{"product_id":"tropicopolitans","title":"Tropicopolitans","description":"In \u003ci\u003eTropicopolitans\u003c\/i\u003e Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and 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 and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.\u003cbr\u003e“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 and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn’s \u003ci\u003eOroonoko\u003c\/i\u003e, Defoe’s \u003ci\u003eRobinson Crusoe\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCaptain Singleton\u003c\/i\u003e, Addison’s \u003ci\u003eCato\u003c\/i\u003e, and Swift’s \u003ci\u003eGulliver’s Travels\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Drapier’s Letters\u003c\/i\u003e. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson’s \u003ci\u003eRasselas\u003c\/i\u003e, Beckford’s \u003ci\u003eVathek\u003c\/i\u003e, Montagu’s travel letters, Equiano’s autobiography, Burke’s political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal’s \u003ci\u003eHistoire des deux Indes\u003c\/i\u003e. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency.\u003cbr\u003eIntroducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, \u003ci\u003eTropicopolitans\u003c\/i\u003e will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory.\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Product","offer_id":54222157775192,"sku":"9780822323150","price":31.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780822323150__676f8a6cc4c3d.jpg?v=1741159958","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/tropicopolitans","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}