Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (review)

Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. By Srinivas Aravamudan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. x + 424 pp.

In the last few years postcolonial thought has reached back increasingly into cultural history, disabusing itself of the proposition that the world began with Kipling. So far the Romantic era, treated in books by Nigel Leask, Javed Majeed, and Saree Makdisi and in an influential collection of essays edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, has been the most productive area for this reaching back. ¹ The long eighteenth century has not been neglected, but Srinivas Aravamudan's important book opens up possibilities and is notable both for its archival strength and for the skill and sophistication with which it brings postcolonial thinking into the landscape of eighteenth-century scholarship.

Aravamudan's sympathies lie with what might be called the school of radical contingency, which sees each text as the unique, interactive result of a highly specific cultural envelopment within which it is written and writes back. Radical contingency satisfies the current passion for nuance and the current distaste for anything approaching homogeneity, but, carried to an extreme, it makes all generalizations dubious. Those wishing to generalize prudently can find themselves resorting to cultural poetics and strongly insisting on the deviations that make them precarious. Alternatively, they can resort to grand narratives that fall to pieces symptomatically during their very articulation.

Aravamudan's exercise in navigation between Scylla and Charybdis is to arrange his investigations under a series of dynamic tropes. The tropes are dynamic because they and the cultural artifacts they organize are mutually constitutive. Named virtualization, levantinization, and nationalization (16-23), Aravamudan's tropes are broad enough for a wide range of texts to assemble under them, supporting and shaking them by turns. They also unfold chronologically, raising the appalling prospect of a grand narrative that proceeds from a trope of dominance to a trope of the empire writing back. Aravamudan recoils from this possibility with fitting caution: "Despite its historical underpinnings, this book is a literary-critical foray that focuses on plural and fragmentary acts of reading" (24).

The fragmentary is not necessarily fragmented. If Aravamudan's readings wander from their tropical containments, they do so to explore the surplus that readings within those containments generate. The nature of excess is that it has no principles. Surpluses are not simply underminings; the complications that Aravamudan detects amount to considerably more than a subversive undertow. They call for a more inclusive reading, in which the reader's overall perceptions must be founded, and, in the nature of the case, provisionally founded, on an almost agonistic relationship between surplus and trope.

Aravamudan's explorations reveal more than one example in which resistance cannot escape collusion with the program and cultural practices it resists. Oroonoko, Charlot Welldon, and Captain Singleton can "decry their own commodification, even as they are oblivious to and sometimes actively encourage the commodification of proximate others" (106). These collusions (and the more complex cases of Equiano and Toussaint, writing from the other side of the colonial divide) do not make depictions of resistance invalid. They do raise the question of whether any voice we hear can be fully disengaged from its matrix, whether anyone speaks without also being spoken for.

Levantinization is a trope that Aravamudan carefully distinguishes from orientalism. In his fine chapter on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters, levantinization is "both an investigative tool and a utopian projection." In other Levantine writings, a "more familiar negative aspect is revealed along with a utopian underside" (159). Orientalism's goals are "culture-bound by producing a logic of self and other," whereas Montagu's levantinization is "class-bound but cross-cultural" (160). One might add that the Letters, though class-bound, are also gender-empowered. That empowerment contributes to their cultural mobility, offering exotic reassessments for a feminine otherness that is domestically devalued.

Vathek, like Moore's Lalla Rookh, is a text that can show up the...