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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 41.3 (2001) 583-603



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James Cobb, Colonial Cacophony, and the Enlightenment

Nandini Bhattacharya


Could it be that with the increasing strength of the Abolition movement and the eventual outlawing of the slave-trade, slavery became capable of functioning as its opposite, a metaphor for freedom?

In an age of rapid global changes triggered by commerce and global warfare, the British dramatist James Cobb (1756-1818) celebrated "Anglo-Saxon liberty" against that volatile global backdrop, exemplifying the Enlightenment's brief flirtation with a global cacophony of cultures, languages, and performances. 1 Cobb was an officeholder of the East India Company; his plays about cross-cultural encounters provide long-neglected examples of the Enlightenment colonial imagination at work on fictions of domestic and colonial reform. "Reform" is a critical aspect of Cobb's plots, and it will also be the focus of the critique in this essay. Far from being stable, unitary, and unquestionable, by the late eighteenth century, British coloniality was fragmented. A heterogeneous but regulated British colonial identity was constructed by dramatists as well. The anxiety produced in England by the cacophony of global others--endlessly subjugated and "resurrected" in various relations of difference or identity with the self-- [End Page 583] created a colonial fantasy (occasionally a nightmare) of self as an outcome of encounters with difference. 2 Such self-constructions then necessitated reformist intervention to reassert Britishness.

Cobb's plays depict at least two scenarios for constructing British national identity. 3 The first is the romance and marriage scenario: familial comedy of manners involving disguises, crossed identities, and happy rediscoveries and reunions (including cynical age rebutted and youth vindicated). European women, like slaves, acted in this scenario as the keepers of children as well as of ancestral memories. But, besides being receptacles of European racial identity, they were also what Joseph Roach has called "sacrificial effigies" or "surrogates": "The effigy is a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance--kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior, and displaced transmission--to produce memory through surrogation." 4 Like slaves, European women as sacrificial effigies or surrogates symbolized subversive excess, always nodes of anxiety in a culture. 5 In Cobb's plays, therefore, women's role of "savior" is the bright side of their containment.

Racial others in the second scenario dramatized public British male identity based on homosociality and aggression. The second scenario involved masculine exploration in the context of maritime commerce and military engagements. In reality, each scenario incorporated some tincture of the other, demonstrating that private, conjugal mores were actually inseparable from public discourse. 6 For instance, both plots are liberally sprinkled with music, spectacle, and performances. Cobb's Love in the East, for instance, opened on 25 February 1788, at Drury Lane, with a variety of new scenery, including a view of Calcutta from an on-the-spot painting by William Hodges with dress and decorations to match. 7 The incorporation of colonial margins as scenery in these spectacles metonymizes the nation represented as both home and mart, private and public realms. Heterotopic and hybrid cultural images and performance linked together representations of private, public, and global. In remembering themselves as a nation refulgent in past and present glory, the British implicitly understood their intimate history through their relations with colonial subjects and neighbors. The anxiety caused by such sutured narratives of identity leads to Cobb's divided plots: an engagement with the other is inevitably corrected by sentimentalized repression of that other, a repression characterized by the use of romance plots as an ideological tool for appropriating difference. 8 [End Page 584]

The hesitant, divided quality of Cobb's triumphalist plots and declarations is precisely what makes him worth study. Their dividedness is demonstrated by his constant de-centering of static and stable nation-state and national identity. In his dramatic universe, encounter with difference repeatedly changes determinations of self and other, difference being defined both by gender and by race. Also significant, Cobb's uncannily oracular plays appeal to twentieth-century readers of colonial and postcolonial texts...

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