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Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-8351623

1527-1943

Paul Youngquist,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Are you down with the brown? If you’re reading this, probably so. No need to query your convictions. They’re safe—not because this book will flatter them. It won’t. But you’ll find that whatever you think brown might signify in racial terms (mixed, or multiracial, or just plain not white) doesn’t apply to Manu Samriti Chander’s sense of what it means for “Romantic” writers. I’ll confess up front that I find the mincing around race—and class, too—frustrating. In the Caribbean context with which I’m most familiar, brown often conflates race and class, as in brown bourgeoisie. While Chander does little to challenge my presumption, after reading his book I realize he doesn’t mean that at all.What he does mean I’ll tell you in a minute. But if you intend to read Brown Romantics, and I think you should, you must, I implore you: read the afterword first. There Chander describes the circumstances under which he wrote his book. They complicate what might otherwise appear a tendentious argument. His candor allows a reader like me to identify with him as a critic who seems to be pushing against an open door when he insists that it’s time to quit obsessing over the work of six Romantic-era white guys. Many of us (should I name names?) gave that up years ago—or tried. But Chander wrote Brown Romantics under the imperial pressure of an impending tenure decision after abandoning his dissertation. That’s a tough choice—made even tougher by his sense of not really belonging in the Romantics biz anyway. He felt, as he puts it, like “a vulnerable brown man playing a white man’s game” (107). That’s a feeling I’ve never had to feel. If the brown in brown Romantics channels this alienation—as the occasion for critical engagement with Romanticism’s (and perhaps the profession’s) imperial pretentions—then Chander should be praised for facing up honestly to his situation as someone not heir to all the advantages that “Romanticism,” professionally speaking, might bestow.And Chander understands Romanticism oh so imperially. He’s right to do so, at least on the basis of certain claims made by poets now deemed Romantic. With what seems in retrospect bad taste, Shelley declares poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Wordsworth tips his imperial hand when he describes the poet as “a man speaking to men.” Chander pounces on these proclamations to construct an empire of letters wherein “the English Romantics were in the position to declare the laws of taste” by which later poets, especially colonial ones, “were to be enjoyed” (4). He associates these Romantics with Giorgio Agamben’s “sovereign” and the colonials with “homo sacer”—not a comfortable fit, since the defining quality of the sovereign is the capacity to suspend law and deploy lethal violence, while that of homo sacer is the liability of being killed without redeeming sacrifice. Ignoring such subtleties, Chander emphasizes instead the logic that tethers homo sacer to the politics of sovereignty, the baleful logic that Agamben calls “exclusive inclusion” (4). By its operation, an outsider—the colonial poet, for instance—becomes at once part of and separate from the empire of letters that legislates his (always “his”) participation. It’s imperial hokey-pokey: the laws of Romanticism require the peripheral poet to write poetry with one foot in and one foot out of its legislated world.That—and not “racially mixed”—is what Chander means by brown. He aims to ironize the category, challenging racial identity as a basis for “simple expression” (4). His theoretical formulation of the conundrum is catchy, I must admit, even if I hope it never catches on: “‘Brown Romantics’ are not marginalized because they are brown; on the contrary, they are ‘brown’ because they are marginalized” (3). That’s a genuinely witty koan. I attended graduate school way back in the 1980s, and I like a chiasmus as much as the next guy. This one worries me, however, for what I hope are obvious reasons. By its theoretical force (apparently) all marginalized “Romantics” become “brown.” I assume that goes for most women writers of the era—Chander takes pains to position his work as a recovery project similar to that of earlier feminist critics. But what of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, and Robert Wedderburn? They must be “brown,” too, however black they might appear by the insidious measure of complexion. Chander argues later that even ostensibly white writers look better when tanned by the touch of his chiasmus. Brown thus indexes the cultural conundrum of exclusive inclusion, a claim I find attractive, except I can’t shake the association of the word with color—and a dehumanizing order of social denigration that goes way beyond literary practice.Which is to say, I can’t unremember the problem of race for the purposes of reading Brown Romantics. Chander mostly eschews it. Where it shows its face at all, it appears as a formal correlative of social force, as in the following remark from late in the book: “The formal characteristics of Brown Romanticism that initially struck the critics as derivative and imitative actually served to expose the Eurocentric racism informing the very tradition in which they wrote” (91). To dismiss colonial poetry as slight exposes the racism of the Romanticism that legislates such judgments, a canny enough claim. It deflects race away from the people who experience it to the ideologies that subject them. But to my mind it begs the most interesting question brown raises: what Romanticism might make of a genuinely mixed poetry, one that crosses colonial with British notions of race, class, and culture.I realize that such a question doesn’t interest Chander. It conjures the specter of creolization, a revenant he wishes invisibly away. He’s concerned with the plight of the colonial poet as cultural participant, not mixologist. Chander appreciates that plight keenly and describes it well, as when he writes that such a poet “could participate only as a marked figure, one designating the model minority who testified to the effectiveness of imperial indoctrination, the native informant with firsthand knowledge of colonial life, and the bearer of the sign of ineradicable difference” (91). That mark of model minority includes the colonial poet as writer but excludes him as anything other than native informant. If racial identity remains in play here (and it does), it cedes to cultural difference the big liability that afflicts the brown Romantic. Neither imperially British nor quietly colonial, the brown Romantic receives a cool reception simply for trying to join the literary party from the underprivileged periphery.Chander provides four examples of the brown phenomenon, globally dispersed and historically diverse, sort of. Henry Derozio wrote Oriental tales in India during the 1820s. Egbert Martin published Christian lyrics in British Guyana during the 1880s. Henry Lawson produced working-class screeds that take an explicitly racist turn around the turn of the twentieth century. These three transgress the laws of Romanticism, advancing colonial tastes in an effort to reinvent the prevailing imperial, which is to say global, community. Chander examines these writers with care and intelligence, offering astute readings of their works that will provide many readers, myself included, with a first encounter with these colonials. Although I find his literary history too thin to sustain the claim that these “brown” writers cared much about being Romantic and his attention to geographic context too spare to support his aspiration to a “global” perspective, his sympathetic assessment of the colonial poet’s plight illuminates the risks involved in writing English poetry—and maybe literary criticism, too—from the periphery of empire.Who’s the fourth brown Romantic? John Keats, of course. You’re supposed to find Chander’s choices perverse. A “recognizable touch of brownness” aligns Keats with “the ‘imitative’ poets of the periphery” (96). He’s the master of mimicry, after all, the callow poet killed by criticism for parroting his betters. The browns suffer a similar fate. Keats the chameleon acquires color by association. But more’s at stake here than critical perversity. Look what Chander achieves under the banner of “brown Romanticism.” He’s brought a mixed-race Indian poet, a mulatto Guyanese, a Caucasian Australian racist, and a versifying white (stable) boy into conversation under a shared rubric—one that sanctions and sustains what he calls “literary cosmopolitanism” (9). Brown Romanticism creates “a field in which the colonial poet could contest taste as part of a transnational dialogue among peers” (11). It welcomes a diversity of voices into cosmopolitan conversation. If I note that the conversation as Chander conducts it includes no enslaved blacks, no women, and for sure no black women, it’s only to say that cosmopolitanism might not be so inclusive as he imagines. And when he feels that it falls to him to adjudicate among cosmopolitanisms (the Cockney kind isn’t cosmopolitan enough), I lose interest. Could be I’m part of the problem. Or maybe my heart remains with the Undercommons. If a brown Romanticism can accomplish so much, I wonder what a black Romanticism might do . . .