ABSTRACT
The goal of this essay is to produce a reading of Apuleius' treatments of India in the Florida that not only accounts for but also depends on his own status as an African intellectual. Using recent postcolonial formulations as foundations for my readings, I argue that Apuleius' descriptions of India diverge from those in other Greek and Latin literature. The reasons for this divergence may include access to different kinds of information, but, more important, I see a more complex idea of the exotic in Apuleius' texts, one that is elucidated through postcolonial theory. A postcolonial lens brings into view a kind of interpretation different from the Quellenforschung that has dominated scholarship on these texts, and illuminates the ways in which these epideictic orations are not simply imitative in their erudition. Florida 12 and Florida 6 are my main sources for his representation of India; the former describes the appearance and training of the Indian parrot, and the latter the Indians and the wonders of India, particularly the gymnosophists. In these works, there is some evidence that Apuleius had access to information that previous Indographers did not, and he engages the traditional rhetoric of exoticism only to render it powerless. The Carthaginian (Roman colonial) context not only destabilizes but collapses the binary of Roman self and oriental other. The resulting implications for Apuleius' view of the Roman imperial project are complex: his depiction of the gymnosophists can be seen as a kind of disempowering domestication, but there is also a sense in the Florida that cultural proximity does not inevitably lead to complete assimilation, that there is still room for a non-Roman subject to subvert and resist imperial control. Insofar as Africa is Roman and India is not, the latter presents a philosophical community as an alternative to a political one.
