Robinson Crusoe: After the island

ABSTRACT

Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.

KEYWORDS:

• Castaways
• trade
• East India Company
• Defoe
• Dampier
• opium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Robert Drury’s story could be important for book two because his 1717 return from Madagascar was in time to influence Defoe. Defoe probably also drew upon Hayy Bin Yaqzan, a 12th-century text by Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail, translated into Latin in 1671 and into various English versions thereafter, including one by Simon Ockley (1708) 2005 – a text well known in London circles (Baeshen 1986, 7–8). Although there is no direct evidence of Defoe reading Ockley’s 1708 translation, he had some of Ockley’s other books in his library (Fallon 2011, 47).

2. Gayatri Spivak laments the loss of “anticolonial internationalism” (2013, 231) from a time before postcolonial studies became more “diversified”, replete with “competition and collaboration” (223), though there is still reason to embrace “the scope and range of postcolonial studies” (2014, 185).

3. Katherine Frank (2011) outlines Defoe’s default approach: “When Defoe found a rich seam – his own or someone else’s – he mined it for all it was worth” (21). Frank favours Knox marooned on Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) as the prime source.

4. Ann Marie Fallon also means Defoe becomes “unmoored” in religion: not only is there no further mention of Islam, as the third instalment becomes a meditation on deception, but the absence of Asia in Fallon shipwrecks an otherwise admirable book that wants to claim Robinson Crusoe for America as part of a “Pan-American meta-narrative of différance” (2011, 134 – the accented spelling not quite citing Jacques Derrida’s différance).

5. Geraldine Barnes (2006), in an excellent investigation, clearly wanted to say that Swift had witnessed Jeoly flayed at an anatomy demonstration at Oxford but is unable to confirm this was the one Swift observed.

6. The allegorical acclimatization of a protagonist to maturity and trade can be seen in other coming-of-age dramas: Treasure Island, Great Expectations.

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Notes on contributors

John Hutnyk

John Hutnyk is a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He has published several books and edited volumes in anthropology and cultural studies, and most recently the monograph Global South Asia on Screen, with Bloomsbury (2018).