TY - BOOK ID - 92246829 TI - Tropicopolitans : colonialism and agency 1688-1804 PY - 1999 SN - 0822322838 132210137X 082232315X 0822377764 PB - Durham, NC : Duke University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Swift, Jonathan KW - Johnson, Samuel KW - Behn, Aphra, KW - Behn, Aphra KW - English literature KW - Colonies in literature. KW - Nationalism and literature KW - French literature KW - Imperialism in literature. KW - Slavery in literature. KW - Black people in literature. KW - Colonies KW - Blacks in literature KW - Negroes in literature KW - Slavery and slaves in literature KW - Slaves in literature KW - Literature and nationalism KW - Literature KW - History and criticism. KW - History. KW - Blacks in literature. KW - Enslaved persons in literature KW - Addison (joseph) KW - Black atlantic KW - Burke (edmund) KW - Colonial studies KW - Defoe (daniel) KW - Equiano (olaudah) KW - Louverture (toussaint) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:92246829 AB - In Tropicopolitans, Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency--or the capacity to resist domination--of those oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century. "Tropicalization" is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, Addison's Cato, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels and The Drapier's Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Montagu's travel letters, Equiano's autobiography, Burke's political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency. Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory. ER -