Description
Book SynopsisAims to reconstruct the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, the author makes a case for the agency - or the capacity to resist domination - of those oppressed. He reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.
Trade Review“
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 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.”—
Donna Landry, author of
The Muses of Resistance: Laboring Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796“Tropicopolitans is the most theoretically sophisticated study yet of colonialist texts in the eighteenth century.”—
James Thompson, author of
Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the NovelTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Virtualizations
1. Petting Oroonoko
2. Piratical Accounts
3. The Stoic's Voice
Levantinizations
4. Lady Mary in the Hamman
5. The Despotic Eye and the Oriental Sublime
Nationalizations
6. Equiano and the Politics of Literacy
7. Tropicalizing the Englightenment
Conclusion
Notes
Index
