Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 by Rebecca Ann Bach (review)

192 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 >integral to [Taj al-Saltanah=s] self-perception and self-representation.= Najmeh Najafi wrote three books about her experiences. The >narrative strategies= of the first are used to >grasp the way in which [Najafi=s] identity is made to fit the image of Persia as an anxious and grateful recipient of American aid and protection.= Multiple gender issues are addressed through the texts of the two female >missing Persians,= Najafi and Taj alSaltanah . In the conclusion, the author reiterates her sense that the depersonal-ized accounts she has dealt with in this study can tell much >about the narrating self and its struggles with conflicting cultural archives.= (RIVANNE SANDLER) Rebecca Ann Bach. Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580B1640 Palgrave 2000. xiv, 290. US $29.95 Scholars of early modern transatlantic studies and the literature of the encounter should welcome the addition of Rebecca Ann Bach=s fine study to the growing corpus of work in this area. Colonial Transformations brings together a wide range of both literary and non-literary materials concerning the cultural interactions that occurred in England, Ireland, and the New World during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While building from the important works produced by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Mary Fuller, and Jeffrey Knapp over the last decade, Bach sets out to examine the reciprocal process of cultural transformation on both sides of the Atlantic that resulted from England=s early colonial projects in Ireland, Bermuda, and Virginia. The author reads texts ranging from promotional pamphlets, legal proceedings, and maps in conjunction with more familiar works of poetry, sermons, masques, and plays. This allows Bach to explore the complicated cultural interactions articulated, sometimes overtly and other times more obscurely, in works such as Spenser=s Amoretti, Jonson=s plays and masques, and Captain John Smith=s accounts of his adventures in the New World. One of the important correctives Bach=s work offers is its attention to the social differences extant among the early colonists and planters. She notes in her introduction that >we literary critics and cultural studies practitioners pay attention to the hybridity of the native subject but too often see the colonizer as a monolithic representative of governmental or technological power, rather than a constructed category painfully maintained in order to preserve English power in the face of appealing or divisive difference.= Her work joins that of Thomas Scanlan and Kim Hall in their efforts to create a broader sphere of understanding of what Bach terms the >New Atlantic World.= Such studies are invaluable to the scholarly discourses surrounding the issues of cultural encounter, gender, class, and race in the literature of humanities 193 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 this period. Chapter 1, >Colonial Poetics in Spenser=s Amoretti,= examines Spenser=s sonnet sequence within the context of English colonial policy in Ireland. Readers have long been familiar with the connections between Elizabethan Irish policy and works such as The Faerie Queene and the View of the Present State of Ireland (Bach chooses not to address questions surrounding the authorship of the View raised by Jean Brink), but as Bach points out they have tended to isolate the Amoretti from the politics of its site of composition . By focusing on the problematic language of violence and submission that marks the rhetoric of Spenser=s sonnets, Bach is able to elucidate the complexities of gender and colonialism that imbue contemporary commentaries and propaganda concerned with Ireland. This is an important move for Bach, who argues that the Amoretti >is as deeply imbricated in [Spenser=s] colonial career as his public epic poetry. Indeed, it is precisely the Amoretti=s personal vision that links these poems to Spenser=s colonial desires, desires which were clearly at the heart of his life and ambitions.= The second chapter, >Bermuda=s Ireland: Naming in the Colonial World,= deals with the colonies on both sides of the Atlantic and focuses on the issue of naming in Ireland, Bermuda, and Virginia. Bach demonstrates that mapping and naming/renaming in Britain=s...