This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative
forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture
and in the course of their history came to be ways of understanding
and controlling different cultures. Examples are: notions of
autonomy and the division of intellectual, social, cultural, and
aesthetic practices; ideas of otherness (taking forms like
"Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft," negritude, and afrocentrism); cultural
and aesthetic forms such as tragedy, mimesis, self, mind/body;
certain modes of history and memory; and particular forms of
discourse such as science, philosophy, and literature.
The book explores the interlocking histories of cultural
instruments from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their
instrumental use and reworking by different cultures, moving from
Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean. In the
process, the author gives close readings of works by a wide range
of authors: Balboa, Balbuena, Brathwaite, Calvino, Carpentier,
Cervantes, Cesaire, Depestre, Descartes, Eltit, Fanon, Freud,
Gombrowicz, Harris, Kane, Kipling, Marshall, Walcott.
Many other authors' works become part of the book's general
argument about how cultures are made, how they figure both
themselves and other cultures, and how they mutually interact (when
they do) through productions of what the author calls the "fictive
imagination"--what in the West is called "art" but in different
cultures may take different names and serve different purposes.
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