Srinivas Aravamudan

Although I am not in any way an eighteenth-century scholar, I was the chair of Srinivas Aravamudan’s dissertation committee at Cornell. I don’t recall exactly how this happened—whether he enlisted me at the beginning of his graduate school career, before his eventual specialization in the eighteenth century became clear, or whether he persuaded me that, despite my lack of knowledge of the eighteenth century and especially of the texts and discourses of colonialism, the rhetorical focus of his project made it appropriate for me to be his thesis director. (Srinivas was always very persuasive, as many colleagues and institutions, including the Mellon Foundation, can attest.) I suspect it may have been the latter, since Srinivas came to Cornell after having completed an MA at Purdue in 1986, and so was not starting from scratch. In any event, I agreed because I understood that it would be a pleasure to work with such a talented and engaging student, whatever the eventual topic of the dissertation.

Srinivas completed his dissertation, “Tropical Figures: Colonial Representation in England and France, 1688–1789,” in 1991, after spending a year in Paris, studying with Jacques Derrida, among others. (In the biographical sketch that prefaces the thesis, he wrote that “he decided both to conduct research and live life to the fullest in Paris, France. When he found that Paris was perhaps conducive to life, but much less so to research, he returned to labor in the intellectual vineyards at Ithaca.”) As the title indicates, his dissertation formed the basis of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, an immensely successful book which won the MLA’s first book prize and is still highly regarded in eighteenth-century studies.

The success of Tropicopolitans is testimony to the advantages of giving junior faculty time to develop the dissertation into something truly valuable and memorable, rather than pushing them to publish a book that will be out by the time of a tenure revue at the beginning of the sixth year, as administrators increasingly seem to demand. Srinivas’s dissertation was completed in 1991 and Tropicopolitans was published eight years later. He took the time to produce a real transformation. What is striking when one compares the two volumes is that, while the three main texts discussed in the dissertation—Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Captain Singleton, and the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes—remain central to the book (others were added, especially Equiano’s autobiography, Lady Mary Montagu’s Letters from the Levant, and several discussions of the sublime), the conceptual framework was radically modified. The starting point for the dissertation is the work of Antonio Gramsci and his account of subalternity, neither of which even figures in the index of Tropicopolitans. And the conclusion of the dissertation, essentially an essay on tropes, starts from Hayden White’s organization of the historical field through the four fundamental tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Strikingly, White too disappears from Tropicopolitans.

The fundamental argument of the dissertation, “that literary representations of colonized peoples—such as Caribbean slaves—had a profound impact on the formation of the Enlightenment-inspired Western political subject, because discourses of individualism, economic freedom, secularism, and national liberation were intricately linked with colonial modes of domination and the representation of those modes,” is recognizable in Tropicopolitans.¹ But the focus in the dissertation is on “examining the interaction between various modes of ‘subalternity’ and the strategies of ideological containment that were deployed to combat the resistances that subalterns posed” (3). Relying on Gramsci’s six-point definition of the steps to be followed in studying subalternity, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s influential discussions of hegemony and on the Subaltern Studies investigations of peasant resistance in India, the dissertation adopts a political vocabulary quite different from that of Tropicopolitans, asserting that “historically-oriented literary criticism could learn a great deal from subaltern historiography’s reconstruction of elisions within dominant historiography” (10–11). This introduction makes little reference to the current state of eighteenth-century studies but sees itself rather as allied with feminist, cultural-materialist and anti-imperialist critics generally in “a...