Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas.

Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas

Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. xii + 289 PP. $47 (cl), $ 18 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-30669-0 (cl), 0-226-30670-4 (pbk).

Kenneth Parker, ed., Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology

London and New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN: 0-415-147573.

Roland Greene's subtle and complex Unrequited Conquests examines an instance of what Jameson terms an "ideology of form": the peculiar aptness of (Petrarchan) lyric for representing the fateful encounters between European "discoverers" and the worlds/peoples they "discovered." Capturing the ways in which (desiring) subjects and (desired) objects were constituted, lyric poetry provided, Greene suggests, "a widely adaptable literary technology" (4) consonant with the subject- and object-constituting processes of colonial exploration.

The book makes an important contribution to colonial (and postcolonial) literary studies, both in its careful consideration of the relationship between literary genre and colonialism, and in making nuanced distinctions among different European colonial projects. There may, perhaps, be a straw man lurking in the background: the initial claim that our sense of early modern lyric has hitherto been "compromised" by disallowing "its franchise in the historical world" (2) would seem to have been put to rest by the studies of Dubrow, Henderson, and Marotti -- surprisingly, not cited by Greene -- which in different contexts focus precisely on lyric's socio-historical horizons, and thus anticipate some of Greene's larger claims regarding the genre. But certainly no studies I am familiar with so imaginatively uncover the specific, differentiated links between the conventions of Petrarchan lyric and the discourses/practices of early modern colonialism.

What drives the colonial and lyric circuits of desire, in Greene's account, is an absence -- hence the importance of "unrequitedness" as a category. Not only are the subjects and objects of colonial desire constructed around non-fulfilment, but this absence also (potentially) makes available modes of resistance. In the wake of Lacanian readings of desire, the theoretical assumptions may seem familiar, but the book's strength lies in its detailing of the ways in which narratives of discovery engage the dynamics of lyric poetry, and the consequence of these engagements for the practices of early modern colonialism. The absorbing opening chapters (on Columbus and the discovery of Brazil, respectively) examine two related but opposed modes of utilizing the discursive apparatus of Petrarchan lyric: one emphasizing the desiring subject's self-constitution, and the other the dialectically linked construction of the desired object. Identifying a "lyric undertow" in the Columbian project, Greene argues that Columbus' vexed invention of a first-person voice in his letters and diaries draws upon Petrarchan models (the claim for a lifetime of service to an unattainable goal, suspension between fruitless hope and certain pain) "to think and feel" the way "across a fresh landscape, to manifest the inner life that his contemporaries were starting to understand as a constitutive element of humanity" (42). The constant refrain of unfulfilled desire reveals, too, the "autoreflexivity" of Columbus' project, creating a colonizing self which "fails" in material terms (he doesn't find gold) but nonetheless sets the pattern for subsequent Spanish (and European) incursions. In Brazil, by contrast, it is less the subject than the object that is at issue. Greene's fascinating discussion shows how Portuguese narratives were from the outset concerned less with the "imperatives of the conquering subject" than with the land and its commodities (specifically, brazil-wood), indeed even collapsing the indigenous peoples into things. Not only did Brazil fill an already extant empty slot in exploratory discourse prior to its "discovery," but Portuguese colonialism subsequently constructed Brazil as a self-referential "lyric object." Emerging from the shifting surfaces of colonial narratives was Brazil as "the site of unreconstructed desire . . . in place, as place, rather than as a person or process" (90).

Chapters 3 and 4 (primarily on Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney) turn from the presence of Petrarchanism in colonial texts, to assemble instead the colonial contexts within which the English Renaissance lyric was "reinvented" as a form of imperial discourse. Balancing his earlier differentiation among forms of colonial involvement, Greene's strength here is an attention to the obverse: he resolutely undoes narrowly "English-only" perspectives on these poets by raking the poems seriously as responses to their authors' investments in "international" projects of their time (as travellers, diplomats, administrators). Wyatt and his European contemporaries refashion Petrarchan amatory metaphors (for example, the sea voyage, changing color, and the plague) to express an "anacultural" outlook that foregrounds contradictions. They thus put into question "the borders between religions, races, and worldviews" (146) even as they draw upon such distinctions. Their poems commingle the political and the amatory to reveal not the sureness of colonial domination but an "unterhered longing" (164) in a changing world. The speculative ambiguities of this earlier generation of poets hardens, so the argument runs, into pragmatism and policy in Sidney's work. Reading into Astrophil and Stella a conflict -- experienced by Sidney as simultaneously personal and political -- between England and Spain, and Europe and the Americas, Greene argues that the echoes of such colonial discourses as anthropophagy and slavery in the sonnets show Sidney pulling a (partisan) "international politics" (179) -- the Anglo-Spanish struggle over empire -- into the ambit of the lyric, both articulating a desire for conquest and self-consciously reflecting on that desire.

An occasional weakness in these latter chapters is that Greene's contextualizations -- while suggestive as horizons for rethinking sixteenth-century lyric poetry -- do not always make themselves compelling in his readings of the poems. Even granting that he is less concerned with "hewing to interpretive protocol" than in "hearing a conversation emerge from several distinct European and transatlantic vantages" (141), the intriguing link between the disruptive function of "color" in Wyatt's and Louise Labes sonnets and an emergent idea of racial difference, for instance, tends more to be asserted than demonstrated. Greene's broad claims require, I think, more careful consideration of the mediating processes through which colonial contexts impress themselves upon the texture of the individual poems.

The concluding chapter draws the book's varied concerns together in a manner that incorporates -- but also retroactively relocates -- postcolonial theories of hybridity. Greene reads the works of the mestizo Inca Garcilosa de la Vega -- the illegitimate son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess -- as complex appropriations of the lyric investment in conquest. The process Green identifies centers on the notion of huaca: moments of wonder that force a re-perspectivization of familiar worlds. Though his narrative deployment of huaca, de la Vega takes up the self-justifying positions of European imperialism only to refashion them in the service of a (re-imagined) Inca empire. He destabilizes inherited humanist and lyric models while vaunting an "inbetweenness" (indeed, his mestizaje) as the condition of knowledge and legitimate conquest. Re-envisioning the paradigm of conquest, hybridity marks here a strategic reconciling of the subject-object dialectic explored throughout the book: through it, the colo nial object can be "exhaustively explained from its own standpoint as subject," thereby casting "a critical light on the European imperialist project" (221). Likewise, Greene enriches our understanding by casting his own critical light upon colonial uses of lyric.

The title of Kenneth Parker's otherwise useful and well-annotated anthology of travel literature seems a misnomer: the Early Modern Tales of Orient assembled here are exclusively narratives by English travellers, despite acknowledgement in the book's introduction of England's relative marginality as colonial power and of the sheer volume of other travellers' accounts translated rapidly into English. Even granting the need for "national" studies, it does seem that the anthology could have been strengthened by including a few representative accounts from other European vantage points (Linschoeten and Pires, for example), both to indicate the scope of the genre, and to indicate the specificity of the English accounts themselves. On the English side, the decision to exclude Sir Thomas Roe's sojourn at the Mughal courts seems odd, as does the tendency to narrow the "Orient" to the Levant and Near East. These criticisms aside, the book is a timely one, especially for teaching purposes: not only does it begin to co unter the relative neglect of east-directed early modern colonial accounts, it is also supplemented by concise appendices that lay out factual and biographical information indispensable for classroom use. Parker's introduction is clear, capable, and well-pitched. It briefly sketches the important historical contexts (i.e., geography and cosmology) and delineates the paradigmatic forms ("the terrible Turk," "the staging of Englishness," etc.) through which the "Orient" was thought and experienced. The extracts assembled in the body of the book are also nicely culled and edited, and cover a broad range of concerns.