To justify the plundering of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.S. intellectual elites have continuously produced dismissive Congo discourses. Tracing these discourses in great depth and breadth, Johnny Van Hove shows how U.S. intellectuals (and their influential European counterparts) have used the Congo in similar fashions for their own goals. Analyzing intellectuals as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, and David Van Reybrouck, the book offers a theorization of Central West Africa, a case study of normalized narratives on the "Other," and a stirring wake-up call for contemporary writers on international history and politics.
To justify the plundering of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.S. intellectual elites have continuously produced dismissive Congo discourses. Tracing these discourses in great depth and breadth for the first time, Johnny Van Hove shows how U.S. intellectuals (and their influential European counterparts) have been using the Congo in similar fashions for their own goals. Analyzing intellectuals as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, and David Van Reybrouck, the book offers a theorization of Central West Africa, a case study of normalized narratives on the "Other", and a stirring wake up call for all contemporary writers on international history and politics.
The idea of writing this book appeared when I was working on some problems related to representations of physically relevant infinite - mensional groups of operators on physically relevant Hilbert spaces. The considerations were local, reducing the subject to dealing with representations of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras associated with the associated groups. There is a large number of specialized articles and books on parts of this subject, but to our suprise only a few represent the point of view given in this book. Moreover, none of the written material was self-contained. At present, the subject has not reached its final form and active research is still being undertaken. I present this subject of growing importance in a unified manner and by a fairly simple approach. I present a route by which students can absorb and understand the subject, only assuming that the reader is familliar with functional analysis, especially bounded and unbounded operators on Hilbert spaces. Moreover, I assume a little basic knowledge of algebras , Lie algebras, Lie groups, and manifolds- at least the definitions. The contents are presented in detail in the introduction in Chap. The manuscript of this book has been succesfully used by some advanced graduate students at Aarhus University, Denmark, in their "A-exame'. I thank them for comments.
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