Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship

Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism

Nandini Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351148948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Colonization, slavery, traffic in women, and connoisseurship seem to have particularly captured the imaginations of circumatlantic writers of the later eighteenth century. In this book, Nandini Bhattacharya examines the works of such writers as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Colman Jr., James Cobb and Phillis Wheatley, who redefined ideas about Value and Taste. Writers re-presented the ethical debate on Value and trade through aesthetic metaphors and discourse, thus disguising the distasteful nature of the ownership and exchange of human beings and mitigating the guilt associated with that traffic. Bhattacharya explores the circumatlantic redefinition of Taste and Value as cultural and moral concepts in gender and racial discourses in slave-owning, colonizing, and connoisseurial Britain, and demonstrates how Value and aesthetics were redefined in late eighteenth-century circumatlantic discourses with particular focus on the language of slavery, trade and connoisseurship. She also delineates the workings of transnational consciousness and experience of race, class, gender, slavery, colonialism and connoisseurship in the late eighteenth-century circumatlantic rim. Throughout the study, Bhattacharya rereads late eighteenth-century British literature as a stage for the articulation of theories of difference and domination.

Chapter 1
Introduction

muse that difference sing¹

This book explores a nascent eighteenth-century diasporic and transnational identity discourse by exploring cultural debates on value, taste, and commerce. These debates expressed metropolitan desire to refigure the excesses and breaches of transnational commerce and colonization as cultural surplus value. As strange things and stranger people became commodities in European systems of value, a concomitant economy and nexus of material collecting and connoisseurship provided a helpful analogous schema for the revaluation and refiguration of the exotic and the unfamiliar – the transnational curiosity – within eighteenth-century western culture. While examining the debates on value, taste and commerce and their attendant discontents, this book’s focus is upon eighteenth-century metropolitan and marginal voices speaking within and across national territories in this age of empire, colonialism, and slave-trading. The focus does not lead to articulating such “global uniformities” as C.A. Bayly argues existed in the early modem world and modem worlds,² but to emphasizing a particular range of intercultural differentials of value, taste, and commerce as articulated by the marginalized and the oppressed.

The experience of the marginalized, oppressed, and colonized, of the repeatedly and involuntarily “translated” or “transnationalized,” is the original churning mud of a transnational theory.³ In recontextualizing race, gender, and national sentiment within nascent transnationalisms, the works discussed in this book offer suggestive precursors to postcolonial discourse by foregrounding the fluid and resituated nature of objects, people, and movements of debated or questioned cultural significance, moral provenance, and commercial valence. Within the contemporary critical discourse on transnationality, Paul Gilroy has captured the essence of such fluidity by stating, “different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational formation that I call the black Atlantic.”⁴ I have attempted to show that such a destabilizing of national boundaries and categories operated in the literary domain and in everyday practices at different points along the Euro-American imperial rim in the eighteenth century.

This pre-national or pre-transnational phase has been alternatively conceptualized as “archaic globalization.”⁵ Within such archaic globalization, according to C.A. Bayly, “Neither race nor nationality, as understood at the end of the nineteenth century, was yet a dominant concept … embodied status remained the key discriminator in the interaction of peoples in the archaic and early modem diasporas. It operated at a deeper level than nationality, which remained a flexible and rather indistinct category at this period.”⁶ Bayly thus appears to offer a historical analogy for an argument made by Saskia Sassen about contemporary globalization’s deterritorialized nature: “globalization – as illustrated by the space economy of advanced information industries – denationalizes national territory.”⁷ Thus framed, the age of nationalism in the nineteenth century may seem to be just an aberrant blip in the otherwise seamless continuum of world history as globalization at different speeds. Moreover, in the tracing of globalizations past and present, it may seem as though books such as Bayly’s, and this one, are doing no more than staking that claim about the continuity and archaic origins of globalization in world history. It is, therefore, important to extract and develop fully another strand that might get lost in the endless clamor about globalizations old and new. This strand is the yet emergent and complex idea of transnationalism.

By transnationalism, I intend a consciousness and a movement, as studied by Saskia Sassen, Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, and others.⁸ Transnationalism engages with the global flux as both a macro-reality and an everyday subjective conundrum; it is discursive as well as material and hyper-real.⁹ This book endeavors not to make an undifferentiated survey of early modem global entities and imaginations; it aims to pick out those voices that most closely approach the specific modality of transnationalism as an engaged, articulate, reflexive discourse on globality. I have therefore coined the term “transnation” as a key thematic for this book. Transnation reflects the transcendence of national boundaries, the rearrangement of “national” identities, the revaluation of aesthetic objects, and the renegotiation of cultural concepts in a hyper-commercial age, by metropolitan as well as marginalized subjects of that transnational imperium who largely consciously engage with a concept of transnationality. As the term transnation suggests, I conflate the meanings of “translation” and “nationality” to produce as a “proper” noun, as a nominative force, the dynamics of two significant acts in history, that of reproducing an original text in a different linguistic context, and that of binding or finding oneself bound to a certain concept of an original context or text called the nation. The migratory impetus of translation and the territorial impetus of nationality converge to produce a ground in perpetual motion, a mechanism of crosscultural identity that speaks its name always as a difference, an elsewhere, an other. Whereas the concept of the migrant or intercultural subject, the tropicopolitan, has already become an influential trope and term in eighteenth-century postcolonial and diaspora studies, my attempt in this book is to introduce and deploy the idea of transnation as a trope for the political and social transformation of those subjects, agents, nations, and nationalities in the vast global flows of things and people that characterized the early modem era, particularly the eighteenth century.¹⁰

This is not to make a claim that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Phillis Wheatley, James Cobb, and George Colman Jr. – the authors whose works will be discussed in subsequent chapters – discourse on globality more critically or articulately than others. It is, however, my claim that these authors articulate nascent transnationality in significant and symptomatic ways that deserve attention as a new direction in rereading eighteenth-century colonialism and globalization. However, it might be asked, why focus on literature? In her excellent book on eighteenth-century anxieties about import-dependent lifestyles and the rise of a “discriminating” taste closely associated with abolitionism, Charlotte Sussman points out the literary as a powerful ground for the manifestation of these refigurations and contestations: “During most of the eighteenth century, moreover, the distinction between political and literary material in the public sphere was quite fluid… questions about the legitimacy of certain kinds of consumerism entered public discussion not divorced from the literary, but on a continuum with it.”¹¹ Sussman is at pains to retain the discussion within the framework of distinct national boundaries and consumerist identities. My attempt, on the other hand, is to take the discussion beyond national boundaries, into transactional border zones, and eighteenth-century literature in particular happens to provide an excellent ground for investigating the recontextualization of familiar and novel objects within fluid and extraterritorial material cultures.¹²

This recontextualization concerns “the uneven entanglement of local and global power relations on colonial peripheries, particularly as these have been manifested in capacities to define and appropriate the meanings of material things.”¹³ In works of literature that occupy and represent the zones of indeterminacy and cultural crosspollination, one sees clearly that the way in which “objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become”¹⁴ is also true of persons, subjectivities, identities; they too follow the fate of objects in culture, experiencing “mutability … in recontextualization.”¹⁵ Sussman notes the revaluation attendant on such recontextualization when she writes about “a decline in the glorification of indiscriminate accumulation, and … an increasing fear that Britain’s consumption of colonial goods was compromising its self-sufficiency… Often, even at times when accumulation and expansion were being glorified, those reactions were characterized by a nebulous anxiety, and by a suspicion that such objects retained traces of the violence with which they were appropriated from foreign locations, or produced by captive labor.”¹⁶

These consumer anxieties were produced, of course, by eighteenth-century fears of what Saskia Sassen describes today as: “denationalization, which to a large extent materializes in global cities, [and] has become legitimate for capital and has indeed been imbued with positive value by many government elites and their economic advisors. It is the opposite when it comes to people, as is perhaps most sharply illustrated in the rise of anti-immigrant feeling and the renationalizing of politics.”¹⁷ Anxieties about consumerism paralleled, therefore, anxieties about collecting and possessing both things and people that psychologically and physically invaded British identity in the process of being collected. Such anxieties presage and mobilize, as Sussman shows, the renationalizing of politics, particularly with regard to a notion of citizenry and national belonging, as well as the revaluing of migrating bodies and things.

Despite renationalizing, the anxiety was a conscious or unconscious response to the reality of transnational contexts and consciousnesses, what Sussman calls “transculturation.”¹⁸ The fate of a literary persona, sometime Wedgwood teapot and sometime Amerindian beauty, as in George Colman Jr.’s play Inkle and Yarico (discussed here in Chapter 2), or that of a Phillis Wheatley, sometime slave and sometime gifted young poet (discussed here in Chapter 5), or that of a Turk and no Turk in a Florence that is England (Chapter 3), or that of a portrait in Georgian England that clings to its inalienability in the very moment of imminent commodification (Chapter 4), all attest to the literary dispersal of transnational recontextualizations triggered by active material cultural border zones: “a succession of uses and recontextualizations.”¹⁹

It is helpful to recognize that the type of conscious engagement with recontextualizing migrations, border crossings, and polyphonic transnational identities that is under review in this book is the precursor to the located yet fluid “reattachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” that Bruce Robbins discusses in Cosmopolitics²⁰ If metropolitan renationalizing was territorial, some migrant transnationals were involuntary peripatetics or self-situating as well. Indeed, transnational voices like Wheatley and Sheridan, beyond their own different experiences of migration and transculturation, speak also from the context of a conscious rootedness in place.²¹ Often such places are cities like London, Boston, and Kingston, then as now, in Sassen’s terms, producing differential human destinies and uneven globalizations.²² Saskia Sassen has surreally delineated this scenario as “about the possibility of a new type of transnational politics, a politics of those who lack power but… have ‘presence.’”²³ It is often in such places, I would say, that the crosspollination of a migrant presence and either voluntary or involuntary situatedness engenders what I will call “strategic transnationalism.”

It will be evident that my term “strategic transnationalism,” which I intend to use interchangeably with “transnation,” draws upon Gayatri C. Spivak’s now famous concept of “strategic essentialism.”²⁴ In her articulation of this concept, Spivak writes of the “project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and ‘situate’ the effect of the subject as subaltern … as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.”²⁵ It is in this light of repeating the original accents of murderous languages while tracing discontinuities and ruptures that Donna Landry sees Phillis Wheatley – gifted, young, black, and slave – deploying the very trope of memory as a form of “affirmative deconstruction,”²⁶ to invoke Spivak again. Hortense Spillers introduces a similar strategic thinking in her theory of the history of black female flesh,²⁷ and one that is also redolent in Spivak’s citation of Foucauldian “practical ontology.”²⁸ I introduce the echo deliberately; Spivak redrew the frontiers of identity-discourse long before globalization theory became current to enable inclusion of seemingly fract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Family Jewels: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship
• 3 James Cobb and Colonial Cacophony: Doing the Enlightenment in Different Voices
• 4 Sheridan’s Follies: Auctioning Ancestors in The School for Scandal
• 5 Transatlantic Flight: Phillis Wheatley’s Copies with a Difference
• 6 Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index