The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (review)

In this ambitious and provocative book, Clement Hawes attempts to show us a new eighteenth century, or rather an older eighteenth century, one that has been buried under twentieth-century historiography blaming it for phenomena that fully matured only in the nineteenth century: specifically, modern racism, nationalism, and imperialism. The argument turns on two key concepts: "metalepsis," which Hawes lines up with new approaches outlined by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition and Greg Clingham's Making History and Questioning History; and "immanent critique," theorized by Adorno in his essay "Sociology and Empirical Research." The first term Hawes de fines as the misrepresentation of the past for purposes in the present, for instance the fabrication of racial and national origins in hopes of consolidating Britain identity. The second concept, "immanent critique," denotes the capacity for opposition at the very moment such histories are being written, or in this case the Enlightenment's ability to critique itself, long before Dialectic of Enlightenment. Thus, Hawes wants to peel back the sedimentation of bad faith and unfair historiography and to reveal an eighteenth century when modernity was still very much inchoate, unpredictable, and self-reflective. He concludes, "Alternate modernities were—and still are—possible" (207).

The book's most compelling chapter focuses on James Macpherson and the "Ossian" controversy, which serves as the primary case study on metalepsis (actually, the discussion of Ossian continues in a later chapter about Samuel Johnson, who famously rejected the epic poem as inauthentic). The publication of Fingal is commonly read as an assertion of Celtic nationalism, but Hawes elucidates a more complex political dynamic, demonstrating that the poem's invention of shared roots was meant to close the gap between Scotland and England largely for the sake of Anglo-Scottish elites within the "Second" British Empire—as always, at the expense of the Irish. Indeed, Macpherson was just one of many among the Lowland Scottish intelligentsia who aimed to forge (in both senses) a new British history that would enable Scotland to act as an imperial partner, not merely a de facto internal colony. Ossian, for Hawes, is not a historical aberration but "the catalyst for, and epitome of, a much broader project of eighteenth-century cultural nationalism: the metaleptic fabrication of ethnic, national, and racial 'roots'" (36). These disingenuous roots, it was hoped, would serve as a foundational past on which to build an imperial future.

Three middle chapters, in a section entitled "Global Palimpsests: Productive Affiliations," look at writers from the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, asserting that the former—specifically Sterne, Gay, and Equiano—have provided the latter—Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and Charles Johnson—with source ideas for a variety of sophisticated and powerful critiques of nationalism, imperialism, and racism, respectively. Hawes's bold and compelling point is that today's postcolonial authors are not so much writing against the Enlightenment as writing with it, extending and amplifying seminal critiques that originated before the British Empire came to be undergirded by a more settled ideology. These chapters are truly original and always interesting, and if their close readings are sometimes selective, they at least make an excellent preliminary case for literary connections that rarely get mentioned.

In the book's third and final section, we move back to the eighteenth century and stay there, with chapters on Swift and Johnson. Hawes's analysis of Gulliver's Travels, developed from an earlier article, shows us how Swift inverts the traveller's gaze and colonizing energy back on Gulliver himself, who stands in stark contrast to Robinson Crusoe: "Gulliver, fragmented among incompatible identities, is the deliberate antithesis of the superbly self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe, a hero whose proud individuality is ruthlessly defined over and against a subordinate 'Other'" (159). Johnson, meanwhile, is described as a cosmopolitan with a healthy suspicion of nationalist myth-making. His writings on English authors and the English language were nothing if not coolheaded and judicious, and Rasselas...