Spectacular Suffering

Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic

Ramesh Mallipeddi

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813938431
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.

The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders.

Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves' embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery.

Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

1

Spectacle, Spectatorship, Sympathy

APHRA BEHN’S OROONOKO AND THE ENGLISH COMMERCIAL EMPIRE

In Oroonoko, the language of spectacle and visuality is Aphra Behn’s principal strategy for presenting exoticism to the reader’s gaze. In 1688, when the novella was first published, its twin locations—the West African slave trading station, Coramantien, and the American colony, Suriname—were still relatively unknown to Behn’s readers. In her dedication to Lord Maitland, Behn notes that “these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear to us, because New and Strange.”¹ The narrative’s strikingly specular character reflects Behn’s attempt to display these unfamiliar places to an English audience. Moreover, spectacle was an important vehicle for mediating representations of alien cultures in public pageants and major theatrical forms of Restoration England, especially the heroic drama. The novella’s rendering of the New World—its ecstatic enumeration of exotic plants, strange animals, and unfamiliar objects—is partly shaped by the commercial spectacles of the public pageants; and its idealized presentation of Oroonoko’s battlefield exploits, by the stage spectacles of the heroic drama. Indeed, the novella portrays the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko’s black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity.

What was strange and unprecedented in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, was not only the Suriname landscape, but also the socioeconomic institution that had come into existence there: plantation slavery.² The rise of sugar colonies in the Caribbean, supported chiefly by the importation of slave labor from West Africa, denoted a shift in England’s colonizing activities—spatially, from the Old World to the New World (or from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic), and ideologically, from expansionist strategies based on war and conquest to those aided by commerce and trade.³ The resulting English commercial empire, created by the movement of people and commodities in the Atlantic basin—between Africa, Europe, and America—necessitated new discourses of imperial expansion and new ideologies of racial difference. The novella’s effort to register this historic transformation is most powerfully evident, I argue, in its treatment of Oroonoko’s black body. Historically, especially in Renaissance drama, blackness was deemed an undesirable attribute, but the black body itself was not always presented as a commodity. In Oroonoko, however, Behn first elevates the black body to an admirable spectacle via the conventions of Restoration drama, then shows how it is reduced to an exchangeable commodity, and finally documents its violent dismemberment at the scaffold.

This chapter aims to explore the theoretical implications of the novella’s emphasis on spectacle by utilizing spectacle as a category of analysis for a variety of representations, including that of heroism and victimization, of suffering and mutilation, and of the body and commodity (or, more properly, the body as commodity). Through an examination of various tropes of extreme visuality, I aim to show that, notwithstanding its problematic representation of colonial contact, Behn’s novella grasps—in a way no other literary work of her time does—the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the point of its insertion into the circuits of commercial exchange.

Historians of New World slavery have for a long time recognized Oroonoko’s seminal role in the British humanitarian campaign against slavery, also known as the antislavery movement.⁴ They have not, however, explained the precise connection between the sympathetic female spectator and Oroonoko’s tragic victimization. The primary site for the operation of sympathy in the novella, I argue, is Oroonoko’s body. Slavery most fundamentally divests a person of any right over one’s body. The female narrator records this alienation not from the standpoint of a detached observer but that of an engaged participant, viewing the reduction of the royal body to ordinary property as an assault on human dignity. As an honorable prince, Oroonoko is in full possession of his royal person. But under slavery, in the wake of his extirpation from Coramantien, he is alienated not only from all claims of birth and lineage, but also most immediately from his own body. The planters’ absolute power over Oroonoko and his consequent powerlessness are starkly dramatized at the moment of his mutilation on the scaffold. And it is on the eve of his public execution that the female narrator denounces the planters and decides to memorialize Oroonoko’s tragic fate via writing. But because Behn’s sympathy is largely reserved for the indignity endured by an aristocratic prince, and not necessarily for the sufferings of a multitude of other Africans, the workings of sympathy in the novella appear paradoxical. By focusing on the female narrator’s vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko’s public execution, I intend to explore the ways in which Behn’s text formulated certain fundamental paradoxes intrinsic to scenes of sympathy—paradoxes that would continue to structure English citizens’ emotional engagement with Caribbean slaves in the long eighteenth century.

PUBLIC PAGEANTS AND THEATRICAL SCENERIES

If the word “spectacle” is employed, literally, to mean an act of exhibiting a thing or person for the viewer’s pleasure or for satisfying curiosity, seventeenth-century England can be said to have at least two prominent avenues for staging spectacles of cultural encounter: the Lord Mayor’s civic pageants and the heroic drama. The civic pageants of the second half of the seventeenth century, sponsored by the enormously powerful London guilds, somewhat resembled and functioned as mobile curio cabinets of exoticism.⁵ Organized annually on October 29 to commemorate the Lord Mayor’s assumption of office, these pageants were intended to showcase the uniqueness of each trading guild, whose claims to distinction rested on their overseas commercial ventures. As such, the Lord Mayor’s pageant was a product of specific ideological circumstance, and its main goal was to showcase the “fruits” of colonial trade for the nation. In these pageants, Africa, Asia, and Europe were routinely emblematized and their stereotypical attributes personified. Even though these pageants were little more than elaborately staged costume pieces, and even though their main concern was to “call attention to the benefits of global trade acquired by England,” they still managed to showcase the changes in the evolution of a commercial empire: “in some Restoration-era pageants, plantation and slave economics were justified and endorsed.”⁶

The second prominent avenue for staging cultural difference, the Restoration drama, lacked the contemporaneity of the public pageant, given its lack of preoccupation with the immediate concerns of English colonialism. At Charles Stuart’s ascension to the throne, England was anything but a dominant colonial power; it was continually engaged in wars with the Dutch from the mid- to late seventeenth century in an attempt to secure monopolies on sea trading.⁷ With this part of English history the heroic drama did not concern itself; instead, it sought to dramatize, for the most part, the founding moments of Eurocolonial (especially Peninsular) expansionist projects in Old and New World settings. If civic pageants functioned as sites for showcasing the achievements of a mercantile class, the newly designed Restoration playhouse became an alternative site for staging the imperialist fantasies of an aristocratic coterie.⁸ John Loftis notes that “the achievements in exploration and conquest of the Spanish . . . made them suitable subjects for the heroic play—the more so since they traveled and fought in exotic places which could justify the introduction on stage of ceremonial and spectacle.”⁹ The stagings of cultural contact as spectacle in serious drama were helped by the innovations accompanying the newly opened playhouse, which was famous, among other things, for the introduction of movable scenery and machines, for its relatively homogeneous, upper-class audience, and for its emphasis on spectacle.¹⁰ The new theater proved to be an excellent avenue for staging colonial contact, as Bridget Orr suggests, in that it “not only used exotic costumes, props and dances but also employed sophisticated new ‘machines’ to display scenes of Oriental wealth, sensuality and violence or pagan savagery.”¹¹ The prominence of iconographic scenery in the background is conveniently matched by the highly stylized heroic action in the foreground, which harnessed the classical motif of the Herculean hero to dramatize the founding moments of European imperial expansion.¹²

Behn’s preoccupation with spectacle and visuality, then, has a larger sociohistorical precedent in the public pageants of the bourgeoisie and the heroic drama of the aristocratic coterie, and her modes of representation are consequently shaped by the paradoxical legacies of this inheritance: the historical specificity of the pageant as well as the evident artificiality of the heroic drama. The novella’s reliance on visual devices for narrating colonial contact must therefore be read in relation to mercantilist and aristocratic ideologies. The affinity between the novella’s complex system of representation and theater is further underscored by the fact that it was successfully adapted, most famously by Southerne and Hawkesworth, for the stage in the next century—adaptations that were more popular than their novelistic counterpart. This traffic between literary and cultural practices needs qualification, however, as the phenomenological experiences of reading a novel and seeing a play or public pageant are not identical. This is because, first, the representation of spectacle in a novel is primarily mediated by language, while in theater, it is assisted by scenery;¹³ and second, the subjectivity of the narrator is a crucial determinant in any narrative act, a concern that does not arise in an analysis of the theatrical presentation of spectacle. The implications of this difference will be important for us throughout, but for now we must recall that the Restoration was also a period in which the interface between narrative and dramatic forms was being renegotiated by the emergence of a small but powerful print culture, a time when print had begun to redefine the relationship between text and performance, the stage and the page, making the experiences of reading and watching a play two continuous experiences.¹⁴ As Julie Stone Peters has shown in her account of the entangled histories of print and theater, “By the middle of the seventeenth century, audiences had come to expect that the texts of performed events—whether plays at the regular playhouses, court masques, royal entrées, or city pageants—would appear in print.”¹⁵ The emergence of a fledgling print culture at this time enabled a readerly discourse about seeing, thereby redrawing the boundaries between the practice of reading a novella and of seeing a play. It is this conjunction of practices that prompted Peter Holland in The Ornament of Action to reorient his critical analysis of Restoration drama from an opposition between text and performance to reading and seeing.¹⁶

NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

Some of these tensions, between the emergent habits of reading and the established habits of seeing, surface early on in the novella. Behn begins her narration, appropriately, with a description of the “Scene” of the last part of the hero’s adventures, Suriname, before digressing to Coramantien. The field of vision unveiled in the opening pages by the narrator’s ecstatic description essentially foregrounds a motley assortment of rarities and curiosities that the natives trade with the planters, such as “a thousand other Birds and Beasts of wonderful and surprizing Forms, Shapes, and Colours. For Skins of prodigious Snakes, of which there are some threescore Yards in length . . . also some rare Flies, of amazing Forms and Colours . . . and all of various Excellencies, such as Art cannot imitate” (O, 8–9). Behn’s catalog of plants, animals, and insects is, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, in line with seventeenth-century landscape discourse—that is, emblematic and composite, not specific and differentiated.¹⁷ The descriptive detail here is pleasurable not only because these things are a part of nature but because they are exotic commodities, finding their way into the scientific and cultural institutions of England like the Royal Academy and Restoration theater. As Laura Brown suggests, “Behn’s enumeration of these goods is typical of the age’s economic and literary language, where the mere act of listing, the evocation of brilliant colors, and the sense of an incalculable numerousness express the period’s fascination with imperialist accumulation.”¹⁸

If the objects are wonderful qua commodities, the commodity form as such conceals the relations of existing social production. The interaction between the natives and the planters is structured by a modern, mercantile exchange economy, but Behn’s representation of the natives is stereotypical, insofar as they exemplify prelapsarian innocence, antecedent to desire and curiosity. This image of amity and reciprocity is eventually shown to be fictitious, but here, especially in the opening description, Behn’s narrator presents the dispossessed natives as inhabiting an empty, homogeneous, qualitatively undifferentiated temporal continuum, even though, by virtue of being colonized, they are firmly within the boundaries of historical time. Social and economic interaction with the natives is based, apparently, on perfect reciprocity: the settlers with the natives live “in perfect Amity, without daring to command ’em; but on the contrary, caress ’em with all the brotherly and friendly Affection in the World; trading with ’em for their Fish, Venison, Buffilo’s, Skins, and little Rarities” (O, 8). The implied contrast here is of course between Africans and the natives: the first are treated as commodities, as objects of exchange; the latter, as equal partners in the exchange of commodities. By the end of her description, however, Behn implies that “it behooves” the settlers to live in “good Understanding” and “perfect Tranquility” with the natives (O, 10). Consequently, their supposedly amicable interaction is the product not of goodwill but of pragmatic necessity for, first, the natives know “all the places where to seek the best Food of the Country, and the Means of getting it; and for very small and unvaluable Trifles, supply us with what ’tis impossible for us to get” (O, 10; emphasis mine);¹⁹ and second, the settlers are a minority, “their Numbers so far surpassing ours in that Continent” (O, 11). The descriptive scene in Suriname, then, temporarily masks the real relations of interaction, marked by hostility and fear; furthermore, it is arranged to display exotic objects and peoples for the pleasure of those viewing it, even as it obfuscates the relations of production and the participation of commodities, as objects of expropriation, in circuits of mercantilist exchange. Finally, the visual pleasure of seeing and contemplation are closely all...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sentimental Melancholy, Capitalist Modernity, Colonial Slavery
• 1. Spectacle, Spectatorship, Sympathy: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the English Commercial Empire
• 2. Yarico’s Complaint: The Female Slave in the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere
• 3. English Subjects, African Slaves: Laurence Sterne and the Politics of Punishment
• 4. Reforming Labor Discipline: Slave Culture and Sentimental Fiction
• 5. “A Fixed Melancholy”: Memories of Migration in Atlantic Slavery
• 6. Filiation to Affiliation: Kinship and Sentiment in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
• Epilogue: The Problem of Slavery, the Problem of Freedom
• Notes
• Index