Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic

Paul Youngquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317072188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In highlighting the crucial contributions of diasporic people to British cultural production, this important collection defamiliarizes prevailing descriptions of Romanticism as the expression of a national character or culture. The contributors approach the period from the perspective of the Atlantic maritime economy, making a strong case for viewing British Romanticism as the effect of myriad economic and cultural exchanges occurring throughout a circum-Atlantic world driven by an insatiable hunger for sugar and slaves. Typically taken for granted, the material contributions of slaves, sailors, and servants shaped Romanticism both in spite of and because of the severe conditions they experienced throughout the Atlantic world. The essays range from Sierra Leone to Jamaica to Nova Scotia to the metropole, examining not only the desperate circumstances of diasporic peoples but also the extraordinary force of their creativity and resistance. Of particular importance is the emergence of race as a category of identity, class, and containment. Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic explores that process both economically and theoretically, showing how race ensures the persistence of servitude after abolition. At the same time, the collection never loses sight of the extraordinary contributions diasporic peoples made to British culture during the Romantic era.

I Differences

1 The Race of/in Romanticism_ Notes Toward a Critical Race Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315603384-2

Marlon B. Ross

Studying the case of blackness is inseparable from the case blackness makes for itself in spite and by way of every interdiction. In any case, it will have been as if one has come down with a case of blackness.

—Fred Moten¹

¹ Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50/2 (2008), p. 185.

We focus on ‘race,’ but rarely on the everyday system of terror and pleasure that in varying proportions makes ‘race’ so useful a category of difference.

—Sharon Holland²

² In The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, 2012), Holland takes seriously racism’s everyday character as conceptualized in critical race theory by moving that theory in the direction of the everyday interactions and intimacies (blood, belonging, family) that constitute the psychic and material life of racism.

Scholarship related to “the Negro Question” in romantic studies has focused almost exclusively on how writers of the period approached the abolition debates concerning the slave trade and colonial slavery.³ More recently, some scholars, energized by postcolonial theory, have begun to foreground the relation between romantic authors and the peculiar mode of British imperialism that emerges from the exploration and colonization of Africa in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁴ This work on abolition, slavery, and the conquest of Africa has helpedto lay bare the extent to which Romanticism—as historical period, as formal aesthetics of imagination, as cultural ideology—cannot comprehensively or comprehendingly be read outside the context of contemporaneous controversies concerning the nature, condition, and elevation of “the African” as a distinct, if problematic, subject of human classification. Indebted to these studies and building on them, I would nonetheless like to shift the focus momentarily away from the important question of Romanticism’s self-conscious investment in or diversion from slavery and colonialism to consider race itself as an economy of gut-instinctual, senseperceptual, socialpsychological, aesthetic-ideological, and geopolitical commitments. I want to suggest here—vigorously and yet somewhat speculatively—that the striking topicality of these issues as romantic subjects derives from the formation of race as a subliminally exposed substructure of everyday experience not only among those who called themselves English, British, or European but also among those others who were decisively but ambiguously incorporated in the undertow of powerful national namings.

³ See, for instance: Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, D.C., 1942); Anthony J. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London, 1978); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York, 1992); H. L. Machow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, 1996), pp. 9–40; Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge, 2000); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York, 2000); Dwight McBride, Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York, 2001); and Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia, 2002). ⁴ See, for instance: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979); Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia, 1991); John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, 1991); Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington, 1996), a groundbreaking volume that combines gender analysis with questions of abolitionism, colonialism, and empire. Laura Doyle’s lead essay for the volume, “The Racial Sublime,” is especially important for unearthing a cultural etymology and archaeology of race in the workings of the romantic sublime (pp. 15–39); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism_ Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998); Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York, 2002); and Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, 2005).

In other words, the highly controversial nature of these topics of abolition and slavery, territorial exploration and conquest may ironically divert us from observing a rather extraordinary accommodation that occurs across the romantic period: the operation of race becomes increasingly innocuous, increasingly quotidian, increasingly real and realistic across political parties, social cliques, and morally antagonistic camps.⁵ Although flagrantly opposed camps of West Indian absentee planters versus hands-on Parliamentary reformers, slave-trade enthusiasts versusslave-sugar boycotters, disinterested scientist-explorers versus devout Christian missionaries, oppressing slaveholders versus the slaves that they oppress may disagree vigorously on the measures, values, and goals of these racially-tinged controversies, all of the camps alike find it increasingly difficult to think, talk, feel, experience, or sense outside a transformative grammar of racial identification, even as that increasingly common vernacular insistently proves itself logically stressed, epistemologically distressed, and ideologically messy. It may at first appear that I am making an argument from historical causation, whereby the spectacular controversies over slavery and colonialism result as mere surface effects of a deep-seated racism. This is definitely not my argument. I am suggesting almost the converse: the tenets of race (and thus of racism) were so disjointedly sloppy during the time (as they still are in our time) that they could not logically be the historical cause of chattel enslavement and African imperialist practice. Instead, the sloppiness of race—the untenability of its slightly subliminal character—makes it fungible, pliable, seductive in a way that shields it from both the niceties and the outrages of moral, polemical, and artistic discourses even as such discourses are mounted as heavy weapons of partisan attack stemming from the harms of racism.

⁵ By “innocuous,” I mean in its etymological sense of not causing harm or injury, and thus becoming ostensibly inoffensive. Whereas the concept of “race” tends to parade itself as a neutral vehicle for perceiving natural and social distinctions, the idea of “racism,” a much more virulent term, conjures the panoply of injuries enacted on behalf of a negative valence of race’s abuses. In the discourse of the romantic period, such injury is ascribed to morally suspect acts like enslavement and colonialism, rather than to race itself as an underlying system for specifying and grouping some individuals as belonging to a class of “Negroes” or “blacks.” By emphasizing the apparent innocuousness of race versus the offensiveness of racism, I hope to interrogate the attempt to privilege “racism” over “race” as the fittest object of inquiry in some critical race theory. See, for instance, the work of David Theo Goldberg, especially his Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, 1993), as well as Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, 2000), and Holland.

I want to distinguish my idea that race becomes increasingly familial and familiar and thus routine during the romantic period from the notion that race originates in the romantic period from romantic thought itself. In his 1996 book, The Meaning of Race, for instance, Kenan Malik writes: “It is in this conservative/ Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, with its renewed stress on tradition, hierarchy, inequality and unreason, that we shall find the genesis of the modern discourse of race.”⁶ The point at which race transitions to modernity is difficult to pin down, and it could be argued that racial thinking itself conditions the process of modernization, as it certainly more clearly can be seen to condition the processes of colonialism and nation-building. Furthermore, to see Romanticism as authoring modern racial discourse, Malik must downplay the extent to which the Enlightenment philosophes relied on race to construct their notion of the universality of the rational man, and at the same time he must exaggerate the extent to which Romanticism constitutes a radical break with the Enlightenment.⁷ Even if we were to concede this radical break between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, such a notion still exaggerates the extent to which romantic-erapeople were engaged in and were able to construct a coherent system of racial thinking. My point is that the racial economy can work powerfully through and within its own incoherence. Malik tacitly accepts this idea when he writes, “The notion of race in the immediate post-Enlightenment world was most imprecise. The idea of ‘peoples’, ‘nations’, ‘classes’ and ‘races’ all merged together. Race often expressed a vague sense of difference and the characterisation of that difference was based variously on physical traits, languages, the aptitude for civilization and the peculiarities of customs and behaviours.”⁸ These confusions still exist today at the heart of racial ideology. What makes race such a powerful economy for organizing subjectivity, political behavior, and social life in the midst of such incoherence is its penchant for impressing a familiar real out of such systematic incoherence, an ongoing project that consistently characterizes the racial economy over several centuries.

⁶ The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996), p. 75. Malik is following the work of intellectual historian George M. Fredrickson, who coins the term “romantic racialism” and who makes a similar argument about Romanticism more briefly in The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Hanover, NH, 1987), pp. 97–102. ⁷ For an opposed view of the role of race in Enlightenment thinking, see Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, 2004), pp. 27–65, as well as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Introduction to Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA, 1997), pp. 1–8. ⁸ Malik, p. 80.

It is also on this point of a racial economy operating consistently across centuries that I disagree with Michel Foucault’s theory of race. Foucault speculates that sometime after the Middle Ages in Europe a discourse of the struggle of two races emerges—a “binary perception and division of society and men; them and us, the unjust and the just, the masters and those who must obey them, the rich and the poor, the mighty and those who have to work in order to live, those who invade lands and those who tremble before them, the despots and the groaning people, the men of today’s law and those of the homeland of the future.” Foucault sees this as a break with the Indo-Roman notion of an ordered sovereignty established in antiquity, and as such the notion of the struggle of binary races constitutes the emergence of a revolutionary discourse. He then posits a second radical break occurring sometime around the mid nineteenth century in which the struggle-of-two-races concept begins to be dominated by a counterrevolutionary biologico-medical discourse of race “in the singular,” out of which “actual racism” is born, indicating the return to a more sophisticated kind of sovereignty invested in the statist bureaucracies of the modern nation.⁹ Even though Foucault’s two-races discourse originates in the same moment as the beginning of the age of exploration, the slave trade, and European colonization, the latter seems to have little impact on the former in his generalized meta-narrative, and in fact, he tends to evacuate from race the specificities of the slave trade, chattel enslavement, and colonial conquest that function to give the racial economy an overdetermined substance from the outset. As a result, Foucault’s history is a curiously intra-European affair, whereby racial struggle gets discursively structured inside Europe between warring genealogical groups—“the Franks, theGauls, and the Celts”¹⁰—and then applied as a supremacist notion of the biological purity of one genealogical group over all others as late as the middle nineteenth century. This not only evacuates the import of the encounter between Europe and its others by delaying its historical emergence, reducing the slippery substance of racial struggle into its most generalizable structure of a conflict between unequa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Differences
• Part II Resistances
• Part III Crossings
• Works Cited
• Index