In this paper, which she presented at UCLA on May 9, Betty Joseph offered a fresh look at the repository of the East India Company documents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that archive she located the traces of women who represent the contradictions of colonialism’s literary and political uses of female subjects. Especially evocative was her pairing of these documents with rogue literature--the literature of vagabonds and dishonest fortune-hunting seafaring men who live outside the principles of authority and the bonds of nation, largely without women.
The paper raised many important questions, among them, “Is global studies replacing postcolonial studies as a preferred analytical frame?” Drawing on critics such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and others, Joseph elaborated on the ways that the alleged universalism of Western thought is limited by its provincial perspective. The concept of woman has, of course, been subject to this universalizing tendency, for European woman, as described by Scottish Enlightenment historians and moral philosophers, was widely regarded as a moral compass for evaluating a civilization’s modernity or barbarity, or as a mediating force between cultivation and its absence.
Joseph showed the way that probing the archives reveals that a native woman could fracture the inevitability of progress and interrupt the trajectory towards European modernity. The female subject, the paper helpfully suggested, never embodies “a unilinear movement towards a European norm but [is] a result of many different configurations and linkages that weave together a subject.” In particular, the paper focused on the resistance of the Rani of the Malabar Coast in India, a coast rich in spices, because she refused to trade for English products and insisted on trading pepper only for gold, thus resisting a progressive history from premodern to modern or colonial.
Among the questions raised in the discussion session was to ask how the situation in the English records differed from the earlier Dutch and Portuguese companies that also traded with Malabar. If the eighteenth century marks a clear change in sex-gender codes, as Joseph argued, then do we not also need to look at those archives? Further, would it be possible to locate traces of other womenperhaps even laboring womenin the native Malabar archives in order to strengthen the claim that this shift signals a change in the mode of production in the eighteenth century? If this were the case, what other secrets might be revealed in the “Great Unread”? Still others wondered whether these stories of economic and political transformation were not ultimately Western stories. Is it ever possible, as Suvir Kaul has asked, no matter how revisionist such work might be, to pry “these texts away from the ideological implications of nationalism and imperialism” |
Betty Joseph is Associate Professor of English at Rice University. Her most recent book is Reading the East India Company,1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (2004), available from Chicago University Press.
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Felicity Nussbaum, Professor of English, joined the Department in 1996. Professor Nussbaum, who earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, is a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, gender studies, and autobiography. |
