Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency,.(Review)

Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. By Srinivas Aravamudan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. x + 424 pp.

In the last few years postcolonial thought has reached back increasingly into cultural history, disabusing itself of the proposition that the world began with Kipling. So far the Romantic era, treated in books by Nigel Leask, Javed Majeed, and Saree Makdisi and in an influential collection of essays edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, has been the most productive area for this reaching back. [1] The long eighteenth century has not been neglected, but Srinivas Aravamudan's important book opens up possibilities and is notable both for its archival strength and for the skill and sophistication with which it brings postcolonial thinking into the landscape of eighteenth-century scholarship.

Aravamudan's sympathies lie with what might be called the school of radical contingency, which sees each text as the unique, interactive result of a highly specific cultural envelopment within which it is written and writes back. Radical contingency satisfies the current passion for nuance and the current distaste for anything approaching homogeneity, but, carried to an extreme, it makes all generalizations dubious. Those wishing to generalize prudently can find themselves resorting to cultural poetics and strongly insisting on the deviations that make them precarious. Alternatively, they can resort to …