Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle Lidan Lin Laura Doyle. Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance. Duke UP, 2020. ix + 392 pp. The concept of postcoloniality has offered some hope for a more equal world because national independence in former colonies undoubtedly signifies victories of human justice, retribution, and morality. In the wake of European colonialism, scholars have continued to ask challenging questions: How did European colonialism happen? Why is racism still permeating many quarters of life? How can we prevent the existence of colonialism and racism? Inter-imperiality innovatively engages these questions and locates the origin of colonialism and racism in the "denial of interdependence" (35). From this fresh angle, Doyle investigates the complex dialectical relations and power structures among competing empires from the premodern era to the twentieth century. Focusing on interimperial alliance and resistance and weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and global studies, Doyle initiates a new "decolonial" (5) or a "360-degree" (1) approach that analyzes Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Doyle argues that a multitude of infrastructural programs shaped such alliance and resistance, along with cultural programs that facilitated the co-construction of imperial states, from intercultural influences in Asia and travel writings by premodern Western missionaries, to the later translations of literary and religious works by Western and non-Western writers. Literature, for Doyle, is a vital site that registered the interlocking world history of colonial hegemony and decolonial subversion. While postcolonial studies have primarily focused on the colonizer-colonized relationship in the context of European colonialism, Doyle shifts this focus to the co-construction of contending empires. This shift is necessary, and it signals a significant new direction in postcolonial studies. Yet, Doyle does not consider "postcolonial" (5) and "decolonial" approaches to be incompatible; instead, she deems them "complementary rather than opposed." This dialogic handling of diverging methods is one of her book's strengths. Drawing on the work of feminist critics such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Nancy Chodorow, Doyle brings a feminist orientation to bear on her analysis and reveals colonial labor as gendered labor. A critical revisit of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectical theory allows Doyle to reaffirm the centrality of the dialectical conditions of being human, conditions devoid of the ontological independence of any kind. While sharing scholars' reservation of Hegel's racist thinking, [End Page 383] Doyle adds her feminist critique of Hegel's male-dominated dialectic by inserting the feminine into the "lord and bondsman" (2) relation on the one hand and by stressing the co-constitution of subjectivity or intersubjectivity implied in Hegel's dialectic on the other. Here, Doyle perceives Hegelian affinities not only in Western thinkers such as pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, Karl Marx, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also in Asian philosophy, including the Chinese Daoist philosophy. Rather than dwelling on the polemics involving poststructuralist and materialist thinking in decolonial studies, Doyle appeals to both, another dialogic appropriation of differing modes of thinking. While incorporating Hegel's dialectic in the analysis of interimperial coformations cogently revalidates the continued relevance of dialectical thinking to decolonial studies, a bit more explanation as to how the revised Hegelian dialectic differs from the dialectical thinking that informs the self-other correlation widely discussed in postcolonial studies would have been helpful. Doyle's book contains a substantial theoretical introduction. The stated theoretical grounding and analytical approaches are mostly lucid, readers will easily follow, if they have some background in critical theory and postcolonial studies. The main body includes seven chapters divided into three parts. The texts chosen for analysis include cultural texts, political writings, and literary texts, among others. While some analyses are more substantial than others, which is necessary to serve different purposes, all will be accessible to readers who have some background in literary and cultural studies. In the two chapters in part 1, Doyle first provides a structural frame for examining ideological and infrastructural formations in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, and shows that they "converged" (28) in their mutual attempts to conquer the "dissent" from the colonized natives. She then stages a...