Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities, and: Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (review)

Eurocentrism, argues Samir Amin, emerged simultaneously with the capitalist world system, the global reach of western European imperialism, and the (western European) Renaissance.¹ Until recently, however, attention to issues of empire during the Renaissance remained the province of historians and social scientists such as Fernand Braudel, Anthony Pagden, and Immanuel Wallerstein, rather than of literary critics.² In "The Tempest" and Its Travels—a collection focusing on the ur-text for studies of colonialism in the English Renaissance—Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman stress that an antiquarian approach dominated the field until the 1960s, when the English-language postcolonial challenge was issued by the Barbadian writer George Lamming.³ Stephen J. Greenblatt's essay "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," initially published in the landmark collection First Images of America (1976), launched the New Historicist challenge to the Eurocentric bias in literary studies of the English Renaissance.⁴ In the wake of Greenblatt's seminal publication, articles by Mary Fuller, Richard Helgerson, Jeffrey Knapp, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullaney, and Stephen Orgel (all published in the journal Representations) further nuanced the New Historicist approach to the New World in English Renaissance literature.⁵ However, as Nabil Matar has stressed in a series of essays that have steadily appeared in print since the mid-1980s and that culminated in the dual publication of Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998) and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999), the New Historicist response to Eurocentrism in literary studies of the English Renaissance has resulted in an equally limited Americocentric bias. As Matar argues, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "Britain did not enjoy military or industrial power over Islamic countries. Rather, the Muslims had a power of self-representation which English writers knew they had either to confront or to engage."⁶ Literary and cultural critics such as Daniel Vitkus, Linda McJannet, Bindu Malieckal, Jonathan Burton, and myself share Matar's emphasis on the Ottoman Empire as a European power during the Renaissance, adding to this emerging body of criticism further studies of gender and empire, stage plays, and traveler's tales.

Acknowledging the impact of Greenblatt's challenge to the traditional Eurocentric bias of English Renaissance studies and Matar's challenge to the subsequent Americocentric bias, Barbara Fuchs's and John Michael Archer's meticulously documented and superbly argued studies (re)turn us to a radically revised notion of the "old worlds" that Archer signals in his title. Fuchs focuses on a Spanish empire troubled by external rivals—especially the Ottomans and the English—and riven with internal contradictions, primarily represented by discontented conquistadors, rebellious natives of the Americas, and the ultimately exiled Moriscos. In launching her paradigm shift toward a radically reconfigured "Old World," Fuchs proposes as her central theoretical tool a "capacious cultural mimesis" that shifts the postmodern/postcolonial emphasis on difference into an investigation of "the political and rhetorical valence of sameness" (3, 4). She develops her theory of cultural mimesis in dialogue with New Historicist critics such as Greenblatt and Joseph Roach and postcolonial critics such as Michael Taussig and Homi Bhabha, though she might have provided further nuances by citing feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, whose concepts of "mimicry" and "performativity" would have bolstered her subsequent discussions of gender and empire.

Framing her first chapter with the Italian epics that forged western Europe's ideologies of empire, Fuchs astutely adduces an indigenous student of European culture, Don Pablo Nazareo de Xalcotán, as embodying "the beguiling treacherousness of the verisimilar" that troubled Spain's imperial project...