Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies.

Vitkus, Daniel

Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies

By Shankar Raman

Postcolonial Literary Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

This book is part of a series, edited by David Johnson and Ania Loomba, that brings together various literary periods or movements (from medieval to modernist) with the interpretive tactics and theoretical principles of "postcolonial studies." Raman's book follows the structural formula prescribed by the series editors: the text includes 1) "a time line"--in this case a useful, detailed chronology stretching for twenty-eight pages, 2) "a comprehensive survey of the existing field of scholarship and debate," 3) "a literature survey," 4) a section summarizing and discussing "key critical, theoretical, historical and political debates," 5) a series of "case studies providing exemplary critical readings of key literary texts," and 6) a brief annotated bibliography serving as a guide to "further reading" (vii). The series editors' preface offers a bold declaration of what they hope these books will accomplish: they will "exemplify how postcolonial studies can re-configure the major periods and areas of literary studies" (vii). This is a tall order, and to be fair, it would not be easy to accomplish a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of the Renaissance even in a much longer volume. Raman's critical text is only 162 pages in length, and the author himself defines his project, not as a radical re-mapping of the Renaissance, but rather as a pre-figuration of postcolonial studies (and an application, to the Renaissance past, of the current and on-going anti-imperial project of postcolonial criticism). In fact, once its author announces that "we have always been postcolonial; we will never be fully postcolonial" (1), Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies draws fairly sparsely on postcolonial theory per se. Its choice of critical method and theoretical pronouncements owes much more to Deleuzian assemblage theory, Bruno Latour, New Historicism, and the history of the book trend than it does to Said, Spivak, or Bhabha--or to more recent postcolonial critics. Raman's discussion is digressive and wide-ranging, covering a variety of contexts, texts, and locations, beginning with Columbus in the New World and going as far as Dryden's 1673 play Amboyna and the Anglo-Dutch wars of that era. One of the strengths of the study is that Raman makes good use of his expertise in early modern Portuguese and South Asian culture.

We are encouraged to view the subject matter of this book through the lens of the postcolonial, globalized present, and, not surprisingly, the focus of Raman's analysis is the study of writings from the early modern period that engage with cross-cultural phenomena or exhibit the drive for colonial or commercial power and mark the beginnings of post-1492 globalization. From Raman's perspective, to inhabit a postcolonial perspective on the Renaissance is primarily to occupy a politicized, presentist positionality in relation to certain Renaissance writings that represent (and raise questions about) racial difference, hybridity, colonization, global expansion, and empire. Many of the usual suspects are brought forth: Columbus, Las Casas, cannibals, Prospero and Caliban, Spenser in Ireland, Othello, Tamburlaine. The opening section, "Exploring the Terrain," investigates the anti-colonial strain that is found in texts like Las Casas's Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies or Alonso de Ercilla's epic poem La Araucana. This section also addresses the question of "empire" and describes the competing imperial models (ancient Rome, Habsburg Spain, Ottoman Turkey) that attracted European colonizers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A discussion of cannibalism follows, emphasizing the fantasized image of the New World cannibal in European texts, and the chapter then concludes with a subsection on "Gender and Race."

The next section comprises the book's only extensive discussion of a text by Shakespeare. In some detail, Raman rehearses the debates about the setting and signification of The Tempest, asking whether or not it should be considered "a colonial text" (51) or "a new world text" (65). Next, an account surveying "Postcolonial Reactivations of The Tempest" (56) by third-world authors extends a "line of argument" (61) taken from Hulme and Sherman's The Tempest and Its Travels. After situating The Tempest in the context of the Jacobean period and then following its later appropriations, Raman is able to assert, "a text is a colonial text not just by virtue of a historical relationship to the past but through a historical relationship to the future.... Colonial texts and the postcolonial readings that reveal them to be colonial might thus be said to constitute acts of temporal insertion; they create gaps in time through which pasts and futures emerge, to act upon one another--and upon us" (61). Of course, this sort of "temporal insertion" is simply what happens in the case of any effective and open-minded effort to acquire a sense of historical difference by reading texts from the past. Certainly, the history of colonization, decolonization, and postcoloniality, from Columbus's first voyage to the age of the globalized, digital swarm, is an important and compelling narrative, but only one of many frameworks that we might use to make apparent our connections to the past.

The chapter on "Debates" then shifts into a discussion of "Civilized Selves and Barbarous Others" in the context of early modern Ireland, and moves from that binary opposition to the triangulation formed by the English Protestant demonization of both Roman Catholicism and Islam that occurred during the era of Habsburg and Ottoman power. In the last section of this second chapter, Raman questions and problematizes the reductive nature of the self-other binary as a descriptive paradigm for describing identity formation. He asks, "Does the proliferation of others in the service of making early modern identities adequately capture emerging fields of difference?" (89) Raman "does not pretend to have answers" (89) to this question, but he leans heavily toward a "no" answer when he goes on to emphasize "what postcolonial studies misses by leaning heavily on identity formation as a paradigm" (89). Offering instead a murky brew of Deleuzian assemblage theory and Latourian object-oriented ontology, this section of the "Debates" chapter raises questions and "open[s] possible avenues" (89) without providing clear or decisive answers.

In his third and final chapter, Raman looks at a series of "case studies." They are quite widely dispersed in time and place. In an attempt to tie these disparate threads together, he delineates three recurrent "themes" (98) that he discerns as key patterns in the colonialist discourse of early modern Europe: "The repeated use of the female body as a metonym" (98) for colonial territory; the trope of the marketplace; and the "comparison of life to a voyage" (99). These issues pop up occasionally in his "case studies": Gil Vicente's farcical Auto da India I (1509), Camoes's Lusiads (1572), the engraved images produced by Theodore de Bry in his multivolume collection of travel and discovery narratives, Richard Brome's Caroline play The Antipodes, Donne's elegy "Love's Progress," and Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Raman's approach helps us to see the connectedness of the so-called New World (including the West Indies) to Asia and the East Indies, and to discern a structural pattern in the Western Europeans' economic and cultural exchanges with both colonized Amerindians and powerful eastern empires in China and India. This gives us a sense of the global scope and impact of early colonial and commercial voyages launched by Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch colonizers and merchants.

Aside from a few pages on Othello, there is no substantial discussion of the additional plays, beyond The Tempest, in which Shakespeare explored issues of empire or race (such as Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice or Antony and Cleopatra). Shakespeareans may be interested, though, in how Raman uses Othello to introduce his reading of Brome's The Antipodes. Here the traveler's tales told by Othello to Desdemona, and the traditional, romantic sense of wonder that they inspire in her, are linked to the mental illness experienced by Peregrine, the travel-obsessed character whose reading of travel tales, including those of Mandeville, has driven him to madness. Peregrine is cured when he embarks on, and returns from, the theatrical illusion of a journey, staged for his benefit, to the Antipodes, in a play-within-the-play. In The Antipodes, argues Raman, an irrational and fantasized Mandevillian wonder gives way to a fierce commodification promoted by the emergence of a globalizing commercial system. We move away from the kind of pity and delight that Desdemona derives from Othello's stories of travail among exotic peoples in distant lands toward something more unstable--"the vision of an inescapable space of exchange and possession, wherein people, things, identities, and attributes endlessly circulate, ceaselessly becoming other" (140).

Raman repeatedly stresses the notion that there are anti-colonial "potentialities ... buried within the language of colonizing power" (9), and he claims that "It falls to postcolonial studies to re-kindle these moments" (50) of incommensurability or plurality that would question or destabilize the oppressive binary opposition of civilized European colonizer to barbaric colonized. This is a sensible (and well worn) approach, one that we have seen frequently since Ania Loomba's groundbreaking 1998 study Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Raman's treatment of "race," "hybridity," "empire" and other key (post)colonial concepts draws skillfully on pre-existing scholarship and frequently takes us in interesting and eye-opening directions. The sections on early modern definitions of law and empire in Spenser's writings, on cannibalism (and its connections to gender and sexuality), and on the Portuguese texts by Gil Vincente and Camoes are particularly helpful.

But does this book live up to the preface's claim to deploy postcolonial studies in a way that reconfigures or re-orients the Renaissance as we know it? Well, not exactly. For one thing, it does not do very much to provincialize Europe or to radically question the Eurocentrism that places the cross-cultural, globalizing process of the early modern period under the rubric of "the Renaissance"--it is surprising that no such moves are made. Perhaps a more radical and innovative questioning of the colonial Renaissance might have happened if the author were more interested in the kind of postcolonial criticism that is currently being published (it is telling that the appended bibliography of "Further Reading" includes very few recent publications). Aside from a brief section on Ibn Khaldun, as far as primary texts from the Renaissance are concerned, we are exposed only to Western European, Christian writers from a handful of early modern cultures. Nor does this book employ global theories like those of Wallerstein or refer to Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism and global trade systems--the word "capitalism" rears its head only once toward the end, in a brief reference to Richard Wilson's work on Tamburlaine. Like many critics today, Raman prefers to call capitalism by the name of "mercantilism"--or simply "the market." Raman seems eager to disavow and move beyond established Marxist or new historicist understandings of empire--into new theoretical and methodological territory. An example of this is in the final sub-section of his book in which he draws on Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus in order to claim Tamburlaine as a Deleuzian nomad whose "imaginative, global desire" (152) occupies a "radical exteriority" to "the rational, strategic side of the imperial mission" (153). But then, this is not exactly "new" (though the current vogue for Deleuze and assemblage theory has recently reached new heights) since A Thousand Plateaus dates from 1987.

Raman's application of Deleuzian concepts to Marlowe's play is what drives the book's final case study, a reading of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I. The discussion of this text concludes the book rather abruptly. And it ends on a curious note. On the final pages, Raman proclaims that the figure of Tamburlaine and "the sheer nomadic energy of Marlowe's overreacher" are to be understood as a theatrical embodiment of the "utopian energy in early modern colonial discovery" (161). Furthermore, Raman reads the Tamburlaine plays as texts inscribing a "prophetic dimension"--prefiguring the violent struggle and unruly violence that will come to pass in future revolutions (presumably anti-colonial or anti-imperial struggles? or perhaps the great crisis awaiting our global Empire?). In particular, Tamburlaine's cruelty and violence at Damascus emblematize "The fulfillment of promise, the possibility of radical transfiguration, [which] emerges only from its negative side, out of the horrors of revolution" (160). The final paragraphs of the book go on to celebrate "the unstoppable force of history, sweeping away the detritus of the past, transforming the face of the world" (161). According to Raman, "the New World was new not only in its never having been seen by Europeans before, but in the promise of transformation it held out for colonialists, many indeed fleeing persecution and emmiseration [sic] in the worlds from which they came. It was new also because it would be made anew, and would allow the makers to remake themselves in the process" (161). This closing expression of a Nietzschian view of colonial violence is accompanied by some rather enigmatic remarks about "the 'event' that is Tamburlaine" (162): for instance, "Tamburlaine stands for everything that can be imagined--but only certain things can be imagined at certain times" (162). This is the book's final gambit--there is no general conclusion and these comments on Tamburlaine are not explicitly tied to the other parts of the book. So we are left to connect the dots ourselves.

While much of Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies is quite sensible, and it offers us an intriguing set of interpretations of early modern texts, it does not provide a striking, game-changing new argument about the either the Renaissance or postcolonial studies. Raman's postcolonial presentism is "untimely" when it could be timely--in other words, there is little specific discussion of the postcolonial condition today or of globalization in the postmodern age. If we do the work to connect the dots, we find that the over-arching thesis of the book is simply this--the signs of both a virulent imperialism and a "postcolonial" anti-imperialism can be traced in early modern texts written by Western European authors. In addition, we gain some useful information and insightful readings of specific works of Renaissance literature. Thus Raman's study is wide-ranging without being comprehensive, anti-colonial without being rigorously anti-Eurocentric, and at the end of the day, theory conscious without drawing on the latest postcolonial theory. It does not function like one of the many useful "companions" or "handbooks" that either offer an introductory survey of a field or else attempt comprehensive coverage by assigning articles covering different sub-fields or topics within a field to an array of different scholars. Instead, it provides us with a series of loosely linked accounts and readings.

In spite of his invocations of the untimely, Raman's readings of early modern texts retain many of the tactics of new historicist inquiry and contextualization. The sections of the book that carry out those critical methods are often quite successful. These materialist, historicizing procedures sit somewhat uncomfortably cheek-to-jowl with Raman's rather abstract presentism. Perhaps Raman's efforts to find a new approach through presentism would have been more effective if those efforts were accompanied by a more extensive treatment of current cultural, critical and theoretical work that bears the imprint of (post)colonial history.

Raman's repeated endorsements of the current vogue for deemphasizing historical difference in order to promote the relevance of the Renaissance to the present--these statements call for a collapsing of history into an ever-present becoming. While this kind of presentist framework has undeniable validity at a certain philosophical level, it can be seen here (as elsewhere) to have problematic implications. Most strikingly in the final section, but also sprinkled throughout the book, are references to the collapsed temporality of the early modern/postcolonial conjuncture. Through these presentist proclamations, Raman's study of the postcolonial Renaissance partakes of a theoretical trend for the critique of chronology and event, but it does so in ways that recuperate as revolutionary the genocide and suffering that were the large-scale, transformative results of the violence perpetrated by the Western colonizers and their capitalist backers. Some of the passages quoted above even hint that the violence carried out by aggressive merchants and colonizers during the Renaissance would ultimately engender a future postcolonial violence.

Inevitably, we see the past darkly, through the distorted and partial mirror of our own time, and limited by the existing archive. But to acknowledge that epistemological dilemma does not mean we should confound the past with the present--or relinquish our efforts to reconstruct the past as accurately as we can, in all of its strangeness and difference. A truly global postcolonial criticism of early modernity should look outside of the West, and it should embrace both sides of the past-present dialectic and take up our responsibility to differentiate and organize the past in order to explain its connections with the present: otherwise we end up with Hamlet's tragically blindered timing, born of a disgusted fatalism that concentrates all temporality into the rush of present thought and action: "We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." In the West, at least, we have been medieval; we have been modern; and now we are all postmodern. Hamlet and all other suicide bombers leave history behind forever, but even in their dying actions, they yearn for their story to be told, and told in a way that serves their agenda. Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies ends with "exhaustion" (162): "The fire is consumed," reads Raman's closing sentence, "the scorched earth remains" (162). Yes, we must understand that the past is an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. But, as the best portions of Raman's book demonstrate, our job is to pick up the pieces and make sense of past events, the causes and effects, the human agencies and actions that made the past happen. Then we will be in a better position to face the future. Readiness comes more easily to those who understand the past as they prepare for what will come. And surely we must understand the Renaissance as a different time in which a historically specific colonizing "energy" mobilized a genocide, enslavement and injustice that we do not want to repeat in any present form. "The oldest hath borne most: we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long."