The Colonial Imagination in Modern European Thought (1900-1968)

FAIN: FT-54306-06

Timothy Andres Brennan
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

In “Borrowed Light,” I argue that the colonial sensitivities that so heavily mark contemporary social and cultural theory are a hallmark of the early twentieth century -- especially the European interwar period -- not, as is often maintained, the “postcolonial turn” of the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1905 and 1940, a new culture arose in the aftershock of revolution on Europe’s semi-developed Eastern periphery that profoundly affected intellectuals on both the right and left. Modeling their thinking, often metaphorically, on public anxieties over imperial decline, this work is the product of a novel imaginary that not yet been appreciated as an intellectual tradition in its own right.