Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, and: The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (review)

In the broad, necessarily reductive rubrics of GenEd courses and literary anthologies, it has fallen to the nineteenth century to wear the title of the "Age of Empire," while the milder epithet of "Enlightenment" glosses the eighteenth century. If the nineteenth century has to some extent provided an alibi for eighteenth-century imperial or proto-imperial activity, serving as the post-lapsarian after to the Enlightenment's before, scholarship in the wake of the postcolonial turn has increasingly questioned that tidy cleavage. Might imperialism owe a more direct debt to Enlightenment thought, whether as its dialectical opposite or as the concrete practice to the Enlightenment's abstract theory? Did the highly racialized, exploitative regimes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European empires betray the principles of the Enlightenment or carry them to their logical conclusion?

In Enlightenment Orientalism, Srinivas Aravamudan focuses on the segment of Enlightenment thought that might seem most vulnerable to charges of complicity with the imperial project—but it is precisely in the unexpected site of Orientalism that his intriguing book finds an underexploited possibility for resistance. "Imperial conquest turned Orientalism malefic," he contends, and his study sets out to disentangle "a transcultural, cosmopolitan, and Enlightenment-inflected Orientalism" from its more sinister nineteenth-century incarnation, which Aravamudan terms "Saidian" Orientalism (11, 3). As the book's subtitle suggests, the novel, and more particularly the domestic realist novel whose "rise" is trumpeted in the teleological narratives of Ian Watt and Erich Auerbach (among others), is the object whose epistemological and historical privilege Aravamudan hopes to unsettle. By examining some of the alternative routes that fiction took during the eighteenth century, Enlightenment Orientalism seeks to provide both a fuller account of the diversity of fictional imaginings in this period and to argue for the Utopian potential of Orientalism before the imperial turn.

Specifically, Aravamudan sees in Orientalist writing a site from which to question the symbiosis between nationalism and what Clifford Siskin has termed "novelism" (Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]), that is to say, between the nation's and the novel's parallel claims to inevitability. Where the novel promoted a closed universe bounded by the constraints of national space, bourgeois experience, and realist representation, Orientalist fiction—a capacious category in which Aravamudan includes "Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias"—cultivated a mode of imagination that was "experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist," invested in transcultural comparison rather than monocultural assertion (4). Monoculture in all its forms is the distemper Enlightenment Orientalism seeks to remedy—both the inward-looking "narcissism" and "xenophobia" of an emergent nationalism and the myopic literary history that collapses the enormous diversity of eighteenth-century fiction into the unitary form of the novel (4). The resistance of Orientalist texts to the novel's tyranny is largely offered through the brute fact of their difference from its example—through their simply not being novels. One provocative suggestion of Aravamudan's study, however, is that the novel's "gatekeeping" mechanisms, its attempts to rewrite the protocols of reading in its own image, were not mirrored in the fictional modes with which it competed (22). Enlightenment Orientalism in his account not only differed, but also strove through the very form of its fictions to explore and sustain the range of human difference.

Aravamudan reads a diverse, sometimes dizzying, range of texts of the French and English Enlightenment, some (like Voltaire's Zadig or Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah) centrally fixated on their Orientalist topoi, others (Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Bernard de Fontenelle's A Discovery...