Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804

Tropicopolitans consolidates and extends previous postcolonial forays into eighteenth-century studies, thereby reimagining the relation of postcolonial studies to literary and cultural scholarship more broadly. With the term "tropicopolitan," adapted from a term in natural history indicating plants that grow in the tropics, Aravamudan links varying levels of representation and practice, enabling the reconceptualization of agency that is the book's signal accomplishment. Referring to both the "colonized subject ... as fictive construct and [the] actual resident of tropical space," that is, both "object of representation and agent of resistance," the term "tropicopolitan" evinces a characteristic "tension between representational surplus and referential lack" (5). Tropicopolitanism is therefore the (intended or unintended) revision of a colonialist trope from a position marginalized by it. Hence Aravamudan also acknowledges that the process of tropicalization is enacted as readily via "the continued retroactive creation of postcolonial genealogies, including my own, that further deform the phenomena" (15) as in contexts chronologically closer to the narratives and events under scrutiny.

Like its title, the book's three sections--"Virtualization," "Levantinization," and "Nationalization"--derive from neologisms that denote often overlapping, open-ended processes of retroactive reconstruction, giving the lie to analyses of colonialism that presume the separability of its victors and victims. Aravamudan's methodology is therefore broadly deconstructive. His focus throughout is on ways alleged or presumed oppositions in practice variously coexisted, enabling reappropriation by practitioners of widely varying intentionalities, politics, and moments. He has an eye for irony and paradox, terms that recur in each chapter, as well as for the simultaneously utopian and dystopian promise or potential of texts and acts. Although his is not the first postcolonial study of the eighteenth century to move beyond Edward Said's early model of reading to unlearn domination--Laura Brown's Ends of Empire, for example, eschewed the claim that one could "separate a text that serves the purposes of empire from the effort to put a stop to it" (22),-- Tropicopolitans focuses attention on the broader question of agency as such, de-emphasizing the too-frequent tendency to become preoccupied with the critic's own role. His work therefore differs from its predecessors by Brown, John Barrell, Peter Hulme, Moira Ferguson and Felicity Nussbaum in the thoroughness with which it works through its commitment to the study of reading representations and practices.[1] The result is a fuller understanding of the specific historic contexts in which, for example, Mary Wortley Montagu's tropicopolitan fantasy of assimilation into Turkish society in her Turkish travels and dress or Edmund Burke's metaphoric location of horror in the imagined response of a suddenly-sighted blind English person to seeing a black woman in an urban crowd were "exploitable by subsequent readers" and are "indicative of their [writers'] ambivalences" (21).

Each section tracks a particular eighteenth-century context in which tropicopolitanism occurred and from which it can continue to be enacted. The groupings also indicate a kind of chronology, with virtualization a correlate of early eighteenth-century rhetorical tendencies, levantinization most readily found at mid-century, and nationalization the special province of late-eighteenth-century political change and nation making. Even as Aravamudan stresses the necessarily non-teleological nature of the processes of reappropriation he describes, this provisionally chronological sequence lends clarity and force both to the book's revisionist readings and to Aravamudan's neologisms in describing them.

In "Virtualization," Aravamudan argues that avowedly revisionist appropriations of early eighteenth-century colonialist rhetoric were facilitated precisely by its opacity and emptiness relative to the more recognizably modern colonialist tropes found in the late eighteenth century and thereafter. Three chapters in this section focus successively on Southerne's and, more centrally, Behn's variants of Oroonoko, with an eye to discerning "scholarship's ironic continuation of Behn's celebratory intentions" (33); Defoe's piratical narratives, especially Captain Singleton, noting its seemingly utopian promise of piracy as a "'coastal fraternity' that displaces laterally what would otherwise turn into a chain of colonial command" (93); and the "racialized and colonial contexts" (103) of English, Anglo-Irish, and American deployments of "stoical" discourse, represented by Addison's Cato (1713), Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726, 1735) and Drapier's Letters (1725-6), and Gordon and Trenchard's Cato's Letters (1720-35).

The book's second and third sections offer in turn groups of chapters demonstrative of "Levantinization" and "Nationalization": the former emphasizes the plural nature of orientalisms and "the specifically dynamic interactions of European culture with Islamic ones " (19), while the latter indicates anti-imperialist practice resembling the now-familiar "empire writes back" variety. Aravamudan offers case studies of levantinization in chapters on Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and on the oriental sublime with reference to Burke, Johnson, and Beckford. In the final section, "Nationalization," Aravamudan most fully realizes his self-proclaimed aspiration to eschew the use of "ethical criticism as a form of social therapy, preferring instead to "identify the institutions and reading practices that determine these shifts of value" (14-15). Thus successive chapters juxtapose Equiano's Interesting Narrative to the ill-fated project of black resettlement in Sierra Leone in order to analyze the critical tendency to valorize the achievement of literacy as the achievement of agency tout court, and consider the Abbe de Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des etablissements des europeens dans les deux Indes (1780, 3d ed.) in relation to the French and Haitian Revolutions.

Of the three terms, or tools, that Aravamudan coins to explore the productive gaps between colonialist representation and ideological and material contexts, virtualization is, for this reader, the most powerful because it so suggestively answers a persistent need for nuanced models of early eighteenth-century colonialist forms. Nineteenth-century derived models of empire and race, which predominate in postcolonial studies, are anachronistic and therefore less useful to our own field; Aravamudan's nuanced historicism here sets a new benchmark for postcolonial eighteenth-century studies.

Tropicopolitans' method and case studies are not, however, without their potential limitations. "Virtualization" has, it would seem, so much to do with the historicity of description as such that one wonders how its processes might resemble rhetorical modes and appropriations that did not take non-European peoples or colonial or commercial practices as their subject. Ironically, Aravamudan's critical sophistication works against him in his chapter on "Equiano and the Politics of Literacy." Laudably correcting the humanist bias that conflates Equiano's literacy with agency tout court, Aravamudan seeks contemporary resonances grander than his case studies can sustain: "As the book confronts the computer screen and libraries unravel into the electronic archive, Literature spontaneously combusts and sublimates into the multidimensional futures of literacies" (288). The chapter's reluctance to acknowledge the overwhelming rewards of literacy, in both the eighteenth century and our own, makes this deconstructive turn less persuasive than is the book as a whole.

Nonetheless, Aravamudan's wide and generous citation of scholarship that is not avowedly postcolonial--including the work of Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Keith Thomas, and Claude Rawson--confirms his abiding refusal to take, or accept the formulation of, simple dichotomies. Some twenty years ago, Foucault urged us to "free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment" (45); Tropicopolitans succeeds beyond its predecessors in helping us to do precisely that.[2] Its insistence on the always-ongoing nature of appropriation and contestation may explain the way it manages both to enact its ethical commitments and to eschew a facile moralism or Europhobia. Though the project's authority finally rests on its theoretical concerns, the power of Aravamudan's abstractions rests in their close proximity to historical particularities. This often brilliant book deserves a wide readership, both by those who know already that they share its ethical aims, and those who value rigor and insight wherever they are found.

[1] Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 1978); John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1985) and Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (New York: Methuen 1986); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge 1992); Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

[2] Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984)