A Conclusion, In Which Nothing is Concluded…

Professor Warner

December 4, 2002

How might one answer the following question: what sort of general coherence or unity would I give to the terrain we have covered in this class (from post-colonial theory and Aphra Behn to Walter Scott)?

Such a question always risks blurring the many distinction among texts; however, my rambling answer to this question may contribute to the efforts you are each making on your research papers.

Taking a cue from Said and Pratt, one might start by saying that with the imperial project, European subjects open themselves to new spaces, new zones of contact, and new forms of adventure and writing. In this course, we have studied how various imperial projects and contexts incite new forms of writing, which, in their turn, figure/ articulate/ narrate distinct forms of identity. [By identity, I mean a self performed for others, one that might be more or less self-conscious about the compositional process of self-invention and self-presentation, one that might figure a self that is more or less "deep".]

Oroonoko: the critical problem: how can a pro-slavery colonizing narrator win a heroic identity for the "royal slave" she glorifies, without tainting her own British imperial subject position?

The Spectator, Thomson and Rowlandson: How can the Spectator celebrate the "additional empire" won by trade, and then sentimentally identify with the Indian princess Yarico sold into slavery by her merchant lover? Through his affirmation of Britain's blue sea policy (of free trade and a strong navy), James Thomson writes poetry that constructs an identity for Britain that reconciles terms history has usually held to be incompatible: empire and liberty. Mary Rowlandson's narrative does not figure the English as Indian fighters (clearing Indians from American land only happens in the margins of her text). Instead, her captivity by native Americans make them an instrument of God, which like the Babalonian captivity of the Isrealites, is used as a trial of the faith of the Christian. In this way Indians are written out of the central Christian drama of self-invention and self-constitution (through trial and faith) they merely catalyze.

In the story of Robinson Crusoe, the Bible is used as a kind of manual for discovering/ narrating a story where every incident can take on allegorical significance for the deep self it brings into being. This story of spiritual conversion and trial enables Crusoe to go from being a castaway to being a Christian to being minister/ teacher (of Friday) to emerging as the proprietor of a colony he owns outright: Christianity emerges as the personal rationale for empire. Gulliver's "conversion" to the higher civilization of his horse master offers an apt counter-point to the narrative of self-discovery through imperial conquest.

Our study of the American revolution involved reading those forms of republican political writing--the collective statement of "our" "unalienable" rights, the petition of grievances, and finally, the performative declarative break --that lie at the heart of the constitution of the American republic as distinct from the father or mother country from which the youthful and rebellious adolescent republic takes leave. Nagging question: while this violent break with the British empire is cast in terms of a defense of liberty, the new republic engages in an expansive imperial project of Westward expansion and Native American expropriation.

In discussing the way slaves and colonized (Equiano, Wheatley, Toussaint L' Ouverture) "write back" to the empire, we focused on the tactics of the weak, and especially the utility of representing the self's story and interior experience by articulating his or her language, narratives and ideas with the terms of the dominant European culture: the story of adventure, Christianity, the heroic couplet, the Western canon, the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Scott: Identity and Entertainment

For me the problem of Waverley might be put this way. How can you construct an identity for Scott's conservative, liberal middle way (between Whig/Tory; England/ Scotland; Lowland/ Highland) by using such a wavering, passive, weak and insipid central character as the "bearer of the gaze"--the character through whom we follow the action? Except for some impulsive good feelings, can Waverly be said to have any character at all?

Scott's novel wins a rather weak form of identity for its hero--Waverley is a politically wavering earnest, naïve, blank-slate of a young man, who finally stumbles (with the help of history, coincidence, Flora and Rose) into some sort of acceptable British imperial subjecthood. But for the reader, Waverley's weakness is a strength: this drifting and incompetent adventurer allows us to follow the interesting and exotic encounters with the "others" of empire. Perhaps the magic of Scott's formula is that a certain collective identity (as a British colonizing subject, who can survey with imperial eyes) is won through his/her entertainment. Now exchanges in the contact zone fuel the pageant of history, and cultural difference is expressed and filtered (Hollywood style) through landscape, costume, dialect, poetry/song, and crusty old characters English speakers can still understand and enjoy. His fiction must be one of the origins of the anodyne pleasures of the American ethnic festival. In this liberal-conservative context, anything too extreme--that is ideological or zealous or turbulent (Flora or Fergus)--may be fascinating, but it can't be tolerated (send them to the gallows or the convent).

Caution: I have left the rather crucial term "identity" rather vague in the above comments. For any thoughtful act of criticism, this term, if used (and there are others, like the Butlerian "performative"), would have to be given careful definition.