Overview

This text seeks to reconstruct the colonial imagination of the 18th-century. By exploring the representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, the book makes a case for the agency - or the capacity to resist domination - of those oppressed. The author's analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the 19th-century. The book also exposes new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the 18th-century, considering such texts as Behn's ""Oroonoko"", Defoe's ""Robinson Crusoe"", and Swift's ""Gulliver's Travels.""

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9780822323150

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Reviews

Tropicopolitans is the most theoretically sophisticated study yet of colonialist texts in the eighteenth century. James Thompson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Modles of value: eighteenth-century political economy and the novel Tropicopolitans might initiate a school of tropicalization studies. In the emerging field of what we have learned to name Black Atlantic writing, Aravamudan has made two substantial contributions in his chapters on Equiano and Toussaint Louverture, in which each figure is richly, contextually read. The wrenching from a Euro-Christian framework into a tropicalizing one opens up these figures to new critical investigations instead of merely freezing their heroic status for all time. Aravamudan's book should go some way toward helping us maintain our vigil against premature orthodoxies. Dona Landry, author of The muses of resistance: laboring class women's poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 This book is an important synthesis of 18th-century and postcolonial studies. --Choice In the place of the monolithic underdog of the subaltern silenced by colonial discourse, Aravamudan offers the articulate tropicopolitan who contests the language of domination... The readings of texts and contexts are rich and often provocative. Particularly rewarding is the chapter on Oroonoko ... An agile and theoretically sophisticated critic ... this book takes many gambles and is likely to excite and provoke those involved in post-colonial and eighteenth-century studies in equal measure. With the publication of Tropicopolitans, it is clear that the stakes have been raised. --TLS, May 19, 2000

Author Information

Srinivas Aravamudan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.

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