◎聯合推薦：南方朔、孫大川、陳芳明、廖咸浩 法國存在主義哲學大師／沙特 《大地上的受苦者》是弗朗茲‧法農的最後一本著作。早在《黑皮膚，白面具》一書中，法農便提出對於種族主義的反思，他認為種族主義並非偶發事件，亦非恣意妄為，而是一種宰制的文化體系，這種體系也在殖民地運作。若是不看清統治文化所帶來的壓迫效應與奴役現象，那麼對於種族主義的抗爭便是徒然，因為這種壓迫的觸角廣及社團、政治與文化，甚至也會影響個體的精神狀態。在全球化對弱勢地區已然形成新殖民剝削的今天，法農的諸多觀點，都能讓我們看清當前的許多現象，原是源自整個殖民主義／資本主義的淵藪。

In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.