Hegel and Empire

M.A.R. Habib is Professor of English at Rutgers University, USA, and currently Visiting Professor at the Gulf University of Science and Technology in Kuwait. He is the author of A History of Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present (2005) and Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory (2018).

“As with racism or sexism, the site of contestation cannot be reduced to the individual but must be considered globally. Habib provides a valuable, concise, and accessible guide to this endeavor. … I would certainly recommend it as an introduction to the vast field of post-Hegelian modernity to which postcolonial arguments must respond, and as a guide to further reading of the work of the many scholars who have engaged in this endeavor.” (Wendy Shaw, New Global Studies, Vol. 13 (3), 2019)“Hegel and Empire is well organized, clearly written, and thoughtfully reasoned. Together with his thorough command of the history of philosophy, Habib’s capacious knowledge of anti- and postcolonial theories and literatures beggars the interdisciplinary imagination. Alongside recent works such as George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics , Habib’s Hegel and Empire is obligatory reading for those of us ‘working toward a more global vision’ … .” (Garry Bertholf, The Philosophical Quarterly, June 21, 2019)

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Hegel’s Dialectic of Master and Slave.- 3. The Master-Slave Dialectic in Theory.- 4. Hegel on Africa.- 5. Fanon.- 6. Slavery, Capitalism, and the Imperial Dialectic.- 7. Hegel on India.- 8. Gayatri Spivak.- 9. Hegel on Islam.- 10. Reading Hegel’s Islam.- 11. The Dialectic of Empire.- Index.