The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory comprises essays that explore topics in political theory, anthropology, aesthetics, and literature. We are presented with readings of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Behn’s Oroonoko, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, to name only a few of the texts under scrutiny. The collection contains eight essays divided into three parts—“Subjects and Sovereignty,” “Enlightenment Categories and Postcolonial Classifications,” and “Nation, Colony, and Enlightenment Universality.” It concludes with a provocative “Coda” by Suvir Kaul entitled “How to Write Postcolonial Histories of Empire?”. The contributors seek to apply the apparatus of postcolonial theory to the Enlightenment, but they also call for a re-examination of the representation of the Enlightenment in postcolonial theory itself.

In their introductory essay, Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey extol postcolonial theory for its innovative insights and its progress over the last three decades. The emphasis on the novelty of the contributions of postcolonial theory needs to be balanced, however, by an appreciation of its indebtedness to a long tradition of scholarship and inquiry, including the Enlightenment. Some of the most engaging essays in this volume show how Enlightenment thinkers formulated concepts and methods that continue to be at work in contemporary critiques and approaches. In his essay “The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context,” David Lloyd asserts that “postcolonial theory straddles a dilemma whose terms are in effect given by the tradition of aesthetic discourse.” This claim does not mean that postcolonial theory is hopelessly trapped in the confines of the discourse that it seeks to critique; however, it indicates the need for a closer study of the tradition, which informs postcolonial theory’s concepts and methods in ways that are often not adequately addressed or appreciated by its proponents. Through an explication of the writings of Burke and Kant, Lloyd draws out the distinctions between the Burkean “physiological” approach to aesthetics and the Kantian view of aesthetic judgment with its disavowal of the body. These antithetical aesthetics are then examined in relation to the body of the colonial subject, understood both as a subject experiencing pleasure and pain and as an object of European judgment.

While the essays in this collection utilize postcolonial theory to explore the Enlightenment, they thus also show how postcolonial theory is illuminated by an understanding of eighteenth-century philosophy and literature. In her essay “Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism,” Doris L. Garraway disputes the claim that the philosophes created “an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist discourse.” At the same time, she notes that “Enlightenment dialogues instantiate and in some cases surpass the critical acumen and degree of self-reflexivity exhibited in postcolonial theory.” Garraway recognizes that in giving a voice to non-Europeans in their dialogues, Lahontan and Diderot ran the risk of usurping rather than representing the Other. Yet she also attends to the irony and reflexivity at work in these texts, which destabilize the pronouncements of their interlocutors and invite us to participate in a questioning of the categories and judgments at play. In a similar vein, Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun’s piece, “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment,” perceptively draws out the tensions in the Enlightenment commitment to universalism and thereby disrupts simplistic depictions of it as uncontested and uniform.

The Postcolonial Enlightenment makes an important contribution to postcolonial studies. But given that this collection aims to challenge dominant interpretations of the Enlightenment and to rethink the Enlightenment in light of postcolonial theory, it would have been enriched if there had been more direct engagement with scholarship representative of rival interpretations. In their introductory essay, Festa and Carey briefly refer to the work of such influential historians and theorists of the Enlightenment as Paul Hazard, Ernst Cassirer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Peter Gay, and Jonathan Israel, but these scholars do not figure in the subsequent essays. A critical engagement here would elucidate the distinctive contribution of the postcolonial approach to the Enlightenment and facilitate a comparison of its merits with those of alternative approaches.