Inter-imperiality

In <i>Inter-imperiality</i> Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires institutions language regimes stratified economies and literary cultures over the longue durée. Weaving together feminist decolonial and dialectical theory she shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered racialized labor while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order. To study literature is therefore Doyle argues to attend to world-historical processes of imaginative and material co-formation as they have unfolded through successive eras of vying empires. It is also to understand oral performed and written literatures as power-transforming resources for the present and future. To make this case Doyle analyzes imperial-economic processes across centuries and continents in tandem with inter-imperially entangled literatures from <i>A Thousand and One Nights</i> to recent Caribbean fiction. Her trenchant interdisciplinary method reveals the structural centrality of imaginative literature in the politics and possibilities of earthly life.