Mixed Race Studies

In Search of Something Akin to Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Power

Florida State University
2007
78 pages

Katrina Songanett Smith

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
 
This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Historical Accounts of Black Women’s Sexuality and Strategies of Resistance: The Narratives of Mary Prince, Thomas Thistlewood, John Stedman, Maria Nugent, and Janet Schaw
• Chapter Two: The Revenge of the Shrew: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
• Chapter Three: The Sacrifice of the Colored Woman in J.W. Orderson’s Creoleana
• Epilogue
• Works Cited

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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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Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Oxford University Press
March 1997
592 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195052824; ISBN10: 019505282X

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?

Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of “interracial literature.” In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of “either-or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.

Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analyzing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of “mixed race.”

Sollors’ interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of “race,” and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about “race,” and where interracial relations can go from here.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction:
• Black—White—Both—Neither—In-Between xv
• 1. Origins; or, Paradise Dawning 31
• 2. Natus Æthiopus/Natus Albus 48
• 3. The Curse of Ham; or, from “Generation” to “Race” 78
• 4. The Calculus of Color 112
• 5. The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign 142
• 6. Code Noir and Literature 162
• 7. Retellings: Mercenaries and Abolitionists 188
• 8. Excursus on the “Tragic Mulatto”; or, the Fate of a Stereotype 220
• 9. Passing; or, Sacrificing a Parvenu 246
• 10. Incest and Miscegenation 285
• Endings 336
• Appendix A: A Chronology of Interracial Literature 361
• Appendix B: Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation 395
• Notes 411
• Selected Bibliography 523
• Index 561