Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740-1833

Atlantic Archipelagos

Michael Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317675853
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland's economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland's national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.

1
Theoretical Orientations

Transnationalism in the Atlantic World

I want to know what the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh gave to the Creole mix as much as I want to know … what particular part of Africa is my heritage … I will solve the African riddle but who will tell me about the others?

—Erna Brodber¹

In a startling moment, the novelist Erna Brodber ‘steps out’ of her short story about the ‘dirt poor’ Miss Manda of rural Jamaica to pose this stimulating challenge. In seeking to answer at least part of the question, this chapter asks what theoretical framework best illuminates the relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. In terms of postcolonialism, Carla Sassi and Theo van Heijsnbergen pinpoint the year 2011 as an ‘important turning point’ which saw the publication of three ‘full-length, comprehensive investigations of the relations and intersections between Scottish literature and postcolonialism’ which constitute ‘the kind of critical mass of scholarly endeavour needed to make an impact within and across disciplinary borders.’² Together with previous work undertaken since the 1990s, the essay collection Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher, alongside two sophisticated monographs from Silke Stroh and Stefanie Lehner, have demonstrated not only how postcolonial methods might inform Scottish studies, but also how considering Scotland might prove beneficial to inflections of mainstream postcolonial studies. Stroh details the advantages of postcolonial perspectives in Scotland while acknowledging shortcomings and difficulties: most obviously Scotland’s lack of a colonised history along the lines of the Irish model. Ireland has been more easily incorporated into mainstream postcolonial studies given its history of ‘plantations’ of settler (Scottish and English) communities in Ulster in the seventeenth century, discriminatory landholding practices, warfare against a racialised Irish catholic ‘other’, laws forbidding Catholics to hold high office and so on. Stroh therefore warns against homogenising what she terms ‘Celtic fringe Postcolonialism’:

One reason why postcolonial discourse has seized more easily upon Ireland is the fact that the marginalisation of indigenous Irish culture could be more easily ascribed to incoming elites from another political or cultural background (English or Scottish). In the assimilation of Gaelic Scotland, and the integration of Scotland as a whole into the UK, indigenous elites, voluntarism and political choice played a much greater role. And despite (self-)anglicisation, Scottish elites often remained important patrons for indigenous culture and thus occupied a hybrid, Janus-faced position, displaying dual loyalties to both local traditions and a wider pan-British national whole.³

Nonetheless, Stroh argues persuasively that none of these elements prevent the tools and methods of postcolonialism from helping to shape analysis of certain areas of Scottish (especially Highland Gaelic) experience. Furthermore, greater attention to such areas might contribute towards the nuancing of the somewhat schematic coloniser/colonised, self/other models that characterised the ‘first wave’ of postcolonial studies: ‘In this context, Celtic fringe Postcolonialism has been repeatedly commended as a useful reminder that even the British (ex-)coloniser is no monolithic metropolitan block, but has itself been riven by considerable internal cultural differences and conflicts.’⁴

Stefanie Lehner’s close attention to such internal conflicts—particularly nation, gender and class—in modern Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish literature reinvigorates the ‘subaltern studies’ approach initiated by Ranajit Guha’s postcolonialism. Importantly however, she mounts her own critique of the postcolonial approach in that it tends to justify ‘the preoccupation with national paradigms … the reconvened nation state is often posited as a panacea that can resolve all issues of identity and belonging.’⁵ I share with these scholars the desire to reframe postcolonialism in a global framework of competing hegemonies, empires, nations, classes, genders and races that is ambiguous, complex and shifting. While this current volume contributes to this ongoing theoretical realignment, I do not position it primarily in the field of postcolonialism. I am concerned that the different aspects of postcolonial studies—political, economic, social and discursive—tend to be ‘flattened’ by the somewhat loaded term ‘colonial’. This lack of distinction would prove particularly treacherous for this project, which acknowledges the pressures and negotiations of national identity in Scotland while it investigates the ‘colonial’ experience of the Caribbean in terms of settler colonialism, enslavement and racism.

I turn instead to paradigms of transnationalism in the Atlantic world that are developing around the revitalised discussions of ‘world literature’. The editors of a recent collection suggest the impulse behind the resurgence of interest:

From China and Vietnam to Romania and Turkey, scholars, teachers, and writers themselves are looking anew at their literary relations to the wider world, while in Western Europe and the United States, new waves of immigration and the aftershocks of the attacks on September 11, 2001, have lent a special cogency and even urgency to the study and understanding of as full as possible a range of the world’s cultures.⁶

There is therefore an underlying ethical impulse in the need to create a sense of a ‘global citizenry’ that can better address planetary inequalities and ecological threats. Historical, cultural and literary studies might contribute by rethinking their long-standing commitments to national and disciplinary borders that have always been in tension with the large-scale processes that constitute the object of their study. This requires, therefore, some serious reflection on the category of the national. ‘Transnationalism’ is expressly not the same as ‘post-nationalism’: the nation cannot be discarded and is not ready to be superseded, as a political unit or analytical concept. This is especially so when current alternatives, like the European Union, speak more to the expansion of capital over sovereign borders than a genuinely emancipatory concept. There is also a fine distinction to be made with ‘internationalism’. Where the prefix ‘inter’ can imply movements ‘between’ two given borders, the prefix ‘trans’ more strongly implies relations ‘through’ or ‘across’ and ‘beyond’ those borders. That said, my own approach to transnationalism draws heart from traditions of international socialism. I do not, however, offer ‘transnational’ in a utopian sense here: capitalism, war and slavery, to name but three, are also transnational phenomena. There is simply a growing sense that cultural studies that are oriented to look beyond borders will better track the significance of phenomena that circulate on a broader scale.

In recent years Scottish studies too has seen an orientation away from the cultural nationalism that characterised much of the twentieth century, though I do not wish to posit a false dichotomy between national and trans-national approaches. Jing Tsu observes, ‘There is as yet no consensus as to where world literature stands in relation to national literatures’:

Just as a notion of world literature … would be meaningless without nations, so national literatures have always been inseparable from the creation of world peripheries.⁷

The work of previous scholars in identifying, defending and promoting the particular linguistic and literary traditions of Scotland has been crucial, and it would be misleading to pretend that they were not also in dialogue with an international scene. However, there is a risk with the national paradigm, especially if it is privileged as the sole or most prestigious unit of analysis, that it is a lens that can obscure as much as clarify. It risks homogenising what are distinct, disparate and fractured elements into a coherent ‘national story’, one that often supports a national elite, at the same time as it undervalues the significance of events that take place outwith national borders. Equally, however, large-scale transnational approaches risk paying insufficient attention to local inflections of global phenomena and reinscribing an unfounded universalism. In Ulrich Beck’s neat formulation, ‘cosmopolitanism without provincialism is empty, provincialism without cosmopolitanism is blind.’⁸ It will be helpful, then, to think of the national as one epistemological lens, one possible horizon amongst many. The national lens should be considered as being in constant interplay with other lenses—local, regional, international and transnational—as well as the intersections of such features as class, race, gender and religion that inflect all such territorial approaches. The national remains one of a number of lenses which can be usefully employed to provide what Svend Erik Larsen calls a ‘telescopic dual perspective’: ‘We can and must look at literature from two alternating or rather complementary positions, through both the magnifying and the diminishing lens.’⁹

Laura Doyle’s dialectical approach to the national/transnational matrix is apposite here. Rather than dismissing the insights of previous theoretical formulations, Doyle suggests that transnationalism has grown out of ‘the last several decades of rich thinking about nationalism’. It takes its ‘impetus from postcolonial, diaspora, feminist, and world-system studies’ to resituate questions of empire, colony and nation in a wider frame.¹⁰ She dispenses with the ‘a priori, Herderian spirit’ of the ‘inside’ of the nation to argue instead that ‘they are radically co-formed … arising from material and ideological forces that continuously transform the existence of both or all national sides.’ She stresses that dialectics need not signify only a dyadic relationship but that ‘like dialogue, dialectics can comprise plural engagements, and … can entail multilateral actors as well as witnesses and listeners’:¹¹

Nations do exist, but as trans-nations or inter-nations. They share a ‘tilted’ structure of orientation to other nations that is dialectical and dyadic yet also multiple and circumferential and horizontal.¹²

With necessary caveats on the sapling nature of Scottish ‘nationhood’ in the eighteenth century, and that the Caribbean is a region rather than a nation, this is a suggestive model for this project. It has become a cliché that we must move beyond the binary terms that are supposed to characterise colonial discourse—West/non-West, self/other—although colonial discourse has rarely been so reducible. With transnational dialectics we might think instead of ‘the paradox of Sameness and Difference’, which better captures the intersections of class, race, gender and nation identities, amongst others, that continually and problematically play out in the transnational world. I borrow the term from Sylvia Wynter’s essay that problematises unfounded universalisms of political discourses through variables of race and gender.¹³ The ‘paradox of Sameness and Difference’ is one that modernity continues to wrestle with in theorising the human condition.

In order to focus on Scottish-Caribbean relations specifically, transnational cultural studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–1833
• 1 Theoretical Orientations: Transnationalism in the Atlantic World
• 2 Archipelagic Poetics: Pastoral, Georgic and the Scoto-British Imperial Vision, c.1740–1785
• 3 Robert Burns: Slavery, Freedom and Abolition, 1786–1800
• 4 Not Immediate but Gradual: Abolition to Emancipation, 1800–1833
• 5 Recovering Scottish Creoles from the Caribbean
• 6 Joseph Knight: History, Fiction, Memory
• Bibliography
• Index