Enclosures, colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe syndrome: A genealogy of land in a global context

Boundary 2

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 129-156

  Marzec, Robert P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 13844292386     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-29-2-129     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994), 34. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as RC
2. In Martin Heidegger's sense of the term, which he derives from the Greek meta-ta-physica: "above," "beyond," or "outside" "things as they are." In other words, metaphysics is a logic arguing that one can stand over and against the temporal or anarchic flow of existence, that one can maintain a neutral position outside shifting contextual relations. Heidegger states, "Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings which aims to recover them as such as a whole for our grasp" ("What Is Metaphysics?" trans. David Farrell Krell, in Basic Writings, ed. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 109
3. See Slavoj Žižek, "Class Struggle or Postmodernism?" in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 121
4. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 11. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as T
5. The plot of the novel itself is based, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, "on the desire to link by marriage the two largest estates in Somersetshire." See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 61
6. Tobias George Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, ed. O. M. Brack Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 310-11
7. Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Boston: Riverside, 1971), 141
8. The explorer Robert Walton is on his way to the prototypical unenclosed land of the North Pole when he pauses to contemplate the rationale of his voyage: "But it is still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas' books of voyages.... I greatly need ... to regulate my mind" (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus [New York: Penguin Books, 1965], 18-19)
9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1980), 242
10. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 1980), 173-75, 214-15
11. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights offers an even more obvious case of excess: the moor's thematic connection to an uncontrollable passion and the wildness of Heathcliff, and Hindley's son Hareton as well, who becomes in part "unvirtuous" by living among the "rankness" of the "wilderness of weeds." See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Boston: Bedford Books, 1992), 176, 189
12. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 644-46
13. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 24
14. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), 29, 34, 83
15. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 202
16. E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 214-15
17. In addition to the novel's opening and ending descriptions of an antagonistic land, I have in mind particularly the scenes leading up to and including the exploration of the Marabar caves and the "reputation" of the caves, which "does not depend on human speech" (E. M. Forster, A Passage to India [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984], 4-5, 79-80, 137, 361-62)
18. There is ample material across the disciplines on the subject of the land that needs to be considered. Yet no work has sufficiently - even briefly - explored the connections between these various fields of study. Martin Heidegger refers to the technological transformation of the agricultural industry from stewardship to capitalist "stockpiling." See "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 14-15
19. He also makes a marginal reference to land in Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 60
20. At key moments in his analysis of space, Henri Lefebvre points toward the need to think the extensive relay that I have in mind. See The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 85
21. However, it is symptomatic of the blindness to an ontological consideration of land that Lefebvre never refers to the enclosure acts. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari address the state appropriation of land in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), see esp. 437-45
22. In each of these philosophical works, however, land is always subordinate to some "larger" issue. One could also consider the unthought relay of postcolonialists, colonial historians, and environmentalists addressing the ontology of land: A postcolonial theorist such as Anne McClintock, for instance, examines how colonized land was coded as "virgin" and penetrated by male explorers in an "erotics of ravishment"; Mary Louise Pratt explores, among other things, how the Linnaean system of classification was disseminated on a global level by Europeans in the eighteenth century; the historian William Cronon analyzes how English colonists reterritorialized the land of New England, dismissing the Native American nomadic relation to the land as wasteful; and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin (the only one out of all these critics to mention enclosures) shows how the enclosure movement has had a direct and destructive impact on the environment. See McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22-23
23. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24-37
24. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 33-39
25. And Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century (New York: Crown, 1991), 5-40
26. See also Robin Broad, John Cavanagh, and Waiden Bello, "Sustainable Development in the 1990s," in Paradigms Lost: The Post-Cold War Era, ed. Chester Hartman and Pedro Vilanova (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 89-110
27. In a similar fashion, D. H. Lawrence invokes the image of unenclosed land half a century later in The Rainbow when examining the damaging effects of coal mining enclosures on the land and its inhabitants. At the conclusion of the novel, the main character, Ursula, turns to "the shelter of the common," embracing "the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered" (The Rainbow [New York: Penguin Books, 1995], 450)
28. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 83
29. The following section is an all-to-brief summary of a genealogy of preparliamentary and parliamentary enclosures that I treat more thoroughly in an unpublished article entitled "The Territorialization of Land." In addition to a number of primary documents, I rely principally on the following historical-agricultural works: The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV: 1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Volume V, Part 2: 1640-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Volume VI: 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
30. Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London: Hambleton Press, 1985)
31. W. E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London: Gollancz, 1967)
32. Michael Turner, Enclosures in Britain: 1750-1830 (London: Macmillan Press, 1984)
33. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 34
34. See the Michel Foucault interview "Questions on Geography," from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 68
35. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 193. I am indebted to Kelvin Santiago-Valles for this reference and for the following reference to Stoler
36. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 125. In addition, the massive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrations - "flights from the land" - that increased the size of industrial city settlements re-presented the countryside to many as an empty space that was "backward and 'dark'" (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 [New York: Vintage Books, 1996], 174)
37. Robert T. Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico with the Other Islands of the West Indies (New York: Century Co., 1898), 418-19
38. Quoted in Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, "Subject People" and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898-1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 30
39. See James A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 3
40. Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 24
41. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982), 219
42. Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
43. Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987)
44. And Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980)
45. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1986), 56
46. Use-rights gave laborers who did not own a farm access to "uncultivated waste," which "included the right to pasture animals needed to work their holding or supply their households - also the right to gather fuel for household consumption, and stone and timber in order to make repairs to their dwellings and barns" (Robert Maning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], 18)
47. Under the open-field system, parliament members argued, the commons and forests lay unprotected by being left open; in such an unterritorialized state, it was thought, the commons will only attract vagabonds and other "deviants" seeking to escape an "honest day's labor" (Maning, Village Revolts, 113)
48. However, it should be noted that not all commons and forests were as "open" as commonly supposed. Many unenclosed spaces were under restricted access. But it was often difficult to enforce these restrictions: "The [East Midlands] region ... was already considered to be extremely populous, and since the fielden areas had no waste left and were suffering from the worst depopulating enclosures of any in the kingdom, it is not surprising that many folk who were driven thence moved into the neighboring forests.... Complaints about squatters in the forests were voiced on all sides. The wardens of the forest complained of despoilers of the woods who gathered fuel and browse wood" (Thirsk, Agrarian History, Volume IV: 1500-1640, 95-96)
49. See Coke, Court of Common Pleas, 6, fo. 59
50. Lennard J. Davis has commented on this moment at length. See his Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 62-63
51. This extension of London, and of the town in general, becoming an enclosing entity aggrandizing the countryside has been documented by Peter Clark and Paul Slack in English Towns in Transition: 1500-1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 66
52. See also Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1984), esp. 13-61
53. Before the post-Civil War enclosure period, there was relatively little communication and no cohesion between the counties surrounding even London. Areas of the countryside - villages, hamlets, small communities - were sharply localized. It was not until the eighteenth-century period of enclosure, along with the nineteenth-century building of railways, that a significant homogenization of these regions occurred. See Everitt, Landscape and Community in England, 11-17
54. See Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 129-30; my emphasis
55. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 222-62
56. Quoted in William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 5. Cronon also explores the ecological potential of the itinerant nature of Indian villages (see esp. 37-38)
57. Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11
58. Broad, Cavanagh, and Bello, "Sustainable Development in the 1990s." The Robinson Crusoe syndrome can be seen informing the manner in which global institutions such as the World Bank indirectly influence the structure of curriculum at the university level. In a recent issue of boundary 2, Ronald A. T. Judy addresses the ominous transformation that literary departments are now facing in Tunisia. In the wake of the World Bank's report on the economy of Tunisia, the nation has been advised to reform in order to properly enter into the global village. Because English has become the "global language," a department that formerly taught French and Arabic literature and culture is now facing the possibility of becoming an "English language" department designed to teach English as solely a technological "second language" (Judy, "Some Notes on the Status of Global English in Tunisia," boundary 2 26, no. 2 [summer 1999]: 3-29)
59. For a discussion of "surplus extraction," see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 394
60. Susan George, "Managing the Global House: Redefining Economics," in Global Warming: The Greenpeace Report, ed. Jeremy Leggert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 438-56
61. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 23-24
62. Robbins, Feeling Global, 39-59, esp. 41-44, where he cites the journal boundary 2, in particular, for, he argues, "romanticizing" the local