Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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moves away from Enlightenment ideology, perhaps those moves were not quite as radical as they might appear. Or, conversely, perhaps the very radicalness of their representation is a sign of disturbing contiguities. Embedded within romantic discourse is a commitment to the idea of the author produced through inward contemplation, celebrating the imagination as the primary space for a revolt against a secured public arena of thought. It is against the popular eighteenth-century understanding of the author as voicing the collective thinking of a reasoning public that romanticism has come to be conceptualized.
Interestingly, however, as Robinson Crusoe makes abundantly clear, these ostensibly different discourses of Enlightenment and romantic thought share many similar currents, particularly in relation to their definitions of national identity. Appropriating the old meaning of “romance” from “romans/romauns,” the vernacular language of France (as opposed to Latin), romantic writers consecrate the colloquial or common tongues, firmly believing these languages to articulate “true” feeling. That is, the historical motives for the “original” turn to the vernacular among medieval and renaissance writers, philosophers, politicians and the like had to do with the rise of nation states. Speaking the vernacular as an expression against Latin, against another authority, also suggests the production of one community in opposition to another one that has since been linked to the emergence of nation.16 Likewise, Crusoe’s taxonomic efforts, recorded in his journal as putatively free from any colonizing desire except “necessity,” appropriate island artifacts (with crucial exceptions) and translate them into an eighteenth-century British commercial vernacular.
Wielding the technical facility Crusoe enjoys as a British subject to fashion his circumstances according to models of trade and commercialism, Defoe makes quite visible the ways in which subjectivities are fabricated through the fetish of xenophobia. Conscious of the outlandish figure he cuts with his goatskins, Mahometan mustaches, and not-quite-Mulatto skin, Crusoe is still able both to acknowledge his othered position (as when he becomes enslaved earlier in the novel) and to brandish the kind of authority granted a British subjectivity. We may be able to situate Defoe on the cusp of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century formulations of the self in relation to others. Eighteenth-century constructions of subjectivity reproduce selves in relation to external reflections of exotic others. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, for example, depicts the national and what we would now term cultural differences inhabiting the bodies of Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, or Yahoos as externally manifested in the smallness, largeness, or darkness of their bodies, all of which are so conceptually distinct from Gulliver’s own British body as to be incapable of sharing the same epistemological space.17 Even if romantic conceptions of the self also deploy national identities as ways of insuring the discreteness of the self, the crucial difference is in their capacity to identify with otherness and incorporate it within the boundaries of the self. Thus when Wordsworth expresses his “personal wish / To speak the language more familiarly,” it takes shape as his gradual withdrawal into the French revolutionary cause: “I gradually withdrew / Into a noisier world, and thus did soon / Become a patriot—and my heart was all / Given to the people, and my love was theirs.”18 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, performs the important task of negotiating between these positions, which reinforces the argument that the “origins” of romantic identity may be deeply embedded in eighteenth-century epistemology.19 My particular contribution to the large and longstanding literature on this subject is to argue that the shared inflections between these ostensibly incompatible discourses are primarily xenophobic and get represented in terms of nation.
The phenomenon of xenophobia remains largely untheorized in current postmodern and postcolonial studies; this telling absence may well attest to the ways in which it functions so successfully in social structures. This book will demonstrate the ways our academic belief in romantic principles (inward subjectivity, the solitary voice, the authority of writing) can be understood only through xenophobia and the language it produces.
Recent critics have persuasively claimed the influence of imperialism, orientalism, and colonialism on the production of romantic literature after Jerome J. McGann’s important study, The Romantic Ideology, “precipitated a return to historical and political readings of the Romantic period.”20 John Barrell, Marilyn Butler, Nigel Leask, Robert Young, Jerome McGann, Saree Makdisi, Charles Rzepka, Alina Clej, Josephine McDonagh and others address the importance of attending to historical materialism in relation to romanticism, thus shifting our understanding of the discipline as a field without history. Collections such as Tim Fulford’s and Peter J. Kitson’s Romanticism and Empire, Sonia Hofkosh’s and Alan Richardson’s Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, or John Beer’s Questioning Romanticism, among others, conduct very useful cultural inquiry into the concept of romanticism, and problematize the material conditions of romantic discourse. Few arguments, however, have addressed the psychological conditions attendant upon imperialist ideology that make possible the production of romanticism. Little work in romantic studies or in the field of history has addressed the relationship between imperialism and nationalism that together with historical materialism forms the ideological apparatus for cultural representation.21 Leask and Saree Makdisi make important arguments regarding Britain’s sense of national self-enclosure: that imperial cultural incomparability results from internal or domestic anxiety about empire (Leask) or that the move away from trade and commerce and entry into industrialism happened well before the mid eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Makdisi). I place my own study in relation to these as an investigation of the psychological structures set up to account for these internal anxieties about national identity—for example, Johnson’s trepidations about language or Defoe’s uneasiness with trade—and claim that these concerns are historically based on an economy of xenophobia and xenodochy.
I will argue that British romantic writing, produced from imperialist ideology, is also constituted through the psychological hinge between imperialism and nationalism: xenophobia. The aesthetic focus dominating representations of romanticism (both of the literature and the critical discourse but also of more recent cultural and material readings) have emerged as a result of territorial claims. Not unlike the historical ways in which unknown worlds were incorporated—and introjected—within the parameters and perimeters of a “known” culture, academic definitions of historical periods as intellectual (or historiographical) territories repeat the imperial impulse to nationhood. As early eighteenth-century novels like Robinson Crusoe demonstrate, however, the connections between discourses long believed to have been antithetical to one another may also demonstrate the ways in which we lock certain paradigms of identity into fixed meanings, whether or not we associate them with a specific literary period. It stands to reason, then, that the romantic period is not simply an isolatable historical phenomenon which we have since “passed.”
Saree Makdisi argues that the
distinction between modernism and romanticism … is not so much in their engagement with modernization … but rather in that romanticism merges with the beginnings of modernization and persists alongside it to the end; whereas modernism emerges specifically at the climax of that process and helps to constitute that climax in overall cultural terms.22
I would add, however, that romanticism does not simply give way or fade out to modernism but is continually renewing itself according to new historical models even in the guise of modernity and postmodernity. For example, Makdisi locates the “much earlier, more deeply and stubbornly held view about overseas European hegemony” near the end of the eighteenth century. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, however, demonstrates a much earlier belief in the epistemological superiority of British national subjectivity (one that develops from trade and commercial activity, but that later evolves into a form of island industrialism—the manufacture of skins into textiles). This belief is contingent upon a romantic understanding of the internalized self as wholly sufficient to articulate British national hegemony. What happens earlier than the end of the eighteenth century is also possible on the other end of the historical spectrum: that romantic celebration of the “archaic” at whatever point of “eradication” (as Makdisi argues) is an ongoing process that makes possible new definitions of (post)modernization (10).
My question addresses why the belief in the romantic understanding of an essential,