Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (review)

Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies has begun to formulate questions and methods that gesture toward a widened eighteenth century that supplements the already accepted notion of the "long eighteenth century." As Felicity Nussbaum has argued in the introduction to her recent book, a "critical global studies" of this period can help us understand how the concept of globalization, now taking hold in various disciplines, is the "end result of a long historical process"; a process, the prehistory of which we could fruitfully seek in the eighteenth century (The Global Eighteenth Century, 2003).

Pamela Cheek's Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex is a significant contribution to this problematic of the global in eighteenth-century studies, and resonates with the critical attention furthered by postcolonial theory and the work of scholars like Nussbaum, Srinivas Aravamudan, Suvir Kaul, Jonathan Lamb and Roxann Wheeler. However, Cheek's book, by its comparative and methodological reach, adds a dimension often missing in recent scholarship. Colonial discourse analysis of eighteenth-century material is still for the most part British-centered and often works from the premise that novels, travel narratives and other cultural texts represented European expansion as a unilinear process—a process in which the colonies and other geographical spaces were in effect made over in the metropolitan image. Cheek, on the other hand, presents a more complex triangulation of the imaginative geography at work in mid to late eighteenth century. As her title suggests, the sexual antipodes were not only diametrically opposite parts of the globe whose cultural difference served to produce Europe as Self, but they were also a fiction-effect produced by Oriental and utopian narratives of this period which shored up the perception that sexual order characterized the political order in the southern parts of the globe. Hence, in the first section of the book called "Metropolitan Allegories," Cheek demonstrates how questions of sexual order provided the contestatory language enabling the activation of British and French national identities. In the second section titled "Antipodes," Cheek traces the third side of the discursive triangle through a number of texts representing eighteenth-century British and French encounters with Tahiti. As Tahiti became the basis for comparing different national sexual orders on a universal scale, modern theories of race associated with notions of essence and degeneration gradually emerged in the writing resulting from these South Sea encounters.

When Cheek contextualizes her illuminating study of French and British colonial writing within a number of metropolitan debates about sex, sexuality, and polity, she reveals that questions of sex and sexuality were increasingly hitched to "governmentality" (a term that Cheek borrows from the later work of Michel Foucault). As such, her analysis also goes beyond the more standard discussions of the sexualization of non-European others or the representations of colonial adventures as sexual adventures. Cheek argues that discussions about the future of the polity in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and Britain were fashioned through a "colonial identity between metropoles" which depended on a shared field of textual circulation (and production). As Cheek makes clear, the French and English 'spoke' to each other through a variety of narratives that circulated between the two countries. This intertextual genealogy is fascinating to anyone interested in the afterlives of French and English novels and how they were read by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on police reports, pornography, journalism, scandalous memoirs, novels, travel narratives, political pamphlets and scientific treatises, Cheek juxtaposes the contents of this rich cultural archive to produce some insightful and original arguments about Enlightenment sexuality and politics.

In the first half of the book, metropolitan debates about sex are at center stage. Here, as Cheek explores the idea of sexual order operating within English and French notions of public identity, her comparative analysis serves to render some specificity to the more general axioms about what Sylvana Tomaselli calls the "Enlightenment Debate on Women" (History Workshop Journal 20 [1985]: 101-24). In Cheek...