I am revisiting Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, over the next couple of days while reading Robinson Crusoe for Dr. Kristin Bluemel’s class on The Novel in English.
In particular, I plan to consider Trouillot’s first chapter, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In this chapter Troillot himself creates a pretty convincing narrative regarding the construction of the savage slot within “Western” Imperialism, how that slot was imagined and portrayed in literature (ahem… Robinson Crusoe), and finally how the discipline of anthropology later emerged as a “A Discipline for the Savage” and was institutionalized, along with many social sciences, as part of a nationalist project.
Of course, the basics of this argument seem old hat by now. And certainly there are striking parallels with the narrative of the “The Rise of English” that Terry Eagleton provides, but I hope that pairing Trouillot with Crusoe will illuminate my understanding of the development of the novel form specifically. Trouillot discusses literary content, but not form, while making essentially the same comparisons between literature and philosophy that Ian Watt does in The Rise of the Novel, but perhaps I can go in a slightly different direction by considering the “cultural” aspects of imperialism that Watt largely neglects and the form of the novel, which Trouillot is, of course, not addressing.
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