ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores a nascent eighteenth-century diasporic and transnational identity discourse by exploring cultural debates on value, taste, and commerce. These debates expressed metropolitan desire to refigure the excesses and breaches of transnational commerce and colonization as cultural surplus value. Speaking of simple origins, scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature have drawn attention to the trope of culture as transculturation, and of transculturation as culture. Life forces commodified through labor value, and fetishized objects metamorphosed in commercial exchange have long signified transformed national identity. The sort of aura that is contested when an object loses its 'cult value' to gain 'exhibition value', as Benjamin speaks of these things, is transferable to slavery, colonialism, and connoisseurship in the eighteenth-century context. Broadly speaking, Thomas transnationalizes the activity of collecting, displacing the emphasis usually placed upon the metropolitan appropriation of indigenous things.
