ABSTRACT
Daniel Defoe “revises” castaway stories, newly available Arabic translations and religious allegories from dissenting denominations in order to represent the rapidly changing globe in the early eighteenth century. As London emerges as a crowded cosmopolitan space, Defoe attempts to remap his way through an early modern city. Building a home on the island represents the move to create a specific and grounded place within otherwise undifferentiated emerging transnational space. But Crusoe’s attempt to create a place fails, the island drops out of colonial history, unnamed and unrecognized. In attempting to map the globe, reflecting the revolutions in eighteenth-century cartography, Crusoe loses his sense of place, his personal relationship to an individuated and historically marked landscape. This tension between global and local continues to haunt late twentieth-century writers. To read literature in only a national context falsely removes it from transnational influences. Alternatively, reading across national boundaries runs the risk of collapsing individual histories, experiences and geographies, consequently creating a universalizing and generic experience. Postcolonial writers are frequently called upon in literary anthologies to represent a common or universal hybrid experience that transcends the individual places of Africa, India, or the Caribbean. This conflict is salient for Caribbean writers, who have come to represent the postcolonial condition in criticism even as they have been excluded from anthologies of American, New World, or Postcolonial literatures.
