Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hutnyk, John

Titel

Robinsonades: pertaining to allegories from the East India Company in Ceylon and other islands, from Marxism to Post-structuralism, and in which, dear reader, a 300-year-old adventure book may still have something to say

Ist Teil von

• Inter-Asia cultural studies, 2020-04, Vol.21 (2), p.279-286

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Robinson Crusoe has been conjured with in many ways over the course of 300 years. While there has been an anti-orientalist critique of the figure of Friday, and some exposure of Crusoe's investments in the slave trade, there are other aspects of Defoe's book that receive less consideration. Post-structuralist and Marxist readings that have been made familiar again in recent work, look decidedly more interesting when the role of the English East India Company is reinstated as backdrop. What then of the resurgence of interest in the models that Robinson provides across the centuries: isolated individual, self-reliant, economic rational and civilising force, alone among nature ... ? If Marx were writing of Robinson today, would the colonial corporation feature? The possibility must be that the environment would be in focus, and a target would be the transnational corporate polluters who accumulate profits through exchanges that risk any future rescue. To think of Robinson is to seek again an allegory for our times, as ever. Perhaps every interpretation of the text leaves us isolated and stranded, left to our own devices with only the sketchiest tools, and a vague textual-moral compass, with which to reproduce a livelihood on an island planet far from home.