Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580-1640 (review)

The last three decades have seen a lively scholarly conversation on early modern English and European colonialism in the New World. To this conversation Rebecca Ann Bach’s Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640 is a welcome addition. The study brings a cultural materialist and postcolonial lens to diverse kinds of texts relating to English colonial projects in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, examining “colonial transformation” as “a process that redefined the territory and people the English encountered, but also importantly refigured the territory and people of the metropolitan center” (3). This understanding of colonial transformations as cultural production both uncovers and works against monolithic constructions of “colonizer” and colonized.” In engaging scholars in the field such as Peter Hulme, Kim Hall, Philip Barbour, and Adnrew Hadfield, her analysis builds innovatively on familiar themes of study, including the feminization of colonial sites, the politics of maps and naming, the presence of Ireland in the English vision of the New Atlantic World, and the reciprocal influence of the colonial experience on English identity-making. The result is to extend these themes to literary texts previously overlooked for their colonial relevance and to colonial writings for their interpretive possibilities.

Thus the first chapter argues that “the poetry that has been seen as Spenser’s most personal, his little love poems, the Amoretti, is as deeply imbricated in his colonial career as his public epic poetry” (36). Bach builds her argument characteristically by locating the text (and author) in question amidst its con-texts, in this case, reading the Amoretti alongside The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland, as well as narratives relating to the colonial project in Ireland. Significantly, Bach incorporates an indigenous perspective into her analysis. In contrast to the Irish presence in Spenser’s “cruel lady,” she shows how the feminine figure of Ireland in the bardic poetry serves to mobilize resistance against English domination. Equally instructive is her analysis in chapter two of place names on maps of Virginia and Bermuda. Among the highlights is Richard Norwood’s 1615 map of Bermuda on which “Ireland” appears as a name for a small island completely surrounded by English possessions, an indication that the map “imagines the islands as a perfected British Isles” (112). In reading maps alongside accounts of English colonists, Bach shows how English place names, in replacing native ones, project not only English visions of the New Atlantic world but also an implicit social hierarchy among English colonists.

Another admirable feature of this study is its attention to genres as textual practices embedded in specific social institutions and contexts. This is especially visible in chapters three to five, which form an interconnected unit. While chapter three attends to drama on the public stage, and chapter four to masques and pageants, both chapters have a common focus on Ben Jonson whose career as dramatist and poet laureate straddles both genres and social worlds. This critical framing places Jonson’s city comedies in relation to plays by Shakespeare, Dekker, Webster, and Ford, and his court masques in relation to city pageants by Munday, Heywood, Dekker, and Middleton. In examining a range of Jonsonian strategies-his satire on England’s “civil savages,” his fantasy of domesticating wildness, his figuring of whiteness through blackness-Bach fully earns her claim that, “unlike his masques, Jonson and his collaborators’ representations for the public stage existed in a matrix of public images of the Virginia settlement rather than in line with any official version of the project” (125). In chapter five, this social sensibility about genres extends to the Virginia colonist John Smith’s choice of the term “masque” to describe a ceremonial dance performed by Indian women that he witnessed during a negotiation with one of the Powhatan tribes. Even as English audiences redefined their own identities in relation to an array of “English ‘antiselves’-Irish, Northern, Virginian, East Indian-on the London stage” (146), Smith’s...