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  • From Tropicopolitan to Anthropocene
  • Laura Brown

We can appreciate the scope of Srinivas Aravamudan’s contribution to our thinking today by juxtaposing Tropicopolitans, published in 1999, and his 2016 presidential address for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual convention, “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead of his Time?” These projects ask us to look in opposite directions—one toward the interpretive frameworks that account for the human cultural and intellectual productions of a past age—the age of the European Enlightenment, and the other toward “a future vantage point beyond the existence of the [human] species,”1 the epoch of the Anthropocene. But these two directions generate corollary perspectives on the responsibility of intellectuals today, in creating and then in disseminating knowledge. Together they show us the range, the intensity, and the relevance of Srinivas’s engagement with our work and our world.

Srinivas concludes Tropicopolitans by focusing explicitly on our role in the dissemination of knowledge. The urgency of his message, in 1999, has been intensified today as we work to redefine the mission of higher education. Even in the current challenging environment, we can readily identify a collective aim that sets Srinivas’s intervention in a broader context. Liberal education in our time reflects a deep, cumulative, and well-defined tradition developed through ongoing debate and practice from the nineteenth century to the present. We understand it as a process of enlightenment, which empowers graduates, liberates their minds, and prepares them for lives of civic responsibility. Our mission is to enable our graduates to become thoughtful and critical citizens who are advocates for human, social, cultural, and global rights. The role of the university, then, is not simply the transmission of knowledge but the promotion of “reflexive communication,” an “argumentative, critical and thoughtful engagement that shapes the very constitution of knowledge” through “the inclusion of as many voices as possible,” and [End Page 101] that thereby seeks to enlarge human freedom.2 This is the project that Srinivas has engaged for us, from both directions—Enlightenment and Anthropocene.

The last chapter of Tropicopolitans posits just this reflexivity. In defining the sphere of knowledge creation in eighteenth-century studies, Srinivas urges us toward “the paradox of finding agency in the dead matter of books”3—an agency that is to inform both our creation of knowledge in the field and, reflexively, our dissemination of knowledge in and through the university today. Arguing that “literary studies cannot stop with the teaching that the world is textualized” (269), Srinivas demonstrates our “social mission” to “dislodge texts from familiar reading formations” (330). That mission emerges directly from the conceptual framework that Srinivas defines in Tropicopolitans through the defamiliarizing practices that highlight parody, interruption, ambivalence, and “slipperiness” so as to demonstrate the ongoing “deferred action” that “surrounds narratives of anticolonial agency” (307), and that characterizes his notion of tropicalization. This is the message that our field is particularly suited to bring to the dissemination of knowledge, since we work at a primary nexus in what Srinivas defines in this context as the paradox of colonialism and agency—in the “historical, transcendental, and global enterprise of the eighteenth century” (330).

And we have all seen, in the seventeen years since the publication of Tropicopolitans and across many of our departments of “English Literature,” a globalization of the curriculum along the lines of Srinivas’s injunction to “act locally. . . [and] think globally” (330) about the relationship between the margin and the center, about the agency of the colonized subject even within the discourse of the “privilege of Enlightenment cosmopolitans” (4). These new curricula involve the inclusion of transnational materials, a new tendency to array Anglophone literature alongside British and American literature, and the rise of global cultural studies. Tropicalization is “disciplinary activism” (330)—giving voice to the agency of the colonized subject within the global enterprise of the Enlightenment, so as to affect the creation of knowledge and its dissemination at once.

Looking in the opposite direction, toward the Anthropocene, Srinivas creates a further reflexive alignment of our critical discourse with our responsibilities as intellectuals in today’s geological epoch. In “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead...

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