The Postcolonial Enlightenment This page intentionally left blank The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory edited by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa 1 3 GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwidein Oxford NewYork Auckland CapeTown DaresSalaam HongKong Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Nairobi NewDelhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto Withofficesin Argentina Austria Brazil Chile CzechRepublic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore SouthKorea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress intheUKandincertainothercountries PublishedintheUnitedStates byOxfordUniversityPressInc.,NewYork #Theseveralcontributors Themoralrightsoftheauthorshavebeenasserted DatabaserightOxfordUniversityPress(maker) Firstpublished2009 Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans, withoutthepriorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress, orasexpresslypermittedbylaw,orundertermsagreedwiththeappropriate reprographicsrightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproduction outsidethescopeoftheaboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment, OxfordUniversityPress,attheaddressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisbookinanyotherbindingorcover andyoumustimposethesameconditiononanyacquirer BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Dataavailable LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData Dataavailable TypesetbySPIPublisherServices,Pondicherry,India PrintedinGreatBritain onacid-freepaperby BiddlesLtd,King’sLynn,Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–922914–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial prac tices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledgedroleinthisdiscussion,alternatelyreviledandveneratedas harbingerofcolonialdominionandavatarofliberation,astargetandshield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas eighteenth century studies and postcolonial theory in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of these imperial projects. Theconversationsthatresultedinthisvolumebeganataconferenceheld at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. We are grateful to Peter Reill, director of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, for his enthusiasm, encouragement, and gen erous sponsorship of the event, and to Doris L. Garraway and Sven Trakul hun, with whom we jointly organized the conference. We also want to express our gratitude to staff of the Center and Library, especially Candis Snoddy,AnnaHuang,andMarinaRomani.Priortothis,ourinitialencoun tersanddiscussionsoccurredinthecontextoftheInternationalSeminaron theEighteenthCentury,forwhichwewishtothankByronWellsandPhilip Stewart, who brought us together, and to Vicki Cutting at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. AtOxfordUniversityPresswehavebeenfortunatetoworkwithAndrew McNeillie and Jacqueline Baker, who have provided wonderful editorial support. We want to thank our production editor, Fiona Vlemmiks, our copy editor, Fiona Little, and our indexer, Tom Broughton Willett, whose diligence and care have been enormous. Our debts to friends, colleagues, institutions, and funding bodies are many. We especially want to mention the assistance of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and its staff, particularly James Allan and Vera Ryhajlo, and the libraryofColumbiaUniversity.DanielCareyisindebtedtotheIrishResearch vi / Acknowledgements Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the award of a Govern ment of Ireland fellowship, which supported his research. Lynn Festa is gratefultotheEnglishdepartmentsattheUniversityofWisconsin,Madison, and Harvard University for the junior faculty research leave which enabled her to work on this volume. Finally, we are most grateful to our contribu tors, for their generosity and patience throughout the publication process. The essays in this collection address a set of issues of both historical significance and current import. By documenting assumptions and ideas from an earlier period, the vocabulary used to refer to racial, ethnic, and cultural groups in this volume reflects historical usage. Thus, rather than correcting terms such as ‘black’ or ‘Oriental’, as OUP house style would dictate, we have generally stayed with the idiom of the era to avoid intro ducing unnecessary anachronism. The cover illustration is taken from Bernard Picart, C´er´emonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (new edn, Paris, 1738), vi, reproduced by permissionoftheKeeperofSpecialCollections,BodleianLibrary,University ofOxford,shelfmarkVet.E6b.8(t.6)(betweenp.228andp.229).Thescheme for these volumes, which first appeared in Amsterdam, originated with the printer Jean Fre´de´ricBernard. Theplates were the workof Picart, a Protest antexilefromFrancewhosettledinHolland.Thisplate,‘DiversesPagodeset PenitencesdesFaquirs’,issigned‘BPicartdel.1729’(i.e.delineavitordesigned). It depicts an idol in a shrine, below a draping Banyan tree. The idol is a distortedandoversizedrenditionbyPicartofagoddess,identifiedinhisplate as‘Mamaniva’(probablyacorruptionof‘Mahadevi’,theGreatGoddess).On oneside,figureswhohavecometoofferprayersaremarkedontheforehead; on the other side, offerings of rice are made. The scene also depicts Indian ascetics(sadhus)ofdifferentsects,referredtobyPicartasFaquirs,performing various ‘austerities’, involving fire, standing, or raising the arms for vast periods of time. The long haired, naked figures are Shaiva sadhus and those with shaved heads are probably Digambar Jain monks. The figure with a broom in the middle, whose mouth and nose are covered by a cloth, is a Svetambar Jain monk, who must wear the mask and sweep with a broom in order to avoid killing any ‘petits insectes’ by inadvertently inhaling or steppingon them. Picart’ssource for all of this was Les six voyages deJeanBaptisteTavernier,2vols(Paris,1676).WearegratefultoDolfHartsuiker for his expertise in making these identifications. CONTENTS Notes on Contributors x List of Illustrations xii Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?’ 1 Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey I Provincializing Enlightenment 5 II Enlightenment without others 17 III Postcolonial Enlightenment(s) 22 Part One: Subjects and Sovereignty 1. Hobbes and America 37 Srinivas Aravamudan I The early colonial history of Virginia and Bermuda 43 II The theoretical reduction of America to Company colonization 53 III From theoretical reduction to oceanic expansion 64 2. The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Colonial Context 71 David Lloyd I Aesthetic culture 71 II The narrative of development 76 III The abyss of blackness 95 viii / Contents Part Two: Enlightenment Categories and Postcolonial Classifications 3. Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory 105 Daniel Carey I Contrapuntal reading 109 II Robinson Crusoe and the subject of slavery 112 III Rereading Robinson Crusoe 125 IV Conclusion 135 4. Between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Blacks So Called’, 1688 1788 137 Felicity A. Nussbaum I Shades of blackness 142 II Africa Orientalized 153 III Postcolonial theory and the eighteenth century 164 5. Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War 167 Siraj Ahmed I Precolonial and early colonial Orientalism 176 II Jones and mythic law 184 III Precolonial and early colonial sovereignty 191 IV A spatio temporal fix for Bengal 196 Part Three: Nation, Colony, and Enlightenment Universality 6. Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism 207 Doris L. Garraway I Mimicry and hybridity in Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un sauvage 211 II Parodic mimicry and utopia in Diderot’s Suppl´ement au voyage de Bougainville 220 III Dialogue, critique, and the imagined consent of the colonized 233 7. Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment 240 Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun I Enlightenment and diversity: three contexts 243 II Kant’s universalism 254 Contents / ix III German Ethnographie and universal history 267 IV The German critique of colonialism 273 V Universalism and diversity? 277 8. ‘These Nations Newton Made his Own’: Poetry, Knowledge, and British Imperial Globalization 281 Karen O’Brien I Newtonian laws of empire 287 II Cowper and the moral order of knowledge 299 Coda: How to Write Postcolonial Histories of Empire? 305 Suvir Kaul Bibliography 328 Index 363