In "Tropicopolitans" Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial
imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations
of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a
case for the agency--or the capacity to resist domination--of those
oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of texts that accompanied European
commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution
through the French Revolution reveals the development of
anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.
"Tropicalization" is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term
that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes
by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study,
primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who
bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In
readings that expose new relationships between literary
representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century,
Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's "Oroonoko," Defoe's
"Robinson Crusoe" and "Captain Singleton," Addison's "Cato," and
Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Drapier's Letters." He
extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's "Rasselas,"
Beckford's "Vathek," Montagu's travel letters, Equiano's
autobiography, Burke's political and aesthetic writings, and Abbe
de Raynal's "Histoire des deux Indes." Offering a radical approach
to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for
understanding the development of anticolonial agency.
Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial
hermeneutics, "Tropicopolitans" will interest scholars engaged in
postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary
theory.
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