The Transnational in English Literature

Shakespeare to the Modern

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317608417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Transnational in English Literature examines English literary history through its transnational engagements and argues that every period of English Literature can be examined through its global relations. English identity and nationhood is therefore defined through its negotiation with other regions and cultures.

The first book to look at the entirety of English literature through a transnational lens, Pramod Nayar:

• Maps the discourses that constitute the global in every age, from the Early Modern to the twentieth century
• Offers readings of representative texts in poetry, fiction, essay and drama, covering a variety of genres such as Early Modern tragedy, the adventure novel, the narrative poem, Gothic and utopian fiction
• Examines major authors including Shakespeare, Defoe, Behn, Swift, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Doyle, Ballantyne, Orwell, Conrad, Kipling, Forster
• Looks at themes such as travel and discovery, exoticism, mercantilism, commodities, the civilisational mission and the multiculturalization of England.

Useful for students and academics alike this book offers a comprehensive survey of the English canon questioning and analysing the transnational and global engagements of English literature.

1

Introduction

Globality and Englishness

In Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), towards the end of Book I, Spenser predicts a battle between the Queen of England and a Saracen king:

Faire Goddesse lay that furious fit aside,

Till I of warres and bloudy Mars do sing,

And Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde,

Twixt that great faery Queene and Paynim king.

(1. 11.7. Spenser 1984: 144)

The fields of Britain, predicts Spenser, would be dyed with Saracen blood. Spenser’s gory image actually serves the useful purpose, as far as this book is concerned, of demonstrating how Englishness, embodied in the very materiality of English soil, is imbued (‘dyed’, in Spenser’s term) through and through with a foreign ‘contaminant’, addition and excess. Englishness seems to mark itself through, first, a conflict with a racial-cultural Other and, second, through its ability to absorb this Other. English identity, it would appear from Spenser’s formulation, right from the Early Modern and Elizabethan age, characterized as the age of the first wave of globalization, was always already imbricated with the racial-cultural Other as a visible or invisible but always palpable presence. As such, the image of English fields soaked with the blood of the racial-cultural Other seems a gross but appropriately ‘incorporative’ or assimilative metaphor with which to start thinking of the interracial, multicultural and cosmopolitan transactions and exchanges that enabled the fashioning of English identity across ages. Later Byron would be full of admiration for a cosmopolitan Englishman/European in Don Juan (1819):

The man who has stood on the Acropolis,

And look’d down over Attica; or he

Who has sail’d where picturesque Constantinople is,

Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea

In small-eyed China’s crockery-ware metropolis,

Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh.

(Byron 1975: 789)

The present work is informed by the assumption that the exchange, movement, assimilation and appropriation of goods, ideas, people, money across vast distances, dating back to the Early Modern world and continuing through many pathways to date, has influenced the cultural identities of European nations, and more specifically for purposes of this book, England. A related assumption is that Englishness is not a prior condition, but something that is lived and experienced across multiple sites – symbolic, affective and material – and one such site of this performance of Englishness is its literary text.

Recent studies, inaugurated by Abu-Lughod (1989), among others, push the ‘era’ and ‘origin’ of globalization further back in time, and enable us to see how cultural and national identities were by no means self-contained, coherent and autochthonous. In fact cultural identities were forged through constant, often frictional, encounters with commodities, people and products originating well outside the geopolitical borders. England, like much of Europe, was being continually transformed through these encounters with spice, tea, chintz, chinaware, arithmetic, jugglers, rhinoceros, women, scriptural texts, literary works, opium, elephants, tobacco, among others, from all over the world – America and the ‘New World’, Africa and Asia – from the sixteenth century. If Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez (cited in McCants 2007: 436) date globalization to 1571 – when direct and permanent linkages were set up between the Americas and East Asia via Manila – others argue that forces of globalization also came out of the Middle East (McCants 2007: 437) in the Early Modern period. This book examines a particular site – English literary texts – where the impact of these cultural forces and influences might be made visible.

It was not Romanticism alone that was, in Saree Makdisi’s phrase, ‘worldly, but also global’ (1998: xii), but practically all of England’s literary movements and moments. The book makes a case for treating England’s literary history, from the Renaissance and Early Modern period to the modern, as a history of its transnational engagements. While I am perhaps using the term ‘transnational’ anachronistically to work with periods when the nation-state as we now know it didn’t exist, it serves the useful purpose of focusing on connections and interactions rather than boundedness and containment. The ‘transnational’ therefore is a way to think about England’s varied connections through the 400 years starting with the early voyages in quest of trade routes and colonies to the twentieth century when its Empire began to break up. This book suggests that in every period of English literature we can locate major movements, authors and texts who/that define English identity and nationhood via a dialectic, a negotiation with Arab, Indian, Chinese and other Asian regions and cultures. Literature is a site where the engagement with difference marks a discourse of Englishness within a discourse of ‘globality’.

I use ‘globality’ in opposition to the ‘tropicality’ that Nancy Stepan (2001) and David Arnold (2005b) discern in nineteenth-century English discourses about African and Asian regions. It also resonates with Mary Louise Pratt’s influential argument about a Eurocentric ‘planetary consciousness’ that she traces to eighteenth-century natural history (2003). The construction of globality is an ideological move that enables the textual colonization of the distant parts of the world to be produced under the sign of the literary. These texts effect an act of discursive globalization and colonization. The literary is the domain within which science, navigation, trade, conquest, profit, humanitarianism and development might be subsumed. ‘Globality’ is the discursive construction in fictional texts of a space of intercultural, interracial encounter of England and Englishness made possible through the Englishman’s journey into various diverse and distant places on earth and those places arriving in some form in England’s homes, streets and intellectual spaces. The Englishman’s idea of the globe, or the world, was a particular kind of space represented through a repertoire of images that is immediately identifiable in its difference from England, and is also a space of the Englishman’s engagement with this difference. This cultural space of difference offers a vision of intercultural encounters and the understanding of difference and Otherness in ways that are appealing and accessible.

The ‘world’ therefore is more than just a geographical concept. It signifies a space of irreducible Otherness of many kinds, but an Otherness with which English identity engages. ‘World’ here is not to be taken as the entire entity of the earth, but as a set of places far away from ‘home’.¹ Hence this book’s abiding concern is with spaces in English writings: spaces of Africa, Asia, the poles, Australia and even Europe. Such an idea of globality draws, obviously, from material practices of globalization. Globalization has been underway in the form of economic and cultural networks at least since the fifteenth century according to numerous commentators (Abu-Lughod 1989, Nussbaum 2003). The European Renaissance, for instance, was definitively a product of global exchanges and interactions (Jardine 1996). Every age of course had its specific modes of exchanges and interactions. But what has emerged in critical studies of globalization since the 1990s is the decisive interpretation of European cultures and imaginations as always having grappled with the global. This process of imagining the globe is what I am calling here globality, or the discursive construction of the globe. Literature is one of the cultural practices in which this construction has been achieved.

Globality, manifest as the theme of transnational Otherness, this book proposes, is itself a national project: of English identity-building. The idea of the English nation is implicitly, but often explicitly, the discourse of the racial-cultural Other. The loci of English identity, therefore, lie not in England but are constructed across multiple sites and spaces. The group of islands might offer a geographical specificity to this construction. However, as will be seen, it is this island’s engagements with diverse and dispersed sites over the globe that produces its identity as ‘England’ and as ‘Great Britain’. ‘England’ or ‘Great Britain’ is the conceptualization of the islands in the world, and Englishness is the Englishness within the world made of many races and cultures.

Every age in England’s literary history, from the Early Modern to the Modernists, demonstrates instantiations of these transnational concerns, interests and anxieties. The racial-cultural Other is not merely the backdrop to England’s national identity: it is central to the process of England’s identity-building. While writers from the 1550s seem, at first reading of the discursive field of English literature, to be concerned only with English culture and identity, this book argues that the Asian, African, Arab and Chinese were constituents of this field. Whether it is English domesticity (as we shall see in Chapter 4) or English travel (Chapter 2), the racial-cultural Other is a part of the English social imaginary. Asia, Arabia, China shape England’s imaginary from the inside, by being a part of its homes, consumption, world of ideas, and lives (of soldiers, merchants, travellers). This is the globality of English literature the present book hopes to map.

England or Great Britain did not merely ‘imagine’ a national identity, as Benedict Anderson’s influential argument about nationalism (1991) has proposed, or ‘forge a nation’, as Linda Colley argued (1992) – it did both imagining and forging through an active, consistent engagement with a racial-cultural Other. An English identity was crafted when Britain faced and negotiated ‘otherness’ in the very real material processes of travel, trade, war, conquest, interpersonal relationships, and commodities. Britain/England, to adapt Mary Louise Pratt’s words, ‘construct[ed] itself from the outside in, out of materials infiltrated, donated, absorbed, appropriated, and imposed’ (2003: 137). Britain’s imagining itself as a nation was almost always grounded in Otherness. England’s cultural identity, as this book treats it, from the period of proto-colonial explorations of the early sixteenth century to the age of decolonization in the twentieth, was constantly negotiated through cultural referents both within and outside the geopolitical territory of the island. Othering is the process of negotiating with such external cultural referents in order for England to develop a sense of self, society and the world. This of course assumes, in Benedict Robinson’s formulation (2007: 11) that literary texts and genres imagined, engaged and formed the world, especially the world’s conflicts, contests and tensions in which England’s multiple identities were formed. This book thus treats English literature as a cultural formation constituted out of a constant circulation of material goods, people and ideas between Britain and other cultures (including but not restricted to her colonies). If, as Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann point out, ‘the significance of transnationalism reaches beyond spatial movements and physical connections, involving distinct multilocal sets of identities and memories, fluid and hybrid forms of cultural reproduction, and transnational flows of money and expertise’ (2007: 1–2), then this book examines the multilocal nature of English identity as a result of its international linkages. That is, the circulation of goods, people and ideas created not only shared economic and administrative realms (imperial Britain) but also a cultural space – that of literature – that brought together Englishness and its racial-cultural Other, Chinese, Asian, African, Arabic and also, on occasion, Europe’s internal Others such as the Romany (gypsies) and East Europeans (notably from Transylvania, in Dracula, 1897).² English literature was inextricably bound up with the globe.

This shift in focus to the globality of English literature is not to reject local histories and social contexts that produced English literature and its concerns. Regicide, food riots, industrialization, social mobilities, literacy and other local factors did of course play a crucial role in shaping the nation’s literature. Rather, a study of England’s transnational and global connections offers us a more nuanced local and national contextualization of the canon. It shows us exactly how local literary themes and concerns were constituted within a transnational and global world ‘system’ or set of processes.

This transnational turn to studies of English national identity is visible in collections such as The Global Renaissance that treat the discourse of identity, manifest in literary and other texts, as instantiating a globalism. This book situates itself in this transnational turn, and sets out to examine the ‘provisional instances’ (Aravamudan’s term, 2005, to which I shall return below) where English literary texts, even as they showcased a national, racial and cultural identity, did so with considerable awareness and narrative cognition of the world and racial-cultural Others.

The ‘transnational’ in its adjectival form describes ‘processes between or beyond national boundaries involving several nations or nationalities’. As a noun, it describes ‘someone operating in several countries’ (American Heritage Dictionary). As Donald Pease notes in his introduction to a volume on transnationalism and American studies, when used as a noun, ‘transnational’ refers to a condition of ‘inbetweenness … flexibility, non-identification, hybridity, and mobility’ (2011: 4). Since it lacks a ‘thematic unity’, it refers at once to ‘factual states of affairs’ as well as to ‘the interpretive framework through which to make sense of them’ (4). Pease further notes that the term frequently ‘bears the traces of the violent sociohistorical processes to which it alludes’ (4).

I employ the term ‘transnational’ in this dual sense of a state of affairs as well as an interpretive frame. The state of affairs the term invokes in this book is England’s national-cultural imaginary, in every age, of hybridity, mobility, diffuse spatial coordinates – from England to Europe and the world beyond – that explicitly or implicitly reference its racial-cultural Other. As an interpretive framework it reevaluates social and cultural formations within England’s national imaginaries by showing/tracing how identities, people, objects and ideas were never bound within national borders, or even national identifications. That is, my dual sense of the term ‘transnational’ refers to (1) England’s very real ideational, material and political engagements with a world (or perhaps that should be ‘worlds’) outside its national borders and identity through travel, expansion, colonial dominance, trade, tourism, literary-cultural assimilation, labour, etc. and (2) a reframing of England’s national literary past in the light of new coordinates – of the cultural encounter with Otherness.

The book proposes a move from an area (the transnational, with all its flows, convergences, boundary-breaking and remaking) to a number of sites where the internal and external of ‘England’ encounter each other. These sites in the present book are localized domains of analysis in which this merging and flows of the transnational might be discerned. It reinterprets England’s literary themes in terms of these flows but, for purposes of focus and clarity, does so within specific themes and domains. These sites include the ‘fact’ of mobility and travel, the ideology of exoticism (and a subgenre, of erotic exoticism), the culture of commodities and materiality, the politics of pathologization and medicalization, the ‘project’ of England’s virtuous labour on behalf of the Other, and finally the technologies of aesthetic understanding and assimilation.

Literary examples in the chapters that follow illustrate the arguments but are not intended to convey any genealogy of a discourse. The chapters are interested in examining a cluster of tropes, themes and images in literary text that convey the ur-discourse of transnational English identity. It therefore studies clusters of sub-discourses, such as travel or objectification, in order to map continuities in England’s multiple, multi-layered engagements with Otherness.

Like all discourses the discourse of transnational English identity was of a diffuse, unsystematic and uneven nature, appearing in very different ways and modes, subtle or amplified, in literary texts. The transnational often manifests, in other words, in an unevenness and heterogeneity of engagements with other cultural referents rather than in any systematically articulated ideology in English literature. This book maps the heterogeneous, uneven and fragmented discourse of globality (which I take to be a synonym for the transnational throughout this book).

Studies of genres like the English novel have pointed to its multicultural, multiregional, multilingual and multiracial origins (Hunter 1990, Doody 1998). English subjectivity in the genre, the critics tell us, was formed within the crucible of such comparative, mobile and multiple racial interactions, transactions and locations, whether these are Irish, Scottish, African or Asian. Writing about the iconic English literary genre, the eighteenth-century novel, Srinivas Aravamudan argues that ‘various fictions, including oriental tales and surveillance chronicles, are provisional instances of the translational and transnatio...