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Palgrave Macmillan

Rule of Sympathy

Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Authors:
  1. Amit S. Rai
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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
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  2. Sympathetic Governmentality

    • Amit S. Rai
    Pages 1-13

  3. The Rules of Sympathy

    • Amit S. Rai
    Pages 15-60

  4. “Some Inscrutable Appeal”

    • Amit S. Rai
    Pages 61-115

  5. Theaters of Horror

    • Amit S. Rai
    Pages 117-160

  6. Conclusion

    • Amit S. Rai
    Pages 161-167

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 169-225
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Keywords

About this book

The Rule of Sympathy is a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although initially associated with feminized or effeminate forms of sentimental discourse (the romance, the novel, the gothic), sympathy came to function as a key technology of gender and race in new evangelical social movements, such as abolitionism and missionizing. Amit Rai argues that sympathy was a paradoxical mode of power. The differences of racial, gender and class inequalities that increasingly divided the object and agent of sympathy were precisely what must be bridged through identification. Yet without such differences, which were differences of power, sympathy itself would be impossible. This paradoxical mode of power transformed the ways in which people came to think of how best to manage, order, and govern individuals and populations in the late eighteenth century.

Reviews

"Rule of Sympathy brings into focus issues that have occupied the margins of colonial studies for years." - Ann Laura Stoler, University of Michigan

"Subtle, wide-ranging, and magisterial, Rule of Sympathy is a rich and provocative contribution." - Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

About the author

AMIT S. RAI wrote his dissertation on national identity formation in the program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford, and had been a full-time faculty member at the New School since 1996. He has written extensively on postcolonial cultural studies, film, race theory, diasporic identity, and the Internet. He is currently writing a book on Hindi films and globalization.

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