Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804

There are several reasons why post-colonial theory provides a useful lens onto eighteenth-century colonial literature. As Srinivas Aravamudan reminds us in this book, there is no easy access to voices of resistance; the colonized cannot write back to the colonizers as though self-representation were an entirely transparent and unmediated process. Although we might be tempted to read some of the anti-imperialist texts from this period as directly subversive, the voices of the marginalized and the silenced, as Gayatri Spivak has taught us, are only too easily co-opted by colonialist ideology. Moreover, the distinct aesthetic value that late eighteenth-century romanticism bestowed on works of literature, raising these above and beyond their humdrum historical contexts, encounters perhaps its most subtle challenge in a theoretical approach that tries to find its way into the cracks of ideology. Such theory seeks out the refracted and refractory voices that shadow the triumphant discourses of imperialism and Enlightenment. Post-colonial theory is profoundly historical in that it enacts a rhetorical excavation of alternative histories and voices even from within the Enlightenment ways of seeing that continue to shape our understandings of the past.

The task of writing about anti-colonial agency, Aravamudan argues, must avoid reifying such agency into the authentic voice of an oppressed "other." Such reifications are already the work of colonialism as it "benevolently" tries to represent voices of resistance and in so doing effectively silences them. Tropicopolitans argues for the more subversive potential of the figure of tropicalization, which evokes at once the unstable relationship in the trope between tenor and vehicle and the challenging perspective of peoples from those regions of the earth that eighteenth-century Europeans considered inferior to themselves. Like catachresis, tropicalization provides the conceptual means of imagining something other than what is shaped by the rules of language and existing configurations of power. Actual tropicopolitans are thus not limited to the acts of "writing back" or of violent resistance to their colonial (and neo-colonial) oppressors. They have other strategies to "manipulate the ideological circumstances of their situation and to move from fatal histories to empowering ones" (13). Aravamudan identifies three such strategies: "virtualization," "levantinization," and "nationalization." Virtualization is an archival labor that describes a "retroactive projection of a counterhegemonic tradition" (17). This involves exploring colonialist representations for expressions of resistance whose force can be absorbed by a postcolonial politics of the present. Levantinization describes at once European representations of peoples and empires to the east and the south and the spaces of agency and ambivalence that occur within these representations. Nationalization, finally, expresses more directly the voices of colonized peoples who are speaking back to their oppressors, yet it does so through the appropriation and subversion of metropolitan discourses.

Aravamudan's tropicopolitan texts are, therefore grouped, not according to their overt political agendas, but by the forms of subversive intervention or agency that they make possible. The virtualizations that are enacted through Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, for example, have very different departure points. The ambivalent abolitionist story of Oroonoko, Aravamudan shows, identifies the commodification of Englishwomen with the fetishization of the exotic black man, a reading that reveals the subversive satirical content of a text that has been oversimplified and piously canonized as progressive. Defoe's adventure stories conceal an economic and sexual deviancy beneath the triumphant mercantilism that transforms criminal and renegade heroes into venture capitalists in collusion with the colonialist project. Neostoic criticisms of mercantilist expansion by Addison, Swift, and Gordon and Trenchard have to be read through an attack on the political corruption that attends a commercial age. The chapters on levantinization are similarly diverse. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's praise of Turkish culture, Aravamudan argues, is at once proto-feminist and humanist as it mobilizes a kind of progressive orientalism to articulate positions on women's freedom and cultural exchange. Rather differently, the chapter on Burke, Johnson, and Beckford focus on representations of oriental despotism only to argue for the capacity of the sublime to reverse the order of power. In the final section on nationalizations, the several studies are more thematically connected. A chapter on Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative challenges the idea that the gift of literacy is the route to emancipation. Instead, Aravamudan argues, Equiano mimics the way he has been constructed as fetish. The closing chapter identifies the 1791 slave revolt of Saint-Domingue as a scene of reading or "metaliteracy" that tropicalizes the eurocentric, Enlightenment arguments of Abbe de Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes.

Of course, the question that refuses to disappear is to what degree hybridity, mimicry, and metaliteracy are and have been able to alter the lived conditions of formerly colonized peoples in the neo-colonial South. The theory of tropicopolitics does offer a method for rewriting colonial history outside of the Enlightenment paradigms that we have inherited. And certainly culture, politics, and economics are informed by the ironies, twists, and inversions that always affect representation. Yet the kind of interventions that tropicalizations can make, and the post-colonial politics that they enliven, surely need to be buttressed by both citizen-based and cross-border activism even while they provide an important check on Enlightenment claims to political agency that continue to determine how we imagine social change. Aravamudan closes with a definition of a new Enlightenment in which "global theorists give way to local intellectuals, metropolitan readers are trumped by their colonial cousins, and cosmopolitans yield to tropicopolitans" (331). In its most provocative moments, this book hints that such reversals in colonial fortune really can take shape outside the subtly subversive arena of mimicry and ambivalence.