Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan

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      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, inward authorial subjectivity and a persistent belief in aesthetic sensibility as a free-standing phenomenon is so enduring, particularly in the face of a postmodern culture with increasingly sophisticated capacities for self-consciously reinventing aesthetics. What epistemological ends does this tenacity serve?

      This study addresses these questions by analyzing the ways xenophobia has historically created and sustained the belief in an essential authorial subjectivity. How xenophobia disarticulates and rearticulates this need, I argue, is crucially connected to the strategic and complex understanding and definition of orientalism and imperialism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. I am especially concerned with the ways the idea of containment—most often figured as containment of the literal mass of territories that constitute Britain’s ideological imperial identity—is prominently represented in romantic literature. That is, to contain something—to draw boundaries around that “thing”—is to give it definition, whether this definition is produced discursively (lexicography), economically (commerce), or ideologically (nationality).²³

      Definitions, especially as they emerge as representations of containment, are critical to the ways in which colonial relations operate. Britain’s relation to India seems to offer a particularly convincing example of how containment works. The relation India has had to Britain has been understood as politically, culturally, and aesthetically subordinate. However, India was crucial to the production of British identity: one has only to remember Gauri Viswanathan’s crucial contribution to postcolonial studies when she argued that the solidification of a canon of literature marking English cultural identity was principally invented in India before it was deployed in Great Britain.²⁴ According to this model, there are no independent freestanding nations of “Britain” and “India” because their political, aesthetic, and cultural identities are mutually constitutive. It is not possible to “have” an India free from the cultural signification with which Britain has endowed it, or the reverse.

      The popular dualism between “England” and “India,” often postulated as the binary relation between “self” and “other,” has conventionally situated these locales as utterly distinct from one another, sharing only a colonialist relation based on dominance and subordination. If we think of these territories, however, not as endpoints or fixed modular units but only as spaces for cultural negotiation—as intermediary planes occupying “in-between” spaces, in which neither place is automatically endowed with a natural(ized) authority over its own meaning—then the ideological structures sustaining beliefs about dominance and subordination become more transparent. The same insecurities defining the subaltern space for the British also delineate their own domestic space. Thus, from a British standpoint, what connects the “home” country, the domestic habitat (in the sense of native) to its fantasy of the East (an India that is continually being reinvented as ever more foreign), also subjects the domestic to a need for continual recontainment.²⁵ The ideological circuits that attach far-flung colonies to their “mother” country entangle those faraway places with the home base; foreign colonies, therefore, may not always be figured as outlandishly different from the mother country. These circuits also problematize the material things that identify the domestic space (the incorporation of tea, for example, as a signifier of Englishness); in short, they deterritorialize the domestic. While it is true that the national identity displayed by both colonial and postcolonial “India” is constructed within a European discourse, it is also true that British national identity is absolutely dependent on those “Indias” for its articulation. I argue that any British insistence on its own domestic interiority—or at least on the independence of that interiority from the colonial exterior—requires a disavowal or repression of the material practices that define Englishness.

      As an academic discipline, romanticism is no longer understood as the self-referential celebration of art and the dehistoricized artist. Rather, romanticism provides us with ways of making things outside the scope of that nucleus, outside our domesticated space, “safe” for our consumption. Xenophobia similarly operates as a crucial ideological force in the task of organizing a space, of making and remaking the territories that, among other things, demarcate what is and what is not “home.”

      I am arguing, however, that xenophobia is not a free-standing entity, out of which is produced imperialism. As I’ve suggested earlier, xenophobia also depends on an economy with another less familiar term, xenodochy. Articulations of xenophobia—such as those occurring in imperialism—thus crucially depend on inviting the “foreign” to inhabit domestic grounds. Nigel Leask and John Barrell both argue that the consumption of the other is a form of maintenance; in Leask’s terms, sporting “the sign of the Other in order to disengage the signifier from any semantic substance, to parody it, and also to innoculate himself and his culture from the threat which it poses” accounts for the sustained interest in and often excessive consumption of Oriental artifacts in tandem with a continual abjection of Oriental identity.²⁶ The difference my argument brings to their important formulations is in thinking through and historicizing the psychic impulses that drive such forms of consumption and vilification.

      Slavoj Žižek argues that fantasy “constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates … teaches us how to desire.”²⁷ What one incorporates or introjects within one’s desire is always going to be articulated in the context of phobic markers. Crusoe’s desires to resituate himself within a foreign signifying system take shape as the intense phobias that mark his difference. For example, Friday’s habits, particularly his predilection for cannibalism—a practice that for his people is a way of negotiating political power—need to be instantly and radically relearned because of the threat they pose to Crusoe. Despite the fact that Friday willingly learns Crusoe’s lessons and is an admirable companion to him, Crusoe remains skeptical, fearing the return of other savages even while admitting to the pleasantness of his life.

      But to return to my new companion: I was greatly delighted with him and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper…. now my life began to be so easy that I began to say to myself that could I but have been safe from more savages, I cared not if I was never to remove from the place while I lived. (188–89)

      Such fears remain as the introjected phobic markers that critically mark the difference between Crusoe and Friday despite Crusoe’s desires for assimilation.

      The two parts of this book examine the ways xenophobia informs the relations between colony and mother country through the reification of romantic authorship. British romantic ideology, I argue, СКАЧАТЬ