1 the Discourse of Colonial Enterprise and Its Representation of the Other Through the Expanded Cultural Critique
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Notes 1 The discourse of colonial enterprise and its representation of the other through the expanded cultural critique 1. I use the term “enterprise” in a delimited manner to specifically denote the colonial enterprise of capitalism and corporate enterprise of multi-nationals under global capitalism. I also examine the subversion of the colonialist capitalist enterprise through the deployment of indigenous enterprise in Chapter 4. It is not within the purview of my project to examine the history of the usage of the term “enterprise” in its medieval and military context. 2. Syed Hussein Alatas in a 1977 study documents and analyses the origins and function of what he calls the myth of the lazy native from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia. See his The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977). I pay tribute to this excellent study; however, my own work differs from Alatas in the following respects. Alatas treats colonialist labour practices as an ideology or a patently false “myth” not as discourse. Unlike Alatas my own study of labour practices is oriented towards discourse analysis. This difference in tools leads to a more fundamental theoretical divergence: Alatas foregrounds the myth of the lazy native without investigating the binary half of the industrious European that sustains the former. Contrarily I argue that the colonized native’s unproductive work and play within the expanded cultural critique cannot be discussed without taking into account the normative labour and leisure practices in post-Enlightenment enterprise. 3. My choice of the Defoe text, as well as my locating the colonial capitalist discourses of labour in the English Enlightenment is influenced by Marx’s brief but intriguing interpretation of Defoe’s Crusoe. Marx says: “All the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth are here so simple and transparent . And yet those relations contain all the essential determinants of value” (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, intro. Ernest Mandel, trans. Ben Fowkes [1977] 170). In the Grundrisse Marx coins the word “Robinsonades” which for him means utopias along the lines of Robinson Crusoe. He says: The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth- century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s Contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of “civil society”, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. 199 200 Notes which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on the one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. (Karl Marx, Grundrisse Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. and Foreword, Martin Nicolaus [1973] 83) 4. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) has inspired a host of re-readings. In a modern anti-apartheid novel a white woman writer, Nadine Gordimer, reverses the master-protector/protected subject-people hierarchy by imagin- ing a beleaguered white family protected by their servant. As Defoe’s Friday is named after a day, Gordimer’s African servant is named after the month of July in July’s People (1981). A white South African male teacher of English lit- erature invokes Defoe’s cast of characters far more explicitly than Gordimer. Coetzee re-invents Friday as an eighteenth-century Englishwoman’s project of giving voice to the other in Foe (Coetzee, 1986). Toni Morrison explains the phenomenon of Clarence Thomas by performing a textual reading of the Crusoe–Friday relationship (Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, 1992). These re-readings appropriate Defoe’s text for a wide variety of projects in cultural studies. 5. All the quotations from Robinson Crusoe are from Daniel Defoe’s, The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) An Authoritative Text/Backgrounds/Sources/Criticism, ed. Michael Shinagel (1975) 58. 6. Ibid. 7. See Pierre Macherey’s interpretation of Crusoe’s gaze at the destitute landscape in A Theory of Literary Production (1978). 8. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, op. cit., 94. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Ibid. 11. The eighteenth-century scholar-critic Ian Watt notes that “Crusoe lives in the imagination mainly as a triumph of human achievement and enterprise,” “Robinson Crusoe as Myth”, Eighteenth Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James L. Clifford (1959) 159. Watt praises Defoe’s fictional travelogue as “his epic of individual enterprise” and notes that Defoe’s Crusoe “has been endowed with the basic necessities for the successful exercise of free enterprise”, An Authoritative Text/Backgrounds/Sources/Criticism, ed. Michael Shinagel (1975) 296, 297. 12. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, op. cit., 11. 13. Ibid., 26. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 30. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. I refer to one of my chief influences, Ranajit Guha’s, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (1963). Guha has consistently pointed to the Enlightenment as an important watershed of European ideas, Notes 201 discourses, and philosophies for the making of Britain’s colonial capitalism in India. While he studies the eighteenth-century physiocrats, I use a text that has become part of the colonial imagination, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, because it became part of the European imagination, giving rise to multiple variants and reinventions of the ur-narrative of the “man on the island.” 19. Here I make alliances with Said’s essay “The Pleasures of Imperialism” in Culture and Imperialism (1994) which is, in my view, Said’s most suggestive work after Orientalism. I extend Said’s notion further by suggesting that there should be an element of auto-critique in the examination of the aesthetic pleasures of imperialism. The critic should implicate herself in her own inquiry by asking what are her own sources of readerly pleasure in the imperialist text, a question I have tried to address in my discussion of Defoe in Chapter 2. 20. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, op. cit., 37, 40. 21. Ibid., 45, 49. 22. Ibid., 50. 23. Ibid., 174. 24. John Bowring, A Visit to the Philippine Island (1859) cited in Syed H. Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native, op. cit., 59. 25. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, op. cit., 51. 26. It is noteworthy that in three of the four Hollywood films I have chosen, the embodiments of American colonialist enterprise are actors who have played iconic roles: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford as a modern Crusoe is a good casting choice, as he brings to bear on this role his iconic status from Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and so on, as the good American with an inviolate moral centre who fights corruption even in its most familiar and insidious form. 27. The film is based on Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast (1982). 28. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, op. cit., 37. 29. Ibid., 40. 30. Recent ecologically oriented studies of history have shown that the world ecology was significantly affected from the fifteenth century onwards by Western colonial capitalism. Specifically in India, the changes brought about by colonialism and the exploitation and control of Indian national resources had a profoundly unsettling effect on different populations and their habitat. Elizabeth Whitcombe’s pioneering study, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, Vol. 1: The United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–1900 (1971), is one such example. In this study Whitcombe shows how the introduction of colonial capitalist market-oriented agriculture led to enor- mous changes and hardship in the rural economy of Doab. Similarly in Kumaun district from 1893 to 1921 the British takeover of the forests and introduction of commercial forestry brought about a transformation of social relations whose repercussions continue to date. This is documented by Ramchandra Guha in “Forestry in British and Post-British India: A Historical Analysis,” Economic & Political Weekly (29 Oct. and 12 Nov. 1983); reprinted as “Forestry and Social Protest in British Kumaun, c. 1893–1921”, in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (1985). 31. Guha, A Rule of Property, op. cit., 26. 202 Notes 32. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan from the Death of Akbar to the . Settlement of the Empire under Aurungzebe . A Dissertation on the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan . An Enquiry into the State of Bengal, Vol. 3, 1768–1772, 33. 33. Ibid., 35. 34. It is noteworthy that both the Bengali zemindar class and Wajid Ali Shah were placed in their position of power by the British themselves. The discourse regarding their unproductivity was as much a British construct as the discourse of colonial British enterprise. 35. Interestingly the two sites, Bengal and Awadh, are also linked by way of military history and resistance.