ABSTRACT
Scholars of paradise studies have been swift to pronounce the death of the myth of paradise: A. Bartlett Giamatti declares, “All historians of paradise … have to face the fact that after 2000 years their subject essentially disappears into the eighteenth century,” and Jean Delumeau triumphantly proclaims that at the moment evolutionary theory emerged, “the ‘garden of earthly delights’ vanished.”2 Yet when Delumeau urges his readers to reject “empty” fantasies of Robinson Crusoe and the golden age, he contradicts the death of paradise. The continued resonance of Crusoe myths highlights paradise’s past and continued relation to the history of colonization and its perseverance as a fantasy in late capitalist modernity, now operating within the discourses of tourism and the postcolonial exotic. By contrast, Michael Wood wishes he could pronounce paradise vanished, but instead highlights its sheer ubiquity and banality as a metaphor-“Paradise could be everywhere and also dead.”3
That the secularization of our age precludes belief in a literal terrestrial Eden does not mean that paradise has ceased to operate as modern fantasy, regulating and expressing nostalgia for that which is absent or desired. In May 2008, on the eve of the international banking collapse, The Economist
ran a special report surveying the accelerating crisis, under the headline “Paradise Lost.”4 Though hackneyed, the use of the phrase to describe the anxieties attendant upon the death throes of American finance capitalism baldly testifies to the centrality of fantasies of paradise to the false promises of neoliberalism. To proclaim the death of paradise after the Enlightenment is to fail to recognize its flexibility and resilience, its ability to shift over the centuries from a literal topos, to a myth, to a literary motif, to an advertising cliché with global relevance. In the online archives of the New York Times alone, a search for headlines containing the word “paradise” returns over 10,000 results, with a large percentage of the articles referring to postcolonial nations and tropical destinations. Clichés of paradise lost and regained form the mainstay of contemporary media discourse about Third World scarcity and First World plenitude. The myth is not, to paraphrase M. H. Abrams,
“religion in which we no longer believe,” but rather the product of a valueladen discourse related to profit, labor, and exploitation of resources, both human and environmental, whose very appearance of irrelevance or “death by ubiquity” shields the processes it perniciously conceals. Paradise is inextricably linked to the “long” modernity of the capitalist world-system, implicated in the discourses of material exploitation and colonization that originated in the fifteenth century and developed throughout the Enlightenment into the present. Throughout this literature, paradise begins as a geographical topos moti-
vating European exploration and colonization, evolves into a myth justifying imperial discourse and praxis, and finally becomes an ironic motif responding to neo-colonialism and global capitalism. Far from being an unchanging artifact of a permanent collective unconscious, the paradise myth is dialectical, serving to naturalize the contingent, fabricated values of imperialism, even as it is riven by the contradictions of an embedded utopian impulse. Literary examples of paradise discourse must therefore be read through a dual hermeneutic which recognizes their simultaneous ideological and utopian functions.5 Tropings of paradise across modernity arise from the flux and fluctuation of world-systems, as the myth is continually reconfigured to accommodate the changing purposes of its users and the material circumstances in which it is deployed. This book aims to produce a comparative reading of literary topoi to contribute to a deeper sense of the paradise myth’s multivalence and ubiquity in relation to the ideologies of global imperialism: to investigate why it continues to circulate after the high age of European imperialism has come to an end and how the legacies of paradisal representation affect the economic, social, and cultural conditions of postcolonial subjects. Ian Strachan’s study Paradise and Plantation (2002) makes a crucial interven-
tion into the previously generalist field of paradise studies by realigning the myth of Caribbean paradise with the material conditions of the plantation. Strachan’s argument that paradise discourse “alters according to who is estimating its value and according to the basis of estimation-whether it is profitability or a measurement of worth independent of the quest for wealth” could be extended beyond the Anglophone Caribbean to other neocolonial sites, yet the dominance of critical studies of the New World has obscured the examination of myths and metaphors of paradise in association with a wider range of continents and locations.6 In the “depraved Eden” of Mexico, the “Golden Ophir” of Africa, and the “paradise of dharma” of Ceylon, the relationship between the mythological architecture of paradise and its foundation in material exploitation has yet to be scrutinized. While Strachan’s comparison of the “imperialist-colonial economy of wealth
extraction and exploitation” with the “anti-imperialist counter-economy” of self-value which motivate paradise discourse is methodologically useful, the model of the Caribbean plantation cannot be extended uniformly to the differing economies of Mexico, East Africa and Ceylon.7 Hence, it is a key part
of my agenda to compare how the paradise myth evolves according to the differing material conditions and discursive agendas of those who deploy it, by excavating the conditions that have made not only the Caribbean, but also Zanzibar, Sri Lanka, and Mexico “ideal locations for paradise” at different points in history and by undertaking close readings attentive to the aesthetic qualities of texts as well as to the non-metropolitan material histories, social formations, and cultures of which they are transfigurations. The “treasurehouse” of paradise metaphor is extraordinarily portable and intertextual, circulating across colonies and continents, empires, and ideologies. I will map its continuities and reconfigurations as it travels, while also examining the myth’s double valence, its dyadic tendency to fluctuate between the promise of laborfree delight-paradise, garden, gold-land-and the “infernal” shadow of its repressed material realities-anti-paradise, wasteland, depraved Eden. Finally, I will interrogate the ideological limitations of paradise discourse in its articulation of cultural resistance to imperial power. Of course, colonial, postcolonial, or neocolonial discourse cannot be
reduced to one trope, over-determined as it may be, nor can the material relation between paradise myth and the quest for labor-free profit and value be the only perspective from which paradise could be analyzed. Myths and metaphors of paradise have been employed throughout the past three millennia for a vast variety of aims-theological, literary, political, cultural, and environmental-and methodological approaches to the study of paradise have ranged from sociology of religion, to history of ideas, poststructuralism, feminism, and ecocriticism.8 Indeed, the questions of gender and ecology are particularly significant, since through tropes of Eden and apocalypse, the paradise myth acts as an expression of alienation and environmental crisis, and frequently employs a distinctly ecological, gendered idiom. For Murray Bookchin, the capitalist system is profoundly irrational and anti-ecological, based on competitive hierarchies which project “the domination of human by human into an ideology that ‘man’ is destined to dominate “Nature.’”9 As ecofeminists have argued, the same ideologies of gendered “Nature” and “feminized paradises” which legitimate the exploitation of the natural world accompany the domination of women and minorities.10
