Let Them Sink into the Sea: Free-Trade Empire and a Hermeneutics of Disconnection

Document Type

Article

Authors

Chris Taylor, University of ChicagoFollow

Abstract

This essay reads Edward Said’s practice of contrapuntal reading alongside the historical material from which he partially derives this practice in order to query the limits of a founding feature of postcolonial literary theory: an optimistic faith in the irreducibility and persistence of imperial connection. Taking political-economic and literary discussions of the nineteenth-century West Indies as its primary case, it explores how instituted processes of abandonment and expulsion require colonial and postcolonial thought to engage with a poetics and hermeneutics of disconnection. Ultimately, this essay argues that postcolonial theory was not Victorian enough and that reengaging with the ongoingness of this other Victorianism necessitates a retooling of the postcolonial for the pressures of the Anthropocene.

Recommended Citation

Taylor, Chris (2019) "Let Them Sink into the Sea: Free-Trade Empire and a Hermeneutics of Disconnection," Criticism: Vol. 61: Iss. 4, Article 7.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol61/iss4/7