Mixed Race Studies

Race, the Jamaican Body and Eugenics/Genomics: An Autobiographic Mediation

Auto/Biography and Mediation
2010
pages 39-55

Edited by:

Alfred Hornung, Professor of English and American Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Written by:

Eve Hawthorne, Professor of History
Howard University

Paul Vanouse, Associate Professor of Visual Studies
The State University of New York, Buffalo

Caribbean bodies are among the most specularized of observed objects. From religion to sociology, and through a range of genres—travel writing, missionary reports, histories, colonial administrative accounts, diaries/journals and belles lettres—these bodies have been made into available and free sites, serving for archival evidentiary data collection, statistics, literary subjects and visual voyeurism. They have been objectified both through a “torrent of words and images,” as Stephen Greenblatt has described the phenomenon of hyper-textualization that enabled imperialistic projects to gain possession of and control over the New World (145), and a “visual colonialism” achieved through scoping, according to Johannes Fabian (123).  Historically, this ‘gaze’ begins with fixing the New World indigenous Indian people as its object—the adventurer Christopher Columbus both described and brought back Indigenous people as specimen to Europe to display their difference from Europeans (Doggett 12)—but by the eighteenth century there is a marked shift to the black, African body. In contrast to the dual perspectives that had characterized the textualization of the Amerindian in which early colonial representations of aboriginal peoples were both “pragmatically political and romantically imaginative” (G. K. Lewis 32), that of the African was invariably constructed to justify his enslavement. Middle-colonial imaginings, then, with the exception of those created by the Abolitionists or liberals such as John Gabriel Stedman (Narrative of a Five-Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1796) were ideological productions that evolved into a potent archive of black stereotypes available for hegemonic discourses.

Colonial texts produced two views that would predominate throughout the following centuries, i.e., one of the black body’s ‘laziness,’ and one of moral laxity or ‘slackness’—particularly of the female. In Jamaica, the writing of Matthew [Monk] Gregory Lewis, the British writer and plantation owner, relies on the evolving stereotype of the lazy native:

For myself, it appears to be almost worth surrendering the luxuries and pleasures, of Great Britain: for the single pleasure of being surrounded with beings who are always laughing and singing, and who seem to perform their work with so much nonchalance, taking up their baskets as if it were perfectly optional … sauntering along with their hands dangling; stopping to chat with every one they meet. (101)

In time, Thomas Carlyle in “The Nigger Question” would give a more egregious picture of this ‘lazy’ Caribbean native, while Anthony Trollope would devote eight of his twenty-one chapters of The West Indies and the Spanish Main 1858/1860 to the same purpose. The surveillance of the female, in which it was important to declare her moral laxity, is sometimes different. Thus in one of the earliest descriptions, Mrs. Race, the Jamaican body, and Eugenics/Genomics 40 Carmichael writes in Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White,Coloured, and Negro Population:

The appearance of these women was disgusting;… but without exception, the arms were drawn out of the sleeves, which with the body of the gown, hung down as useless appendages; while from the waist upwards, all was in a state of nudit.… We observed several coloured women at the door and windows of houses, the dresses of some of whom would have been elegant and graceful, had they been more modest. (10-11)

The immodesty of the black female becomes an overpoweringly invasive image that overshadows that of the Abolitionists and adventurers such as Stedman. For both genders, the underlying objectification of ‘skin color’ assumed paramount importance, and became the clearest and most frequent delineator of alterity and inferiority. By the beginning of the twentieth century it would be scientized as ‘race.’

In this article we examine a twentieth-century manifestation of the collusion of power and knowledge-formation—specifically ‘Science.’ Largely, scholars have been scrupulously attentive in examining the colonization of the black body during the mid-period of Caribbean colonialism, promoted by an early science of ethnography that relied on the writer’s observation and interpretation. By the 1850s, this ethnographic authority was augmented through the field of physical anthropology that would claim greater scientific authority, ensured by works of biology such as that of Charles Darwin. The young science accommodated ideological needs by declaring hierarchical structures of difference, especially as existent in the European colonial possessions with their unmatched degrees of hybridity—or intermixtures of peoples. The new science becomes an “aggressively racist movement” (Lorimer 12), solidified under the science of eugenics. The black body and its sexuality and reproductivity were placed under constant surveillance. While this dominant science of eugenics was the popular science of nineteenth-century England, by the early twentieth century it had lost much of its appeal and potency there. Conversely, it becomes a plausible science in the U.S., and institutions and scientists were well-financed by both government and private sources, given its promise as tool of social engineering and control.

Given the waning British interest in eugenics, it was surprising for us to discover that the Caribbean body was made freely available to this racialized science as pursued by an American scientist and occurring as late as the 1920s. Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929) is a scientific text resulting from an extensive study conducted by the American eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. It seems, however, to be entirely overlooked within the historical discussion of the colonial era, yet it, too, epitomizes Western imperialism; Jamaican bodies used as raw material in the furtherance of First World goals. With its late-imperialist vision, the 512-page tome comprises anthropometric, physiological, and psychological studies of “Blacks, Whites, and hybrids” (iv). Its author is a well-known U.S. biologist who held at the time of this study the position of director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York State. His field investigator was Morris Steggerda, a Ph.D. student in zoology at the University of Illinois. The island of Jamaica was chosen for having what were perceived as isolated pockets of “pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White” populations of similar economic class. The methods entailed anthropomorphic and psychological examinations that included some sixty measurements of body areas including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in a variety of positions. The text has some 359 tables and charts, the result of a comparative analysis of three hundred and seventy “Blacks,” “Browns,” “Whites”: 197 males, 173 females. Mico College for Men and Shortwood College for Women supplied ninety-eight of these subjects; 118 came from the agricultural areas of Gordon Town and Seaford Town, and from a prison; 110 were classified as “city folk”, from Kingston’s fire and police departments, a crèche, and a prison; and forty-four Cayman Islanders were chosen who were supposedly white subjects.

Read the entire chapter here.