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

Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804, by Srinivas Aravamudan. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 424 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2315-X.

In this book, Srinivas Aravamudan engages in what he terms the "tropicalization" of European colonialist discourse, that is, a tropological revision of discourse of colonial domination that brings about a contestation of European rule. The book is divided into three parts that correspond to three types of tropicalizations. The first section, which comprises the first three chapters, uses virtualization to reread the legend of Oroonoko in Behn and Southerne, the depiction of accounting and piracy in Defoe, and the neostoicist discourse in Addison and Swift. The second section examines the functioning of levantinization in Montagu's Letters from the Levant and the phantasm of oriental despotism in Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, Johnson's Rasselas, and Beckford's Vathek. In the last section, the book addresses a form of tropicalization known as nationalization, which is said to belong to the "empire writes back" variety. The trope of nationalization is used to read Equiano's Interesting Narrative of Gustavus Vassa the African, reports on the Sierra Leone resettlement project, Abbé de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes as well as the history of Toussaint Louverture.

One of the most engaging discussions in the book is the author's critique of what he deems a problematic celebration of tropicopolitans as literary subjects who empowered themselves through an unexamined notion of literacy, a move that runs the risk of re-articulating the evolutionary narrative of the early abolitionists. While this concern is no doubt legitimate in the case of Equiano who was highly versed in English language and culture as opposed to the less literate Sierra Leoneans, the issue of using literacy or literature as the sign of humanity took on quite different dimensions in other colonial contexts. For humanity had also been systematically denied by Europeans to peoples who did have a long history of literacy such as the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Indochinese among many others. Hence what is at stake is not simply a question of conflation of humanity and literacy as the book has it, but rather what constituted the kind of literacy that could bestow humanity on others as literacy per se was no guarantee for membership to the human family as defined by European colonial discourse.

Another issue brought out by the book that merits further investigation is the contention that Montagu's narrative of Turkish women partakes of a hybrid synthesis of feminist and orientalist impulses. What has not been spelled out in the analysis is the kind of parameter used in the deployment of the attribute "feminism," a term that requires a great deal of ideological unpacking in the history of the relationship of Western feminists to imperialism as shown in the works of Antoinette Burton and Clare Midgley.

Through its tropicalizing of a number of eighteenth-century European texts that are richly contextualized within colonial history, Tropicopolitans is indeed a valuable contribution to the re-mapping of the relationships between literary representations and colonialism.

Marie-Paule Ha

Marie-Paule Ha is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.

Works Cited

Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1994.

Midgley, Clare, ed. Gender and Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

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