Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele ed. by Susan B. Iwanisziw (review)

313 How’s analysis of the nature of epistolary spaces and the growth of the postal system that changed letter-writing practice ; they will also appreciate a fascinating group of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letter writers. Cynthia Lowenthal Newcomb College of Tulane University Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele , ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xv ⫹ 203. $69.95. The ‘‘Preface’’ of this book defines Oroonoko—‘‘the sign, the name, the character’’—as ‘‘a veritable trope that has evolved continually over the past 300 years to register changing attitudes toward the transatlantic slave trade, the place of Africans in global history, and the status of women writers.’’ If this collection stands as evidence, these claims are inflated. The volume contains very little material on texts other than Behn’s 1688 novel and Southerne’s 1695 play. Three of the eight essays engage with eighteenth-century adaptations of Behn’s and Southerne’s works. Additionally, Rhoda M. Troobof takes us into the nineteenth century, and Jessica Munns’s account of ‘Biyi Bandele’s Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in a new adaptation (published and performed in London in 1999) is a welcome introduction to contemporary material. But the collection as a whole gives us no sense that there have been, over three centuries, ‘‘continual’’reformulations of the Oroonoko story. Nor does it provide new insight into the slave trade and African history. Aside from Behn’s novel and More’s ‘‘The Slave Trade,’’ women’s writing rarely makes an appearance here. Oroonoko studies have never been more vibrant than today, but this volume does not reflect the dynamic readings of the novel and its recent adaptations. One wonders why Ms. Iwanisziw chose to reprint three well-known essays from the early 1990s. An expanded version of Laura J. Rosenthal’s ‘‘Owning Oroonoko : Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property’’ appeared in her Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (1996). Ms. Rosenthal observes , in an endnote to this chapter, that her ideas have not changed since that time. Although Moira Ferguson’s ‘‘Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm’’ laid the groundwork for much of the work undertaken on Behn’s novel in the 1990s, it now appears dated in its coverage of plot and observations. Ms. Iwanisziw claims that the second chapter represents an ‘‘updated’’ version of Margaret W. Ferguson’s 1991 ‘‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,’’but aside from a new introduction, it reproduces the original essay verbatim. Its reading of Oroonoko does not engage with any recent accounts of the novel; indeed, Ms. Ferguson’s endnotes reveal references to only two critical sources published after 1995. ‘‘Shocking’’ might not be too strong a word to describe the glaring omission of works that have shaped Oroonoko studies in the past ten years. Not one essay lists, in its ‘‘References,’’ Srinivas Aravamudan ’s Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Duke 1999). Chapter Two claims that ‘‘more work needs to be done on Imoinda’s symbolic and material existences,’’ but notes neither Charlotte Sussman’s seminal 1993 essay on this subject, nor Felicity Nussbaum ’s work on women and ‘‘race,’’ recently republished with an extended reading of Imoinda in The Limits of the 314 Human (Cambridge 2003). Only one chapter notes Catherine Gallagher’s edition of Behn’s Oroonoko (Bedford/St. Martin’s 1995)—an edition that has been instrumental in helping to place the novel in its global historical context. Readings of eighteenth-century adaptations of the Oroonoko story appear isolated from broader literary developments , including the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in 1789. With the exception of Ms. Trooboff’s essay, no chapter documents an Afro-British or African-American presence as a contributing factor to the representations described, despite evidence that black authors participated in a wide range of English economic and cultural practices in the eighteenth century (see Vincent Carretta’s anthology of eighteenth-century Black authors, Unchained Voices, Kentucky 1996). Ms. Trooboff’s chapter interestingly speculates that a play no longer extant, The Drama of King Shotaway, written and performed by African-Americans in 1823, may have drawn on the Oroonoko story; she...