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Similitude and Empire: On Comorian Strategies of Englishness
JEREMY PRESTHOLDT*
University of California, San Diego
| A town on a small island in the Indian Ocean once acquired a voracious appetite for English things. It was not a British colony, and it hosted neither an English consulate nor a permanent English resident until the 1850s—fully two centuries after islanders began their particular relationship with the English. By consuming English goods, speaking English, and asserting an affiliation with Britain, the people of Mutsamudu town on Nzwani Island in the Mozambique Channel created an intimacy with a global power and parlayed their claims to a special, at times familial, relationship with Britain into economic and political support. Through various strategies of representation, Mutsamuduans claimed a moral proximity and similarity to the English that convinced Britons to view them differently, to imagine them as people in some way akin to themselves. For at least a century, Mutsamuduans were largely successful at using things that signified Englishness to direct imperial means for local ends. |
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This essay seeks to reveal the efficacy of cross-cultural performances of similarity—a strategy of appeal that I call similitude—on the stage of global relation. It demonstrates how the strategic uses of imported symbols affected the producers of those symbols and ultimately their relation to Nzwanians. Nzwanians relied on similitude to affect relations with diverse foreigners, including Arab, French, and American visitors. But by exploring the extreme case of Nzwanian appropriations of Englishness we can better appreciate how the cultural appropriation of symbols in even seemingly marginal locales has affected patterns of global interrelation. |
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Strategy and Globality | |
| One of the most important questions that analysts of global integration have addressed is how people who are too easily labeled the victims of global cultural homogenization conceptually transform imported materials, symbols, and ideas.1 Aviad Raz describes this analytical impulse as an attempt to augment scholarly focus on cultural imperialism with a consideration of the "reception" of global symbols.2 The entrance of such terms as "domestication," "hybridization," "localization," and even the orthographically unwieldy "glocalization" into vocabularies of analysis—we are reminded here of Michel de Certeau's insight that the masses always renegotiate the meanings offered them—evidence the increasing attention given to reinterpretation in the global circulation of signs.3 Many analysts of reception have convincingly shown that meanings are rarely as transferable as their objects. The work of Aviad Raz, Mark Alfino et al., and Joseph Tobin, among others, suggests that even when such symbolically laden products as McDonald's hamburgers or Hollywood movies circulate globally, their uses and social relevance can diverge dramatically between national, cultural, and gendered spaces.4 As James Watson has illustrated for McDonald's in East Asia, things as simple as processed fast foods can easily lose both their associations with their place of origin as well as the cultural meanings given them in their home society.5 The strength of "reception" literature thus lies in its demonstration that symbols circulating beyond the boundaries of their places of origin are rarely simple copies, but instead are often radical reconstitutions with compound local meanings and associations. |
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