The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

393 Pages·2009·2.8 MB·English

by  Daniel Carey

The Postcolonial Enlightenment
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The Postcolonial
Enlightenment
Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and
Postcolonial Theory
edited by
Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa
1
3
GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial prac
tices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance,
and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often
unacknowledgedroleinthisdiscussion,alternatelyreviledandveneratedas
harbingerofcolonialdominionandavatarofliberation,astargetandshield,
as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas eighteenth
century studies and postcolonial theory in order to interrogate the role
and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial
ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of these imperial projects.
Theconversationsthatresultedinthisvolumebeganataconferenceheld
at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. We are
grateful to Peter Reill, director of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Century Studies, for his enthusiasm, encouragement, and gen
erous sponsorship of the event, and to Doris L. Garraway and Sven Trakul
hun, with whom we jointly organized the conference. We also want to
express our gratitude to staff of the Center and Library, especially Candis
Snoddy,AnnaHuang,andMarinaRomani.Priortothis,ourinitialencoun
tersanddiscussionsoccurredinthecontextoftheInternationalSeminaron
theEighteenthCentury,forwhichwewishtothankByronWellsandPhilip
Stewart, who brought us together, and to Vicki Cutting at the American
Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
AtOxfordUniversityPresswehavebeenfortunatetoworkwithAndrew
McNeillie and Jacqueline Baker, who have provided wonderful editorial
support. We want to thank our production editor, Fiona Vlemmiks, our
copy editor, Fiona Little, and our indexer, Tom Broughton Willett, whose
diligence and care have been enormous.
Our debts to friends, colleagues, institutions, and funding bodies are
many. We especially want to mention the assistance of the Bodleian Library
in Oxford and its staff, particularly James Allan and Vera Ryhajlo, and the
libraryofColumbiaUniversity.DanielCareyisindebtedtotheIrishResearch
vi / Acknowledgements
Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the award of a Govern
ment of Ireland fellowship, which supported his research. Lynn Festa is
gratefultotheEnglishdepartmentsattheUniversityofWisconsin,Madison,
and Harvard University for the junior faculty research leave which enabled
her to work on this volume. Finally, we are most grateful to our contribu
tors, for their generosity and patience throughout the publication process.
The essays in this collection address a set of issues of both historical
significance and current import. By documenting assumptions and ideas
from an earlier period, the vocabulary used to refer to racial, ethnic, and
cultural groups in this volume reflects historical usage. Thus, rather than
correcting terms such as ‘black’ or ‘Oriental’, as OUP house style would
dictate, we have generally stayed with the idiom of the era to avoid intro
ducing unnecessary anachronism.
The cover illustration is taken from Bernard Picart, C´er´emonies et coutumes
religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (new edn, Paris, 1738), vi, reproduced by
permissionoftheKeeperofSpecialCollections,BodleianLibrary,University
ofOxford,shelfmarkVet.E6b.8(t.6)(betweenp.228andp.229).Thescheme
for these volumes, which first appeared in Amsterdam, originated with the
printer Jean Fre´de´ricBernard. Theplates were the workof Picart, a Protest
antexilefromFrancewhosettledinHolland.Thisplate,‘DiversesPagodeset
PenitencesdesFaquirs’,issigned‘BPicartdel.1729’(i.e.delineavitordesigned).
It depicts an idol in a shrine, below a draping Banyan tree. The idol is a
distortedandoversizedrenditionbyPicartofagoddess,identifiedinhisplate
as‘Mamaniva’(probablyacorruptionof‘Mahadevi’,theGreatGoddess).On
oneside,figureswhohavecometoofferprayersaremarkedontheforehead;
on the other side, offerings of rice are made. The scene also depicts Indian
ascetics(sadhus)ofdifferentsects,referredtobyPicartasFaquirs,performing
various ‘austerities’, involving fire, standing, or raising the arms for vast
periods of time. The long haired, naked figures are Shaiva sadhus and
those with shaved heads are probably Digambar Jain monks. The figure
with a broom in the middle, whose mouth and nose are covered by a
cloth, is a Svetambar Jain monk, who must wear the mask and sweep with
a broom in order to avoid killing any ‘petits insectes’ by inadvertently
inhaling or steppingon them. Picart’ssource for all of this was Les six voyages
deJeanBaptisteTavernier,2vols(Paris,1676).WearegratefultoDolfHartsuiker
for his expertise in making these identifications.
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors x
List of Illustrations xii
Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is
Postcolonial Enlightenment?’ 1
Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey
I Provincializing Enlightenment 5
II Enlightenment without others 17
III Postcolonial Enlightenment(s) 22
Part One: Subjects and Sovereignty
1. Hobbes and America 37
Srinivas Aravamudan
I The early colonial history of Virginia and Bermuda 43
II The theoretical reduction of America to Company colonization 53
III From theoretical reduction to oceanic expansion 64
2. The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the
Colonial Context 71
David Lloyd
I Aesthetic culture 71
II The narrative of development 76
III The abyss of blackness 95
viii / Contents
Part Two: Enlightenment Categories and
Postcolonial Classifications
3. Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery,
and Postcolonial Theory 105
Daniel Carey
I Contrapuntal reading 109
II Robinson Crusoe and the subject of slavery 112
III Rereading Robinson Crusoe 125
IV Conclusion 135
4. Between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Blacks So Called’, 1688 1788 137
Felicity A. Nussbaum
I Shades of blackness 142
II Africa Orientalized 153
III Postcolonial theory and the eighteenth century 164
5. Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War 167
Siraj Ahmed
I Precolonial and early colonial Orientalism 176
II Jones and mythic law 184
III Precolonial and early colonial sovereignty 191
IV A spatio temporal fix for Bengal 196
Part Three: Nation, Colony, and Enlightenment Universality
6. Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan,
Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism 207
Doris L. Garraway
I Mimicry and hybridity in Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un sauvage 211
II Parodic mimicry and utopia in Diderot’s Suppl´ement au
voyage de Bougainville 220
III Dialogue, critique, and the imagined consent of the colonized 233
7. Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment 240
Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun
I Enlightenment and diversity: three contexts 243
II Kant’s universalism 254
Contents / ix
III German Ethnographie and universal history 267
IV The German critique of colonialism 273
V Universalism and diversity? 277
8. ‘These Nations Newton Made his Own’: Poetry, Knowledge,
and British Imperial Globalization 281
Karen O’Brien
I Newtonian laws of empire 287
II Cowper and the moral order of knowledge 299
Coda: How to Write Postcolonial Histories of Empire? 305
Suvir Kaul
Bibliography 328
Index 363