Magical Criticism
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A01=Christopher Bracken
academic
animism
Author_Christopher Bracken
benjamin
Category=DSB
Category=JHM
critical
criticism
critique
discourse
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
era
ethnicity
ethnocentric
ideal
ideality
identity
knowledge
marx
migration
native american
nietzsche
peirce
philosopher
philosophical
philosophy
physical
postmodernism
proust
race
racial
racialized
racism
research
researchers
savage
scholarly
scholars
soul
time period
western
Product details
- ISBN 9780226069906
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2007
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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During the Enlightenment, Western scholars racialized ideas, deeming knowledge based on reality superior to that based on ideality. Scholars labeled inquiries into ideality, such as animism and soul migration, "savage philosophy," a clear indicator of the racism motivating the distinction between the real and the ideal. In their view, savage philosophers mistake connections between signs for connections between real objects and believe that discourse can have physical effects - in other words, they believe in magic. Christopher Bracken's "Magical Criticism" brings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light and shows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of "the savage," they remain active today in everything from attacks on postmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken reveals that many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savage philosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust to Freud, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Walter Benjamin.
For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophy presents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explain the very real effects created by the discourse of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.
Christopher Bracken is associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
