for Euro settlers and indigenous people that connect labour and slave systems to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas with the rise of liberal modernity. In contextualizing important connections and relationships such as slavery and imperial trades, Lowe is also careful in appreciating their spatial significance and importance, however, contends that societally and scholarly we may actually be vastly unaware and critically uneducated about The Intimacies of Four Continents. The Intimacies of Four Continents draws reader’s attention to the necessity of reading texts, objects, and contexts with careful attention to what they have to say about lost histories and how certain narratives and understandings have been forgotten or supressed. In joining prominent and influential scholars such as Saidiya Hartman (2003) and Jodi Byrd (2011), Lowe creatively and powerfully highlights how liberal philosophy, culture, and economics are deeply implicated in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and the empire. Lowe allows for critical opportunities in attempting to understand what is often forgotten or silenced in colonial discourses and narratives. As Lowe states “forgetting attests to the more extensive erasure of colonial connections that include but are not limited to indentureship: that implicate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the settler logics of appropriation, forced removal and assimilation that are repeated in land seizures, militarized counter insurgency at home and abroad, and migrations within neoliberal globalization of which Chinese immigrant labour is but one instance” (p. 38). It is extremely crucial that as educators, parents, students, etc., that we begin to engage with the politics of our lack of knowledge: what do we know? How do we know this? Why have we never heard about this before? In investigating and exploring our lack of knowledge or influences of knowledge production, Lowe allows for us to pause and reflect upon what it means to supplement forgetting with narratives of liberal modernity and freedom. It is necessary to engage with one’s own politics of knowledge throughout reading this publication and to consider how and what has produced such distinctly separated and limited areas of our knowledge and understanding. A prominent notion put forth by Lowe throughout this publication is the conceptualization and imagination of the possibilities of what could have been possible and this ultimately provides a space for critical and alternative thinking. This space in regards to The Intimacies of Four Continents requires attention to what has been lost or forgotten in colonial discourses and historical narratives that have attempted to encompass notions of positivity and freedom. What can freedom look like outside of Western liberalism? More importantly, how can this exist upon stolen indigenous lands? Lowe highlights a “past conditional temporarily” that ultimately suggests that other conditions and narratives of possibility and futurity that have been subdued by liberal and political values of freedom and humanity as an opportunity to investigate possibilities and alternative futures (p.175). The Intimacies of Four Continents provides a counter lens for reading, contextualizing, and interpretation so that we can begin to understand the ways in which violent processes of settler colonialism, slavery, and indenture are forgotten and naturalized throughout dominant historical narratives I am thankful to have had the opportunity to review this important piece of literature as it has allowed me to explore important historical narratives that I had not previously encountered and conceptualized. The method of writing by Lisa Lowe is truly elegant, captivating, thought provoking and commendable. At times, it is hard to understand how one person can contain so much important knowledge, however, once again, I am extremely thankful for the critical importance of this book and the significance it has for understanding the worlds we live in, and the worlds that we could possibly inhabit.AcknowledgmentsByrd, J. (2011). The Transit of Empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis andLondon: University of Minnesota Press.Hartman, S. V. (2003). The time of slavery. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 757-777.Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress.