Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640 - 1940 (review)

Freedom's Empire is the most ambitious study of the novel and empire since Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism.¹ Covering three hundred years of writing by Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic writers, it claims that "race . . . has constituted the idea, the content, the location, the capital and the color of the Atlantic public sphere, by way of its foundational coupling with freedom" (446). Doyle supports this claim by drawing attention to how English-language novels encode crypto-histories of the English Revolution and disseminate racialized notions of freedom based on the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. She claims that "in Atlantic modernity, freedom is a race myth" and, following Saidiya Hartman, attempts to "scrutinize 'the vexed genealogy of freedom' as it is structured by race" (3) and taken up in freedom struggles against empire.² Doyle's notion of empire is subtle and capacious, encompassing the conquest and seduction of raced and gendered people. Though focusing exclusively on English-language fiction, Freedom's Empire should interest students of literature, as well as scholars interested in questions of race and gender in societies structured in dominance.

In Doyle's account, the initial iteration of what she calls an English-language freedom discourse comes from seventeenth-century English Revolutionary dissenters and the counter-histories of resistance they wrote to assert a free Anglo-Saxon (read non-Norman) past. In some respects (as Doyle acknowledges) this is a more than twice-told tale. What is new is the seriousness with which Doyle grapples with: (1) Anglo-Saxonism as a racialist discourse emergent in the context of a merchant-led Atlantic colonialism; (2) those merchants. coalition with religious dissenters within Parliament; and (3) the emergence of a "nascent public sphere" where both parties and their largely subaltern allies used "the language of native liberty" (41). Thus, "freedom," at least in its English-language version, was at its founding moment trans-Atlantic and bound up with colonialism and race.

After establishing the English-language novel's political pre-history, Freedom's Empire engages a diverse trans-Atlantic, but still canonical, coterie of writers including: Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf. The political is still pervasive in these writers. fictions, particularly in what Doyle terms their shared "phoenix plot" of ruin and rebirth which mirrors the rupture of the English Revolution. Doyle demonstrates how each novel portrays virtue under threat of ruin by tyranny. In its particular Atlantic version, "the trope of an Atlantic crossing correlates with . . . a swoon moment — the phoenix fall — involving a bodily 'undoing' or 'ruin' that is often sexual or coded feminine" (6). Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), for example, narrates this fall first in a conflict in Coromantien (contemporary Ghana) between the character Oroonoko and his king "over Imoinda's sexual and reproductive body" (105), implicitly a second time in Oroonoko and Imoinda's fall into slavery, and then again over Imoinda's body in Surinam. For both characters, liberty comes with death as Oroonoko kills Imoinda (and indirectly himself) in order to save her from tyranny (107). Doyle shows how this rendition of "noble" Africans is an Africanist use of black figures to make a political point regarding recent English politics. Conversely, in reading texts as varied as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1903), Doyle demonstrates that people of African descent are not merely raw material for English-language fiction, but also sovereign subjects and active participants in the literary-political struggle over freedom's reach.

Freedom's Empire's ironic take on the freedom narrative is more clear in its readings of texts like Eliza Haywood's Fantomina (1725) and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), which also show how literal and metaphoric rape figures as the scene and embodiment of virtue's (and liberty's) trial in many...