Srinivas Aravamudan: A Tribute

I first met Srinivas Aravamudan shortly after he arrived at Cornell for his graduate work: he was clearly very bright, a voracious reader, and, as his fellow graduate students would go on to discover, a supple and inventive reader of texts. I read one of his early essays then—I can no longer remember its subject—but do remember teasing him about his obvious pleasure in the deconstructive play of language; he was ready for Cornell, I said to him! For our lives were heady with debates: Marx contra Derrida, then Derrida alongside Marx, then Derrida as Marx (I simplify, of course), all the while leavened by our growing awareness that all literary and philosophical canons needed to be rewritten by feminists and by critical race theorists. This was the matrix of ideas within which Srinivas honed his critical practice, a practice that I and so many others benefited from in years to come. And there would have been so much more....

Srinivas’s two books in eighteenth-century studies, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 and Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, have won major academic prizes, but my sense of their importance comes from their impact on the work of other scholars, including my own. Srinivas’s writing, which combines a rigorous grounding in history with a remarkable sensitivity to literary language and form, has taught us to read differently, to keep in mind large, even global developments, while commenting on the supple modulations of literary and philosophical writing. He moves seamlessly and persuasively from a remark on the dance of syntax in a sentence or paragraph to a comment on intellectual history to a reminder of a signal event in the making of colonialism, and does so in a way that brilliantly illuminates the operations of language in culture. Few critics can treat complex ideas with the clarity he achieves, fewer still can turn sharp observations on images in a literary text into probing accounts of the epistemological or philosophical apparatus of colonialism.

Tropicopolitans, Srinivas’s first book, made clear that he belonged to the front rank of scholars of eighteenth-century British literature. Even today Tropicopolitans dares literary historians and students of colonialism to rethink our understanding of postcolonial studies as well as of the European “enlightenment.” And it does so invitingly, elegantly, and as a model of supple, thoughtful critical investigation, one unafraid to question—or to celebrate—the work of others. In a review in Diaspora, this is how I summarized my response to Srinivas’s book:

Tropicopolitans is a challenging and ambitious intellectual achievement, one that demands philosophical and conceptual engagement from its readers even as it offers a rich series of readings of texts and historical events. Indeed, it is fair to say that each one of the “acts of reading” Aravamudan performs here is informed by, and exemplary of, some larger theoretical or intellectual problem highlighted in contemporary critical-theoretical inquiry more generally. Reading Tropicopolitans is thus also a high-level introduction to definitive problems in postcolonial studies—its enduring achievement will be its illumination of eighteenth-century British and French colonial cultures via the conceptual lenses provided by debates within postcolonial theory and criticism. This is, in fact, the “specific genealogy”—not so much for neocolonialism as for disciplinary practices—that Aravamudan details in this book, a genealogy of the crucial cultural and intellectual problems that bedevil all those of us whose disciplinary interests and specializations return us to the eighteenth century, though not in the manner of the antiquarian or the celebrant but with the engagement of the analyst and critic.¹

Since its publication, Tropicopolitans has become required reading for students and professors of eighteenth-century culture, and will continue to influence studies of the cultural relation between European colonizers and those colonized by them for a long time to come.

Srinivas went on to write a series of impressive essays on eighteenth-century literary texts and literary issues, including two that function as introductions to new editions of texts. His “Introduction” to Volume 6 of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation,² which reprints the fiction of the...