Mixed Race Studies

Going Viral: Stedman’s Narrative, Textual Variation, and Life in Atlantic Studies

Romantic Circles Praxis Series
Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic
October 2011
47 paragraphs

Dustin Kennedy
English Department
The Pennsylvania State University

The current multiplex configuration of Stedman’s Narrative emerged in 1988, the result of Richard and Sally Price’s new scholarly edition. The Prices’ text transcribed Stedman’s 1790 manuscript version aiming to restore his original authorial intent and exposing the extent to which the text had been altered by Stedman’s first editor, Joseph Johnson. Both versions of the Narrative are troubled by what they cannot contain, whether it be the sexual exploitation made possible by plantation-slavery, or the inter-racial desire that would eventually mark Stedman’s Narrative as a singular example of resistance to the exploitations inherent in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Stedman was more than a traveler in Surinam, and he was also more than a colonial agent and oppressor. The Narrative can be read as the outgrowth of social subjectivity categories that typify the operation of the larger plantation slavery system in the West Indies and South America, but it must also be recognized in its particularity. In the following sections, I will consider what happens when Stedman’s authorship becomes displaced in the larger archive – how critics rewrite what they read, how an author becomes a character, and above all else, how textual changes challenge criticism’s reduction of Stedman to imperialist.

John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) is a very complicated text. It tells the story of an officer in the Scots Brigade deployed in 1772 to the Dutch-controlled colony of Surinam to suppress an armed black revolt against plantation slavery. It also exposes the cruelty of both slavery and military authority, while providing a rare account of a wide spectrum of colonial society. It takes advantage of Stedman’s role as a colonial authority, writing from the privileged perspective of the colonial gaze, but it also challenges many assumptions and prejudices natural to the colonizer’s world view. Stedman’s Narrative is gaining importance in Atlantic Studies, because it both reflects the larger experience of circum-Atlantic circulation in the Age of Revolution and provides a unique perspective that differs from other primary material from the period. It should be possible to differentiate between what is typical of society and what is particular to an individual’s perspective in Stedman’s Narrative, right? There is just one problem: there is more than one Stedman’s Narrative.

Today’s reader is in a position to understand the role that variation plays in the construction and interpretation of Stedman’s Narrative. Contemporary culture is comfortable with the idea of media going “viral,” taking on a life of its own as it is experienced and altered by users on the net. Likewise, a type of reading that is attentive to reference and mutation is necessary for Stedman’s Narrative because of the proliferation of versions that have emerged over the more than two-hundred year history of its publication legacy…

…Stedman altered the conventions of British society both in his daily life and in his public writings by incorporating new experiences of eighteenth-century life within the familiar narratives. Following his return to Europe, Stedman produced his Narrative for print while keeping a journal that records his exceptional family’s experience in British society. In order to make sense of his time in Surinam, Stedman drew from literary conventions, characters, and narratives to tell his story. His private writings from the same period record his mixed-race, mixed-nationality household from the domestic perspective, depicting both the strained relationship between Stedman’s Dutch wife, Adrianna, and Johnny, as well as Stedman’s emphatic inclusion of Johnny within traditional familial relationships. If Stedman “re-wrote” his and Joanna’s relationship into the normative codes of domesticity, then his journalistic evidence of an analogous effort to establish Johnny socially within the codes of relation and inheritance tempers the critical assumption that such re-writing is necessarily aligned with a system of colonial domination..Stedman’s readiness to bend the normative forces of domesticity to include the potential for legitimized inter-racial relationships is a radically destabilizing social scenario. While the racial power dynamics of plantation slavery made Joanna sexually available to Stedman in Surinam, his continual effort to endow their relationship with consent and love in his writings generated cultural tension by denying Joanna’s reduction to a sexual commodity. Stedman’s “cleaning up” of the sexual relations in the colonial system by scripting them within the codes of the British middle class family is then both at once a problematic erasure of colonial power and a powerful challenge of the homogenous constitution of British society. Stedman’s re-writing of Joanna denies her reduction to a sexual commodity, implicitly denying his own association as a white male consumer of subjugated women. The mitigating quality of this particular recorded relationship is that the denial does not transpire in silence as so many others did.

At the end the five years expedition, Stedman left Joanna and Johnny in Surinam to return to Europe. In the Narrative, Joanna is depicted as having the agency to decide not to return with Stedman “first from a Consciousness that with propriety she had not the disposal of herself – & Secondly from pride, wishing in her Present Condition Rather to be one of the first amongst her own Class in America, than as she was well Convinced to be the last in Europe at least till such time as fortune should enable me to establish her above dependance” (1988, 603). The only record of Joanna’s choice is inundated with Stedman’s narrative authority, and in itself is at best a compromised version of what grounds their domestic relationship may have entailed. Joanna’s choice in this moment signals a much wider comprehension of what her and Stedman’s relationship would mean in the wider context of colonization, rather than being limited to the local plantation society. When the Narrative gives Joanna agency, however, it exonerates Stedman of not only his role as a colonial exploiter of women (Joanna’s choice of separation is made on other grounds), but also his abandonment. If the Stedman Archive was limited to the core texts, it would be difficult to argue that Stedman has been judged unfairly as a practitioner of the colonial romance and the mystification that authorship has the power to produce over any scene. By reading this moment in the Narrative against the wider collection of journals and textual variation in the archive, it becomes clear that their domestic relationship remained in place even while they were separated by vast geographic distance. Following Joanna’s death three years later (reputedly by poisoning), Johnny, who had been manumitted before Stedman’s return, traveled to Europe to live with his father. The Stedman family in Europe was then composed of Stedman, his Dutch wife Adrianna (whom he married while Joanna was yet alive), and Johnny…

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Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832

American Historical Review
Volume 111, Number 2, 2006
pages 336-361, 44 paragraphs

Marixa Lasso, Associate Professor of History
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

During the Age of Revolution, nations in the Americas faced the quandary of how to reconcile slavery and racial discrimination with the enlightened and liberal ideology of citizenship. Would slavery be abolished? Would all free men, regardless of race, enjoy the equal rights of citizenship, and if not, how would that exclusion be justified within an ideology that proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of humankind? From 1810 to 1812, patriot movements across Spanish America answered the last question by declaring legal racial equality for all free citizens and constructing a nationalist ideology of racial harmony—what contemporary scholars call the myth of racial democracy. In Mexico, the rebel leader Miguel Hidalgo proclaimed the end of racial distinctions: “Indians, mulattos or other castes … all will be known as Americans.” In Venezuela, the 1811 constitution decreed the derogation of “all the ancient laws that degraded the segment of the free population of Venezuela heretofore known as pardos [free blacks and mulattos] … [and] restored all the inalienable rights that are accorded to them as to any other citizens.” Farther south, the revolutionary junta in Buenos Aires repudiated colonial caste laws and condemned the “prejudices responsible for the degradation to which the accidental difference of color condemned until now a part of our population as numerous as it is capable of any great enterprise.” By the time the wars of independence ended in 1824, the constitutions of all the nations in Spanish America granted legal racial equality to their free populations of African descent, and a nationalist racial ideology had emerged that declared racial discrimination—and racial identity—divisive and unpatriotic. In contrast, nineteenth-century nationalism in the United States centered on ideologies of manifest destiny and white supremacy. What explains this difference?

This essay argues that the revolutionary wars were crucial for the construction of these different national racial imaginaries, and that any historical analysis of comparative race relations in the Americas needs to take into account the important role of anti-colonial struggles in the formation of racial identities. The literature on nationalism and the Age of Revolution has made us aware of the importance of this period in shaping national identity. However, we still do not have a comparative study that explores why societies with similar colonial pasts of slavery and racial prejudice developed such divergent racial national imaginaries during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is partly because of the tendency of U.S. and Latin American historians to assume that the colonial pasts of their regions naturally led to their modern racial identities. Yet as David Brion Davis already noted in 1966, “differences between slavery in Latin America and the United States were not greater than regional or temporal differences within the countries themselves … negro bondage was a single phenomenon, or Gestalt, whose variations were less significant than underlying patterns of unity.” Thirty years later—after summarizing the scholarship on U.S. and Brazilian slavery—Anthony Marx similarly concluded that there is little in the two countries’ colonial pasts that warrants their dissimilar histories of modern race relations. Indeed, when one colonial experience is set against the other, the divergent national racial imaginaries of the United States and Latin America seem less natural. Although this essay is not a comparative analysis, it examines the construction of Colombian racial identities against the background of the United States’ experience to argue that racial democracy was neither inevitable nor a colonial legacy…

…One of the most fascinating aspects of Colombia’s declaration of racial equality for all free people was how fast it became a core element of Colombian patriotism, particularly considering that in the last decades of colonial rule there was little in the attitudes of white Creoles that foreshadowed the crucial role that racial equality would play in patriot nationalism. Most white Creoles were little inclined to renounce their traditional racial privileges and strongly opposed the Bourbons’ minor reforms in favor of people of African descent. Pardos‘ claims for a greater degree of social inclusion were usually supported by peninsular officers, who prized pardos‘ economic and military contribution to the crown and contrasted their obedience and loyalty to the arrogance and discontent of white Creoles. Most elite Creoles did not share Spanish bureaucrats’ view of pardos. In Cartagena, white Creoles fought against the crown’s decision to grant black militias the corporate legal privileges of the military. They bitterly resented losing jurisdiction over an important segment of the urban population, and they worried about the effect that their diminished powers of social control would have on established social hierarchies. White Creoles also opposed the attempts of wealthy pardos to enter professions barred to nonwhites. One of the most eloquent examples of their opposition was the Caracas town council’s memorandum against the 1795 publication of the Gracias al Sacar, a legal procedure that permitted people of African descent to buy their whiteness. The council argued for the “necessity to keep pardos in their current subordinate status, without any law that would confuse them with whites, who abhor and detest this union.” According to the town council, the crown decree was the result of false and evil-intentioned reports from Spanish officers in the Americas who did not care about the interests of Spanish American subjects (españoles americanos). A particularly sore point for Creoles was the Spanish notion that American whites were rarely free from racial mixing, which justified the blurring of racial distinctions in the American colonies. According to the viceroy of New Granada, Cartagena’s white militiamen were “blancos de la tierra [local whites], who in substance are mulattos a little closer to our race.” White Creoles dreaded this notion, because it created a distance between them and peninsular Spaniards, further emphasizing their increasingly disadvantageous position. Indeed, white Creoles understood Spanish support of pardos as a sign of contempt toward them, and considered it to have been invented “to de-authorize them under the false pretense that it serves the interest of His Majesty.”…

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Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2002
320 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-32309-2

Earl Lewis, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Emory University

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

When Alice Jones, a former nanny, married Leonard Rhinelander in 1924, she became the first black woman to be listed in the Social Register as a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families. Once news of the marriage became public, a scandal of race, class, and sex gripped the nation—and forced the couple into an annulment trial.

Are you ‘diverse’?

The Boston Globe
2012-05-05

Dante Ramos, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

In the mid-’90s, around the time Elizabeth Warren’s name was appearing on a list of minority law professors, I was applying for entry-level reporting jobs at dozens of newspapers. In a few cases — one of which involved a summer job at a paper tartly critical of affirmative action — something odd happened. First came the nibble of interest; later, the bashful questions: What, exactly, was my ethnic background? Perhaps I’d like to be considered for a minority internship?

At the time, I was in my early 20s, underemployed, and eager to please. But did I qualify? It was hard to say. One of my parents is Filipino; the other is white; my surname is Spanish. Still, I disliked the implication that my dull, dutiful stories, which I’d clipped to my resume, were suddenly fascinating if their author were less ambiguously ethnic. What grated most — what steered me away from these strange, unbidden opportunities — was that no one asked: Are you actually disadvantaged in some way? Does your ethnicity relate in any way to what you’ve written?

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Warren. We may never know whether she played up her scant Native American ancestry to advance her academic career. But whatever the flap says about the Harvard law professor’s US Senate campaign, it also reflects badly on the ham-fisted, box-checking approach that many employers once took toward diversity — and that some still use today…

…Yet if Warren handled this subject badly, let’s admit that it’s impossible to handle well. The question still lurks: Are you “diverse” or not? For mixed-race Americans who mean neither to exploit their ancestry nor minimize it, politely brushing aside the issue is harder than it seems.

Meanwhile, the usual ethnic categories keep blurring at the edges; the 2010 census counted over 9 million Americans as multiracial. Yet as The New York Times reported last summer, many elite colleges still can’t say how multiracial applicants fit in with their diversity goals. So applicants are left to fret: Check every box that applies, or hope that skipping the question entirely won’t keep you from getting in?…

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African-Scottish families

A North East Story: Scotland, Africa and Slavery in the Caribbean
2008

This exhibition has been organised by an Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Bicentenary Committee to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Britain’s outlawing of the African slave trade in 1807. It follows on from a service of commemoration and a series of public lectures sponsored by the Committee in 2007.

Many of the commemorative events in the UK in 2007 explored the big history of transatlantic slavery and the fight of British and African activists to end it. This exhibition seeks to show how that big history links to the history of North East Scotland.

Table of Contents

• Slave names
• Colour consciousness in the Caribbean
• John Shand and Frances Brown
• Frances Batty Shand
• Jonathan Troup

Few Scottish women went to the Caribbean. Their menfolk had relationships instead with women of African origin or descent. Thousands of children were born from these interracial relationships.

The men almost never married their African partners, although sometimes a man would buy the freedom of his enslaved lover. If he did not, he would have no rights over his children. By law, a child born to an enslaved woman belonged to the woman’s owner, regardless of who the father was.

Often it was the custom for the children to use their father’s surname. If they were born free and had a fairly light skin colour, their fathers often sent them to Scotland for education.

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A 30 Percent of Mixed Race Component in Argentina’s Population

Agentina Investiga: Divulgación y Noticas Universitarias
Universidad Maimónides
Facultad de Ciencias Médicas
2012-04-09

Adrián Giacchino
Departamento de Prensa
Universidad Maimónides

The research of a team formed by anthropologists, biologists, biochemists and archeologists proves that the autochthonous contribution in Argentina’s population might be of a 30%. The results of the work, emerged from an analysis of blood donors in diverse regions of our country, indicate that there is a 65% of European component, a 30% Amerindian and a 5% African. Amerindian lineage is mainly maternal, decreases as we come close to the city of Buenos Aires and increases towards the north and the south.

How many times we have heard that in Argentina “we come from the ships…” and that we are “a melting pot”. This is believed by many people and it was written many times and even legitimated as valid knowledge. But, do we really come from the ships and are we a real melting pot?

“What exists is the mythology that we are white and European –indicates to InfoUniversidades Dr. Francisco Raúl Carnese, who is in charge of the laboratory of Biological Anthropology of the University-. However, our population is mixed. The native composition is very striking, especially in maternal ancestry, which increases towards the north and the south and it is also very important in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, particularly in the suburbs. We have the need to “bleach” populations, but the concept of “melting pot” is questioned. The populations’ genetics showed that there is no continuity between human populations, that the biological variations are of continuous nature. Races do not reflect biological reality, but are social constructions…

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