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In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & 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 ...

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & 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 & 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 & the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those subaltern people who bear & resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation & colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe & Captain Singleton, Addison's Cato, & Swift's Gulliver's Travels & The Drapier's Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Montague's travel letters, Equiano's autobiography, Burke's political & aesthetic writings, & Abbe 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, & literary theory.