Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580-1640 (review)

In Colonial Transformations Rebecca Ann Bach investigates the intriguing relationships between English dramatic literature of the early modern period, English colonial conquests in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, and the consequent literary, ideological, and material changes wrought at home and abroad. She traces these colonial transformations from England's expansion into Wales in 1536, which started a process that she says "redefined the territory and people the English encountered, but also importantly refigured the territory and people of the metropolitan center" (3). In this way Bach problematizes the divisions between colonizer and colonized, a dichotomy challenged by postcolonial theorists who nonetheless rely on these categories to begin their investigations of colonial contact. Bach, likewise, recognizes the power differential inherent in the dichotomy but challenges the idea that only the colonized were changed as a result of English imperialism and that they were altogether subjugated to the mother country. Threats to the colonizers' Englishness also permeated early contact. In an argument that precedes Joyce Chaplin's work in Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Harvard 2001), Bach sees especially threatening changes enacted on English culture and identity through colonial contact as well as transformations that did not further English interests (as in rebellions among the lower classes of English settlers in Bermuda through their joining the "natives" and the general arming of Native Americans). While Bach's work must take a subordinate position to Chaplin's more extensive historical analysis, Colonial Transformations may be categorized with Subject Matter and with other recent works complicating imperial contact and with those employing contemporary postcolonial theory to understand English colonial history.

Attentive to native resistance, Bach argues for the transformative power of naming in her second chapter ("Bermuda's Ireland: Naming the Colonial World") and for the challenge offered by "Gaelic poets, Native Americans, and disgruntled returned colonists" who renamed and, therefore, re-appropriated colonial space (69). She relies on Paul Carter's work in The Road to Botany Bay (1987), which she extends by examining personal naming in addition to the naming of natural and political bodies (68). While Bach offers compelling examples of native opposition (like the Irish Earl of Tyrone taking the name O'Neill to challenge English attempts to obliterate it by legal decree, or like Native Americans renaming the English plantain "Englishman's foot"), her conclusion that naming reflects "power and resistance" is no longer innovative and her claim that the simple act of naming "is transformative in itself " rests oddly in a text that otherwise draws out significant material and ideological effects of language and performance. Nonetheless, her examination of the overlaying of place names in the case of the James River in Virginia (which upon contact was named "Powhatan" by John Smith) illustrates a complex negotiation of power and history in the interaction of two competing kings as well as in the suppression of the original Native American name for the river, "Paspahegh" (89).

In her discussions of Edmund Spenser and John Smith, Bach demonstrates the transformations wrought upon these colonizers and also links their literary production through their feminization of colonial space. Chapter 5, "A Virginia Maske," argues that John Smith's description of a masque in his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) transforms the original dance as well as himself by representing naked, dancing and singing Powhatan women, who offer themselves to Smith. The "Virginia Maske" depicts these women through English fantasies of "witches and concubines" (192). As Smith rereads the masque, he also transforms himself "into the authoritative ruler of Virginia" (201). In so doing he also underestimates the role of women in Powhatan culture. In chapter 1 ("Colonial Poetics in Spenser's Amoretti"), Bach challenges the standard division between Spenser's personal desires and colonial aspirations through the corresponding distinction between The Faerie Queene (1590) and Amoretti (1594). She contends that while critics have read The Faerie Queen in...