Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn's Oroonoko

This essay excavates two key moments where the Orient appears in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) to romanticize transatlantic slavery and mediate relations between colonizer and colonized. The Orientalized practices of japanning, embalming, and tiger hunting—all techniques of preservation—feature prominently in the setting of Surinam, and demonstrate the relevance of Asia to colonial encounters of the transatlantic world. In the context of global commerce between East and West, the author borrows from contemporary developments in chinoiserie and natural history to construct a new myth of immortality, one that memorializes and objectifies slave labor through the commodity culture of the East Indies trade.