Srinivas Aravamudan begins Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 by providing a brief definition for the word trope, taken from Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia. The definition, its corresponding illustration, and Aravamudan’s relation of the two to colonial representations of cultural others, unravels what he means by his use of the word “tropicopolitan.”
Trope, Tropus, in rhetoric, a word or expression used in a different sense from what it properly signifies. Or, a word changed from its proper and natural signification to another, with some advantage. As, when we say an ass, for a stupid person; thunderbolt of war for a great captain; to wash the black-moor white, for a fruitless undertaking.” (Aravamudan, 1)
Aravamudan focuses on this last illustration of washing the blackamoor white and its relationship to the idea of a fruitless undertaking as a means of demonstrating the eighteenth century colonial rhetoric that presents the Other in such a manner as to link him with the idea of inadequacy. As it is impossible to wash him white, the blackamoor, the “concrete vehicle” fixed within the context of his racial being, represents the “abstract tenor” or the notion of inability, failure (2). The language acts upon the body, expressing the desirability of whiteness over blackness, thereby binding the blackamoor within a space of inferiority relative to the implied superiority of the colonizer. “The blackamoor becomes the sign of … unachievable whiteness,” his blackness representing the inability to change and this, subsequently, representing uselessness (4).
Having demonstrated the colonial relating of blackness to failure, Aravamudan defines the term tropicopolitan as “the colonized subject who exists as fictive construct of colonial tropology and actual resident of tropical space, object of representation and agent of resistance” (4). In this light, the tropicopolitan functions as a site of transition, initially acted upon by colonial interests in a denigrating fashion and subsequently re-appropriating the adverse colonial language to criticize and, therefore, resist the colonizer. This method of interpreting colonial discourse from the perspective of the colonized tropicopolitan constitutes what Aravamudan refers to as tropicalization.
Tropicalizaton appears in three forms, virtualization, levantinization, and nationalization. The first, virtualization, is primarily concerned with issues of transformation as it affects the fictional Other. That is to say, it focuses on the fictional target of colonialist discourse as it undergoes a symbolic transformation, revealing a trajectory that extends from the tropicopolitan’s existence as a “colonialist representation,” in which he is the inferiorized Other, to a “postcolonial revision,” where he enters a state of agency, acting, through interpretative practice, against Eurocentric tropologies (17). Aravamudan devotes three chapters to this idea, beginning with a discussion on Aphra Behn’s and Thomas Southerne’s versions of Oroonoko.
In the first chapter, he discusses the practice of acquiring Africans as pets, aside from purchasing them for the purpose of performing slave labor. In such a role, Africans served as a marker of the upper class status of the owner as well as evidence of the pervasive sense of exoticism that was entrenched in the colonialist mentality. Here, Aravamudan makes note of portraits that specifically feature women accompanied by their human pets, sometimes wearing pearl necklaces, fanciful dog collars, or some other symbolic form of bondage, asserting that scenes of this nature are imbued with notions of exoticism and “sadomasochistic eroticism,” which are emblematic of colonial and sexual acquisition (37). He ties Oroonoko to this image, with regard to Southerne’s play, making reference to the ornamental collar in which the character often appeared in theatrical performances, revealing the perception of the African prince as a domesticated pet. Aravamudan goes yet further, linking Oroonoko to pethood through the scene in Aphra Behn’s novella in which he “kills a tiger that chases the colonists” and “fetches the cub as the spoils for the narrator as if he were a loyal hound and the narrator were Diana,” the huntress (39). Speaking admiringly to the narrator, Oroonoko refers to her as “his Great Mistress,” completing an actualization of the scenes illustrated in the African pet portraits. He symbolically becomes the female narrator’s pet.
Oroonoko’s position as pet is checked by the narrator’s idealization of him. Fashioned as “pet-king,” there is a distinction drawn between him and the other slaves (42). He exudes royalty and so is not treated in the manner of a slave. Additionally, he “gives audience to people who come to see him” like a king entertaining guests, and even leads a slave revolt, which changes “his status as pet-king to a claim of actual political authority,” symbolizing the reclamation of his person from colonial ownership (42). The narrator frames the qualities that comprise such an individual as Oroonoko in a manner that Aravamudan refers to as a “recuperative logic” that rescues Oroonoko from the lowliness accorded to him through his positions as pet and slave (42). Implicitly, Aphra Behn’s narrator has a vested interest in this recuperation as she, like the exoticized African slave, is “an object of display” and a commodity that potentially can be owned by a man (37). In this light, the African slave-pet’s attainment of agency suggests the possibility of a woman’s attainment of agency. Aravamudan illustrates such an attainment using Charlot Welldon, from Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, and her manipulation of both her gendered appearance and the metaphorical credit system that grants power to men which cannot be enjoyed by women. Exercising her own agency, Charlot transgresses sexual boundaries by disguising herself as a man in order to take advantage of the “marriage market,” obtaining a dowry for herself (51).
In the second chapter, Aravamudan concerns himself with accounts of piracy. Here, he notes that accounts serve the aims of colonialist ambition as well as those of “anti-conquest” discourse (73). On one hand, the colonizer’s recording of various kinds of information entails a greater entrenchment of the process of colonizing as it initiates an “involved process of classification and evaluation” (73). That is, recordkeeping, in a sense, reiterates and extends the physical act of colonization. On the other hand, by providing an account of colonial practice, the colonizer also makes it possible to trace the “egregiousness of conquest as physical violence,” which serves as fodder for a postcolonial revision of colonial discourse (74). This revision, from a colonial perspective, would constitute a pirating of colonial discourse for re-interpretative purposes.
In comparison with this dual-effect of accounting, piracy exhibits a similar nature. Stressing the importance of the phrase, “going upon account,” Aravamudan draws attention to its double meaning. At the same time that it refers to one becoming a pirate, it also refers to “private commercial activity undertaken by sailors” (81). The sailors who engaged in this activity implicitly promoted the capitalistic aims of colonialist Europe. Generally speaking, pirates, by contrast, disrupted colonial practice by targeting merchant ships for looting. However, the relationship of pirates to colonialism was not exclusively anti-colonial. Piracy was often sanctioned by Britain against commercial competitors, who also engaged in this activity, so that piracy both disrupted commercial transactions and protected them.
In terms of piratical discourse, however, piracy is decidedly anticolonial. As depicted by Daniel Defoe in works such as A General History of the Pyrates and The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, pirates appear as a more democratically disposed contingent than their colonialist counterparts. For instance, it is noted that pirates distributed their spoils more evenly amongst themselves than could be expected under the capitalist model of payment, and that their rules of governance were based on a social contract as opposed to monarchical rule (89). This was in opposition to ideas held by Defoe who, Aravamudan suggests, was a proponent of venture capitalism, a position which he sought to justify through the novel, Captain Singleton. In achieving this goal, Defoe transforms some of the novel’s characters from pirates into merchants, a process that, in one instance, is metaphorically expressed by Captain Bob’s exchanging of “a freight of sin and shiploads of goods for ready money and a clear conscious” (94).
The second form of tropicalization is levantinization. Aravamudan explains that this word is sometimes used to connote an idea of the tainting of “European values by supposedly degenerate Levantines” (159), that is, the inhabitants of “the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and North Africa” (19). Aravamudan uses the word, however, as “an investigative tool” to connote the means by which the European observer comes to identify with the observed native Other (159). Using Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from the Levant, he unveils a three-stage process that Montagu undergoes as a result of her levantinization. The first stage entails the observation of the Other within the context of both the observer’s recognition of cultural difference and his or her relative suspension of cultural biases. The second stage is characterized by the idealization of the Other and their cultural practices, and a subsequent process of “going native” (161). Finally, in the third stage, the observer, having only partially identified with the Other, and still retaining “implicit anxieties and criticisms,” experiences a “banal return” to his or her own cultural milieu (162).
As an example of her relative suspension of bias, Montagu blasts the culturally biased characterizations of Turkey by “ignorant merchants and travelers who ‘pick up some confus’d informations which are generally false’” and who “can give no better Account of the ways here than a French refugee lodging in a Garret in Greek street, could write of the Court of England” (164). Subsequently, Montagu’s account of the women in Turkey presents her readers with her progression through the first two stages of levantinization. She notes that the Turkish women’s acts of covering and uncovering bespeak feminine freedom. The covering, the wearing of the veil, makes it “impossible for the most jealous Husband to know his Wife when he meets her, and no Man dare either touch or follow a Woman in the Street…. You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave” (171). Here, Montagu proposes that covering frees women from the possessiveness of men and from class distinctions. Uncovering, i.e. nudity, also connotes the idea of women’s freedom. Aravamudan notes that Montagu characterizes the women at the hammam she visits as “naked but not immodest, free but not licentious” (174).
As an example of her assimilation to the culture, Aravamudan provides her donning of Turkish clothing and the appreciation of the beauty it gives her. She says, “I am now in my Turkish habit, tho I believe you would be of my opinion that ‘tis admirably becoming” (173). Given the fact that Montagu felt that she had lost her former beauty, due to her contraction of smallpox, this re-beautification, occurring through her donning of Turkish garb, amplifies the sense of assimilation and solidifies her passage into the second stage of levantinization. She enters the third stage with the realization that her exposure to different languages has caused her use of English to languish. She says, “I am allmost falln into the misfortune so common to the Ambitious while they are employ’d on distant, insignificant conquests abroad, a Rebellion starts up at home. I am in great danger of loseing my English” (186). The statement indicates the beginning of a desire to extricate herself from her assimilative practice and serves as a precursor to her eventual return to England. She journeys back, viewing the ruins of classical civilizations along the way. During the trip, she notices some of the inhabitants at the site of Carthage using ruins to store grain and writes a denigrating description of the Maghrebian women.
Their posture in siting, the colour of their skin, their lank black Hair falling on each side their faces, their features and the shape of their Limbs, differ so little from their own country people, the Baboons, tis hard to fancy them a distinct race…. (188)
This characterization of the women as baboons resolutely signifies the end of the suspension of cultural bias, coinciding with the third stage of levantinization and Montagu’s journey back to England.
Nationalization, the third form of tropicalization, focuses on the once colonized, and thus objectified, individual as one imbued with agency in the homeland of the colonizer. Using Olaudah Equiano as a model, Aravamudan examines the ways in which the discourse of colonialism and that of the tropicopolitan foster assimilation and separatism (235). According to Aravamudan, colonialism and anti-colonialism join together in Equiano’s envisioning of an “African community” for emancipated slaves (283), which prefigured the “national separatism of the Sierra Leone Resettlement” (236). The project is the product of both his abolitionist leanings and the “colonialist milieu of Equiano’s thought” which called for Britain’s “general economic expansion into Africa” (237). The combination of the two competing ideas presents a dichotomy concerning Equiano’s ideological position. At the same time that he functions as a proponent for the freedom of African slaves, he appears to support a commercial ideology that is attached to the slave trade.
Further evidence of this dichotomy appears in Equiano’s relationship to the print medium. Here, Aravamudan borrows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s idea that
black writers achieve full-blown subjectivity by appropriating the high cultural value assigned to literacy. Skillfully manipulating the colonialist uses of Bible and breviary which justified the subjugation of African slaves and American indigenes, Anglo-Africans reclaimed their agency by talking back in the master’s voice, literate and learned as this voice was deemed to be. (270)
Equiano, through his authorship of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which signifies his literacy, embodies this “full-blown subjectivity.” Interestingly, it is the very writing of the narrative that seals his position as a nationalized agent, given Aravamudan’s assertion that books served as one of the three most effective means by which Europe exercised its dominance across the international landscape, the other two means being guns and shipping. The power of the book is attributable to its ability to initiate a “social process” that directly engages the minds of the literate for a determined purpose, which, in a colonialist society, could mean the furtherance of colonial aims (272). Through his general interaction with the book medium, then, Equiano steps onto the stage of British colonialist discourse. Ironically, however, even as he enters this space Equiano tropicalizes the colonial associations of the printed book through his own book, which “played a significant role in arguing for the eventual abolition of the slave trade” (237). Through this anti-colonialist appropriation of the book, and his support of the Sierra Leone project, not through the means of his support, but because of his intention of establishing a settlement for freed Africans, Equiano functions as a tropicopolitan, resisting the influence of colonialist discourse.
Overall, Aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency offers an intriguing interpretative strategy for interacting with eighteenth century literature. Its threefold method of uncovering colonialist discourse, anchored by a wealth of historical information to support the claims made in the book, provides for a mostly convincing read. One drawback of the book, however, is that Aravamudan, in a few instances, is not as clear as he could be, regarding the transition of the target of colonialist practice from victim to resistant tropicopolitan. This is the case with his discussion of Olaudah Equiano, in which Equiano tends to appear as though he is fixed within the representational structure of colonialist discourse, with the effect of undermining Aravamudan’s assertions of his agency. Aside from this, however, his insights into the colonialist/anti-colonialist tension that plays out in the person of the colonized Other are useful for anatomizing the methodology of imperialist discourse.
Works Cited
Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print.
