Editorial Comment

Abstract

Editorial Comment E.J. Westlake "I have observ'd those countries, where trade is promoted and encouraged, do not make discoveries to destroy, but to improve, mankind; by love and friendship, to tame the fierce and polish the most savage; to teach them the advantages of honest traffick by taking from them, with their own consent, their useless superfluities, and giving them in return what, from their ignorance in manual arts, their situation, or some other accident, they stand in need of." So recites the character of Trueman at the top of act 3 in George Lillo's 1731 drama The London Merchant. Trueman has apprenticed to the merchant Thorowgood and has been learning the basic tenants of capitalism. He has absorbed the ideas of the rising merchant class—specifically, the notion that free trade and democratic ideals go hand in hand. The roots of colonialism lie within this confluence of aggressive capitalism in the form of spreading Enlightenment ideals throughout the world, a project every capitalist has an obligation to pursue. As Thorowgood responds, "[i]t is the industrious merchant's business, to collect the various blessings of each soil and climate, and, with the product of the whole, to enrich his native country." Each of the essays in this issue touches on the themes of colonialism, labor, neoliberalism, and capital. Amanda Culp examines the politics of translation vis-à-vis the first version of the Sanskrit drama The Recognition of Shakuntala, translated into English by William Jones in 1789. The dramatic text, she argues, then took its place as part of the English literary canon. By comparing two theatrical productions of the play in the late nineteenth century, Culp reveals the ways in which colonial, Orientalist constructions of universal humanism shape the production and reception of what had become an English "classic." The Elizabethan Stage Society performed the Jones translation in 1899 with white actors in brownface makeup, and with the Regents Park botanical gardens standing in for the "tropical vegetation" of India. Less successful was an earlier staging by the Parsi Victoria Dramatic Company, a company of actors from Bombay, labeled "absurd" by English reviewers. Culp notes, however, that the rejection of the Indian production by English audiences may not have been so much because of the foreign costumes and language, but rather that the bodies of the artists, who were not practitioners of classical Indian performance but actors trained in English staging conventions, created an uncomfortable doubling for English spectators. Culp observes that "the subaltern bodies performing onstage were not ultimately too dissimilar from those that habitually performed at the Gaiety or, even more upsetting, from those seated in the audience." Siyuan Liu focuses on the evolution of several forms of xiqu in the twentieth century. He examines the writing of scholar Zhou Zuoren, a professor at Beijing University in the mid-twentieth century influenced by the work of Enlightenment folklorist Johann Gottfried Herder. Liu argues that the work of Herder and the writing of John Locke influenced Chinese thinkers to embrace the revival and reconstruction of classical art in a way that parallels the trajectory of European antiquarianism. Citing Richard Bauman [End Page ix] and Charles Briggs's description of a modernity that was both a "nostalgia for a vanished past and a growing ideological commitment to progress," Liu chronicles the project of recovering folkloric tradition through to the reform campaign against xiqu in the early years of the People's Republic of China. The disavowel of Asian labor is the subject of Chris Eng's essay on the 2014 revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He notes that the revival, two decades after the original production, must be read within the context of the "neoliberal incorporation of queerness and transness into the folds of normativity." Eng examines the problematic labeling of the title character as trans and the characterization of transness as a violent injury, and the equally problematic privileging of the white gay male over trans and racial Others. Written as passing moments within the play, the use of camp to dismiss and ridicule the Asian labor that makes Hedwig's performance possible places the musical within a contemporary matrix of imperialism, in...