Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan

by Eric Cheyfitz

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book



Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework.

At the center of the book is Shakespeare's Tempest, at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.

Genres: Nonfiction, Post Colonial

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 1990

Reviews

[birdmaddgirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

obtuse writing and circularities are saved by some really interesting moments: an explication of the origins of the word cannibal, an afterword on engravings, for instance. perhaps this says more about my taste, but i prefer close readings to generalized ones. and while cheyfitz avoids literary jargon (thankfully!), there's plenty of ouroborus-style sentences. overall, a little less cleverness would have done wonders for the readability of the book, which makes some interesting and much-needed points about translation, translatability, and the assumptions we all make.