Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific

Refugio by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks

Bibliographic Data

ID2179701
AuthorsClaire Reddleman (0000-0002-5303-1906)
Year2023
Volume59
Issue4
Pages465-481
Publication date2023-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2023.2232130
OpenAlexW4385659482
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation

Aesthetics · Bourgeoisie · Character (mathematics · Economics · Homo economicus · Individualism · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature · History · Law · Philosophy

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