Global Crusoe participates in the dynamic exchanges between postcolonial studies, translation studies, and transnational comparative studies that have increasingly defined literary criticism in the last decade. Ann Marie Fallon has chosen a timely topic, the diverse late-twentieth-century rewritings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) that together “offer an ideal case study for thinking about the implications of a transnational approach to literary studies” (7). Identifying a profuse selection of rewritings and focusing at length on those of Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, Bessie Head, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Marianne Wiggins, Victoria Slavuski, and Julieta Campos, Fallon argues that these texts have in common a vision of Crusoe’s island as “exist[ing] outside all national boundaries or narratives” and “belonging to nobody” (43). Recognizing this, Fallon suggests, allows us to reconsider defining postcolonial literature principally in terms of its “resistance” to the cultural politics of imperialism and to consider how a transnational “aesthetics of revision” enables writers to conceive new forms of connectedness that transcend “the structures of anti- or counter-discourses” (128). Fallon also offers her own revision of Robinson Crusoe, disputing longstanding interpretations of Defoe’s island as “a model of colonial expansion and prosperity” (43). Rather, she contends, “Crusoe frequently undercuts his own mastery and ownership of the island” (36), so that Defoe’s “island colony refuses to remain neatly contained by the structures of colonial possession” (40). For Fallon, the novel represents Crusoe as “constantly revising his experiences, his identity, his relationship to the island, and even the formal construction of the text” (33). In this way, Robinson Crusoe reflects “the contradictions of attempting to ‘be at home’ in the New World” (33). Reading for the novel’s own ambivalence and subversiveness allows Fallon to dispense with stark polarities between canon and counter-canon, and to assert that “many postmodern and postcolonial revisions are subversive because they ‘borrow’ the structures of liminality and subversion that are part of the English canon” (20, emphasis added). With this mode of reading “we might begin to see the novel as a linguistic space of possibility and an expression not of cultural domination, but discourse” (47).
I sympathize with the mode of reading Fallon advocates, and her rich assemblage of texts that reimagine Robinson Crusoe is valuable for researchers and teachers of Defoe’s work in comparative contexts. It is odd, however, that a book centrally about practices of revision would be so dramatically compromised by its own lack of careful revision and proofreading. Most of the many typographical errors are minor, but there are sentence fragments that are not so easily deciphered. Several incomplete bibliographic entries contain notes that the author made to herself but never addressed or deleted. The index, too, is incomplete, sometimes lacking entries for essential critical sources, and other times lacking complete page references.
More important than these oversights, though, are omissions and flaws in the argument. Portions of Global Crusoe, most obviously the concluding chapter, are not well integrated and give the impression of having been written at different times and never reformulated for the book. Thus, for example, the author of the final chapter on American studies seems unaware that her book includes a chapter on South African fiction, while the author of the Introduction is under the misapprehension that Harold Bloom’s “theory of misreading” will figure significantly in the chapters that follow (8). Theoretical texts are deferentially quoted but little explained and sometimes misleadingly, as we see, for example, in the sketchy and simply inaccurate characterization of Robert Young’s reading, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, of Edward Said’s theoretical deviations from Foucault (57–58). Too often the book insufficiently develops its own claims as well. Whole passages from the Introduction (9, 10) reappear verbatim in subsequent chapters (54, 77), leaving the unsuspecting reader vulnerable to an initially disorienting sense of déjà vu. At best, we can call this practice of duplication a missed opportunity to elaborate what could be a more complex and lively argument.
Perhaps most important is Fallon’s failure to engage with current scholarship. Despite the surge in transnationalist studies over the last decade, virtually all criticism and theory that Fallon cites date from the 1980s through the early 2000s. Only two cited works of scholarship, the more recent of which is a collection of graduate conference proceedings, were published for the first time in 2005 or since. The few other publications that date from recent years are either entries from online encyclopedias and dictionaries or reprints of seminal texts such as Imagined Communities (1983) and The Location of Culture (1994), whose original dates of publication are not included in the bibliography. References to Princeton’s “new ‘Translation/Transnation’ book series” (now more than a decade old) and to The Hybrid Muse (2001) as Jahan Ramazani’s “book on transnational poetics” (with no mention of his celebrated book from 2009, A Transnational Poetics) typify the scholarly anachronisms that give this potentially timely book a quality of belatedness (7, 22). For all its promise, Global Crusoe could have done with a good deal more revision.
