There Be Pirates in The Family

One of Bellamy's pirate buddies was a Frenchmen named Olivier Le Vasseur, more popularly known as "La Buse" (the buzzard). The two made trips between New England and the Virgin Islands before La Buse decided to go off and sail with Chris Moody.

My mother has a cousin whose last name is Levasseur who lives in Massachusetts. When she half-jokingly asked if they were by chance related to the pirate Le Vasseur, he said, "Well yeah actually we are." We're currently trying to acquire a complete family tree. Granted, I can't claim blood lineage given that it's a connection by marriage. Still, you never know where weird personal connections come from.

Whydah Exhibit

The Whydah exhibit was interesting although a little thin on physical objects. The ship broke into pieces during the wreck and the most of what washed up on the beach was spirited away by scavengers. Much of the exhibit was reconstructions of the ship with mannequins.

One thing that the curator(s) did particularly well was contextualizing piracy within the Atlantic triangle, specifically the relationship between piracy and slavery in the early 18th Century. The rise in transatlantic commerce made piracy attractive due to both the temptation posed by the riches to be gained and due to the fact that sailor life aboard merchant ships was pretty hard. After the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the wars with Spain and the need for privateers, many sailors were left unemployed and vulnerable to pirates Pirates impressed both black and white sailors as well as the slaves captured in their slave ships raids (this wasn't always the case. As W. Jeffery Bolster points out, pirates were just as likely to sell slaves as to free them). Blackbeard's crew may have been as much as 60% black.In fact, there is some speculation that the massive crackdown on piracy prior to 1730 was spurred by the threat piracy posed to the slave trade

One of the more gruesome and haunting displays was of the shoe, stocking, and shinbone of a boy named John King who's estimated to have been between 8 and 11 years old. King and his mother were passengers of one of the ships captured by Bellamy's crew, and King was so enamored by the pirates that he threatened to kill his mother if she tried to stop him from joining them. He died with most of the Whydah's crew.

In terms of my own work, it's hard to say precisely how much will be useful. There were 2 things that might make it into the chapter if only as footnotes.

• The alterations made to the Whydah by Bellamy's crew seem similar to descriptions of the San Dominick in Benito Cereno. The partitions were removed to reflect the egalitarian ethos embraced by pirates.
• Cotton Mather was judge presiding over six members of Bellamy's fleet. He freed one who alleged to have been impressed into service.

Revision and the Illusion of Completeness

Discussing chapter revisions is simultaneously excruciating and liberating. You are purged of delusions of completeness, disabused of any sense of your own brilliance, and finally reassured that you're "almost there." You are also, at least for a little while, free from that dark isolated cave so necessary to writing, and in talking about your work more aware of how things are coming together beyond the immediate chapter. And having done the hardest work of wrestling with concepts in the first draft, you are now allowed to pay more attention to nuance, argument, etcetera.

So instead of moving on whole-hog to pirates, I'm going to start with the revising process with small excursions into pirate territory for variety. In terms of revising, The next few weeks I'm going to concentrate on some key questions brought up at the workshop.

• Principles of Selection
• The Historical Phenomenon of the Maritime Imaginary
• The Relationship Between Insurrection And Revolution
• The resonance of Haiti and American Revolution within the Context of the 1850s

The narrative isn't as clear as it initially seemed. The progression from swamp to sea of course makes mores sense at the end of the chapter than at the beginning which, naturally, that the chapter essentially as to be rewritten backwards. Having teased out the close readings of the texts I now need to go back and do what I set out to do in the first place and make the controlling elements the progression from swamp to sea rather than letting my close readings guide the chapter. I think I'm going to spend the next couple of days concentrating on the introduction and then go back to the swamp. Sigh.

On the pirate front, this weekend I'm headed, finally, to the Field Museum of Natural History's exhibit of the Whydah.

From National Geographic:

The Whydah's story begins in London in 1715 when the hundred-foot [31-meter] three-master was launched as a slave ship under the command of Lawrence Prince. Named for the West African port of Ouidah (pronounced WIH-dah) in what is today Benin, the 300-ton [272-metric-ton] vessel was destined for the infamous "triangular trade" connecting England, Africa, and the West Indies. Carrying cloth, liquor, hand tools, and small arms from England, the Whydah's crew would buy and barter for up to 700 slaves in West Africa, then set out with them on three to four weeks of hellish transport to the Caribbean. Once there, the slaves were traded for gold, silver, sugar, indigo, and cinchona, the last being a source of quinine, all of which went back to England.

The Whydah was fast—she was capable of 13 knots—but in February of 1717, on only her second voyage, she was chased down by two pirate vessels, theSultana and Mary Anne, near the Bahamas. Led by Samuel "Black Sam"

Bellamy, a raven-haired former English sailor thought to be in his late 20s, the pirates quickly overpowered the Whydah's crew. Bellamy claimed her as his flagship, seized a dozen men from Prince, then let the vanquished captain and his remaining crew take the Sultana.

By early April the pirates were headed north along the east coast, robbing vessels as they went. Their destination was Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, butthey diverted to Cape Cod, where legend says Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, in the town of Eastham near the cape's tip. Others blame the course change on several casks of Madeira wine seized off Nantucket. Whatever the reason, on April 26, 1717, the freebooter navy sailed square into a howling nor'easter.

According to eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 70 miles [113 kilometers] an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet [9 meters]. Bellamy signaled his fleet to deeper water, but it was too late for the treasure-laden Whydah.Trapped in the surf zone within sight of the beach, the boat slammed stern first into a sandbar and began to break apart. When a giant wave rolled her, her cannon fell from their mounts, smashing through overturned decks along with cannonballs and barrels of iron and nails. Finally, as the ship's back broke, she split into bow and stern, and her contents spilled across the ocean floor.

A slave ship turned pirate ship and wrecked off the coast of New England! Perfect!

Postmortem

Sent out the chapter draft to my dissertation committee on Wednesday. Overall I feel pretty good about the whole process despite a few setbacks and the fact that was two weeks behind my projected deadline. Considering I didn't really start doing to reading for this chapter until early May, and the fact that moving issues ate up about two and a half weeks, this went much faster than the first chapter did. I am, as ever, not happy with the writing. Parts are still clunky and thin, and you can definitely tell when I'm running out of steam on an idea.

The narrative I constructed is probably the strongest aspect of the chapter. Starting with Dred and the swamp, and then moving onto Blake's transition from the swamp to the sea, and finally ending with Madison Washington's insurrection made it easy to keep track of the various threads of the argument. This chapter, far more than the last, gets closer to my concept on how the maritime imaginary operates as both a literary and political trope during this period.

I've also found some interesting stuff that might help me shore up the theoretical underpinnings of my concept of the maritime imaginary. One is Jacques Ranciere's On The Shores of Politics and the other is a very short essay by Foucault called "Of Other Spaces." More on them after my brief hiatus.

September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Arggh.

Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing*

No ,I haven't disappeared, but I am in the final push to finishing the first draft of this chapter. That kind of writing leaves me a bit too wrung out for blogging.

After I send the draft off, and take a brief break from all things academic, I'm moving on to the fun phase of the dissertation...



...PIRATES!

If you haven't seen last week's New Yorker yet, it has a review of a new book on the economics of piracy. That, J.F. Cooper's The Rover, and Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea will constitute the next series of posts in the not-so-distant future.

Before that, I still have 10-15 pages of writing to go. Sigh. Back to Delany and Douglass' maritime narratives.

*Apologies to both Pixar and Spencer Keralis

Ponyo!

I've been a moderate Miyazaki fan for a few years now, and I've been waiting for the American release for months now. Rumor has it that you can see a version online, but why deprive yourself of the full cinematic experience?

2080 Words Later

Last week was a bit excrutiating writing-wise. My prose muscles seem to have gone cold during the flurry of moving and settling in. It's a bad day when it takes the better part of a day to crank out a painfully overwritten paragraph or two, and then just dump a few block quotes in just to pad the word count. Blech.

Yesterday, I did a combination of things that worked. Firstly, I downloaded Freedom to disable my network for 5-6 hours. One would think I could muster the discipline to shut off my wireless my own damn self, but, yes, I do require technology to act as a grown up in my stead. Then, after staring at the computer failed to magically produce I ideas, I started writing them out in longhand. Eureka! Productivity achieved.

Most importantly I think I've managed to break open the swamp in a way that more effectively ties it to the sea in terms of looking at Dred. I returned to the Allewaert essay and looked again at that passage on the first page.

"Whether this chain of sea-coast-islands is a step, or advance, which this part of our continent is now making on the Atlantic ocean,” Bartram muses, “we must leave to future ages to determine.” The advancing continent seems to confirm a present-day scholarly tendency to read the writings of eighteenth-century Anglo-European elites as contributing to the imperialistic project of continental expansion. But as Bartram moves deeper into his meditation, the continent begins to dissolve. He reminds the reader that the tide-lands “were formerly high swamps of and any southern planter could confirm that draining these coastal marshes would yield “strata of Cypress stumps and other trees” (78). Land becomes sea, and only fossils and fragments remain to testify to these marshes’ terrestrial past as the southern terrain that Bartram exhaustively details in more than four hundred pages moves toward annihilation. (Allewaert 340)

This anxiety over physical dissolution embodied in the swamp seems to echo a similar fear manifest in Dred that the insurrectionist threat represented in the swamp will envelope the entire country. The swamp both contains a whole history slave insurrection in the United States and indicates the maroons of the transatlantic world.

This is where I left off yesterday and where I begin today. Radio silence begins in about 30 minutes

Maritime Dreams In Poland

It's super late but I just saw this and had to post it. I'll post more tomorrow.

Two dozen homeless men are building a ship to sail themselves around the world at the St. Lazarus Social Pension here, in the yard of a former tractor factory. Sparks fly from the rusty 55-foot hull as they weld it into form, even after losing the priest who led and inspired the mission.

These men with sharply lined faces and blurry, old tattoos have set out to prove their seaworthiness, and to prove that they have some value to society, even if society has largely written them off.

More Frederick Douglass HBO Miniseries

Scott Glenn as William Lloyd Garrison. Discuss.

Loomings

The chapter draft is officially due August 31st. Yikes! I talked to Bryan last week, and he thought it was a better idea to get the chapter done before thinking about the article which is good in terms of how I've been thinking, and bad in terms of my own anxiety. I'm going to spend this week getting organized for the writing process, get some index cards and start making more concise notes in addition to getting a bit more reading in. In terms of blogging, I'm going to try to discipline my prose. The bad thing about writing before I'm ready is I tend to meander into these incoherent and horribly overwritten paragraphs. I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to develop an elegant prose style. For the time being, if I can't be elegant, I'm going to try to clean and concise.

Instead of sectioning the chapter by text, I'm going to section it by trope: the geography of the swamp, the figure of the insurrectionist/mutineer, and ships and ocean travel. This will allow me to circle back to texts more organically instead of doing rigid and plodding juxtapositions text by text. The hope is that: A) I won't have to force the connections between the texts if I cluster them like this, and B) by keeping these three things in mind I can keep the maritime aspects front and center.

Because of my tendency to think backwards it also helps if I start with something like Dred and then reach back to her source material and work my way forward. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have started the last chapter from Equiano and worked my way backward to Grainger. Oh well, hindsight and everything.

Dred and the Swamp Sublime

Finally got around to reading Monique Allewaert's essay "Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone" which is incredibly suggestive in terms of thinking about Stowe's positioning of Dred, and through him Vesey and Turner, as heirs to the white American revolutionaries. Contact with the swamp produces subjects capable of resistance through interaction with "non-human forces" (Allewaert 341). The swamp zone in opposition with the plantation zone becomes not simply a place a refuge but a way of creating resistance.

Earlier I pointed to the swamp as Dred's swamp community as "a brief failed attempt at revolution." Reading the Allewaert essay I'm wondering if part of Stowe's dilemna lies in the way she attempts to "domesticate" the swamp. Granted, she is working from knowledge of the way these maroon communities operated but she also represents the ultimate demise of Dred's little utopia as white destruction on a fledgling black republic. In this reading Dred seems less a revolutionary and more of a colonist of a terrain viewed as un-colonizable by white settlers (343). This begs the question: does Dred's failure in part lie in the semi-permanence of the community? Stowe depicts of the population of the Great Dismal Swamp as seeming to have fewer revolutionaries than refugees, Tiff, Henry's wife, the wounded Clayton. In depicting the swamp she seems unable to imagine it as something other than an outdoor domestic space.

This reading also really emblematizes Stowe's transition from being pro-emigration to pro-assimilation. On the one hand she needs to recognize slaves as potential revolutionary subjects. On the other she also needs to recognize the ways in which the fit into recognizable societal norms. This is an extension of what she did in Uncle Tom's Cabin in depicting slavery as bound up in the fabric of white domestic space. In Dred she demolishes the plantation house and displaces the population to the swamp to show the possibilities of a free community of blacks interacting if not fully assimilating with whites. This makes the swamp an even more interesting metaphor of interstiality. Not only in terms of the state of slavery in the 1850s being bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also in terms of the changing face of abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.

I'm returning to Dred because I need start laying down the groundwork for the real writing (as opposed to the "fake" writing I'm doing here) and while I've been thinking of the shape of the chapter I really need to start thinking of how the article is going to be. Dred still seems like a good place to start and going back over some of these idea I've only glossed over before.

Frederick Douglass's Travels

Douglass is an interesting figure because he has two transatlantic personas. The first is as a fugitive slave and abolitionist when he takes his two year journey to Ireland and Great Britain in 1845. The second is as post minister to Haiti and wealthy cosmopolitan traveler in the late nineteenth century. Fionnghuala Sweeney's book Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World has got me thinking about how best to address his work in this chapter. Initially, I was going to deal primarily with "The Heroic Slave" and insurrection and mutiny, but I don't know if that's going to cut it. Part of the problem is that Douglass, far more than either Stowe or Delany, revisits maritime scenes in his writing over and over from his early days learning to write by watching the ship builders' markings in Baltimore, to his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker, to his sailor's disguise when he makes his escape, to his subsequent trips to Ireland, Africa, and Haiti. Haiti in particular is something he revisits in his writing both during abolition and in the Reconstruction Era.

The answer might be to deal with "The Heroic Slave" in two different registers. The first would be as I intended: within the context of the 1850 and the history of insurrection and mutiny. The second would be in the context of Douglass's larger project of self-fashioning through rewriting his autobiography. In a similar fashion to how Delany seems to return to Africa as a way of reversing the Middle Passage, Douglass seems to write about his voyages as a way of reconfiguring his view of the sea away from that first apostrophe as he looked over Chesapeake Bay in The Narrative of the Life. Between 1845 and 1882, Douglass goes from yearning to be on the "gallant decks" of the ships leaving Baltimore, to observing of voyage to Egypt that "Nothing in my American experience...ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of vast profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage" (Douglass, Autobiographies, 1008).The yearning in the latter quote is quite different from the that of the Chesapeake Bay soliloquy. There is something of Melville's Ishmael in his tone. Yet if being bound to the shore is representative of bondage to him, this "sameness and solitude" smacks more of desolation than anything else.

There's also the issue of Haiti. Prior to the Civil War he invokes Haiti to both point to a successful slave revolution and to talk up how white fears of slave insurrection are behind the United States' failure to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. After the Civil War Haiti represented the best argument against white hegemony as a black republic, despite its persistent instability.

I'm not sure how much of the Reconstruction era Douglass stuff is going to go in there but it's worth knowing about at any rate. Maybe I can somehow address it in the Billy Budd chapter as a way of demonstrating how these issues persisted after the Civil War.

Looking Ahead

I promised myself I wouldn't start writing until August but I'm thinking about revising that since I'm feeling antsy about all the stuff I have swirling around in my head. I'm probably going to spend another week reading and taking notes and then start outlining and generating some close readings of the texts I've read. I also need to organize my notes and figure out what I have the jettison and what needs more research. I think sticking to looking at Dred as my main text is still the right way to go but I also really need to figure out a better way to incorporate Douglass and Delany into that analysis. Here is a loose sense of how I'm going to organize the chapter.

The 1850s
I'm going to need to narrate the history following the Compromise of 1850 i.e. John Brown and bleeding Kansas, the abolitionist debates over black assimilation versus emigration, and pro-slaver supporters arguments in favor of the annexation of Cuba. More than that I need to the way these debates are echoes and continuations of the earlier abolitionist debates in Great Britain. Specifically, how desire for access to the Caribbean sugar market and fear of a black Cuba reenact issues surrounding the rise of the sugar plantation, the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and eventually the Haitian revolution. In the case of abolitionist debates over emigration, I need to tease out how emigration acts as a reversal of the trauma of the Middle Passage, the desire for return not merely about being a homecoming and the establishment of a black republic, but also a desire for a founding narrative, in which equality with white Americans established through an origin story similar say to the founding of Plymouth Rock.

Stowe
The journey she takes from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dred is an interesting one involving both the influence of Douglass, critiques from Delany and others regarding the representation of slaves, and her trip to England prior to writing Dred. This last one is a bit flimsy but I think Clarkson and the British fight is on her mind during the gestational period of this novel. The character of Dred and the setting of the swamp allow her to negotiate both the present and the past in presenting abolition as the outcome of a longer history.

Revolution, Insurrection, Mutiny and the Slave Ship
The slave ship is a fraught image in this moment. On the one hand the Transatlantic slave trade has technically been abolished. But as Blake shows us, and as the Amistad, Tryal, and Creole cases also demonstrate, the slave ship won't go away. The slave ship mutinies and the slave insurrections provide rhetorical moments for abolitionists to invoke both the Haitian and American revolutions.

The Literary Representation of the Slave
Not sure where this is leading exactly but it seems to me that some of the problems I introduced in the first chapter on Grainger and Equiano become even more fraught, especially in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. Douglass and Delany in particular use these texts about insurrection as a way of making opposite points in a way. Douglass ties Madison Washington to the history of the American Revolution as a way of creating an American identity for his character. Delany's Blake is more of a Moses figure leading people away from the States to some never-seen promised land. Stowe is a bit trickier. While Dred at once seem to be merely a representation of other insurrectionists from history she seems less concerned with creating an accurate black revolutionary figure than she is in using him to discuss abolitionists need to recognize themselves as fellow insurrectionists as well as highlighting the role of pro-slavery violence in creating these insurrectionist figures.

The Maritime Imaginary
Hopefully by the time I work these other things out, I'll have a clearer sense of how they play into the role of the maritime in abolitionist texts. For the moment though I'm stuck on this quote from "The Heroic Slave" (1853)

During all the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,— his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor. He was silent but not agitated. The first words he uttered after the storm had slightly subsided, were characteristic of the man. 'Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.'(Douglass 237)

A vexed statement if there ever was one. On the one hand he's correct. The opportunity for mutiny while at sea demonstrates the illusion of authority aboard a ship. On the other hand it seems to me that the kind of freedom attained through mutiny epitomizes the problem of negative freedom, a freedom from tyranny but not necessarily enfranchisement.

Blake Post Mortem

Finally finished Blake which is kind of an excruciating re-read. The kind of primary texts I'm working on in this chapter make me long for my Melville chapter.

Not sure at this moment how much of my chapter is going to discuss Blake. I've set up this chapter as exploring the problem of the literary representation of free and enslaved blacks, and Douglass, Delany, and Stowe have written three texts that attack this problem head-on, and have done it in a way that invokes the Middle Passage, the history of sugar production, British abolition, and the Haitian and American Revolutions. The difference between Douglass's and Delany's visions for blacks in a post-slavery world seems to turn on the lessons learned from this history. Delany seems to yearn for full autonomy for blacks away from the United States, and in setting his revolution in Cuba tries to recreate the Haitian experience, albeit with a "full-blooded" black elite. Yet this vision keeps failing. One of the frustrating things about reading this text is how much planning goes into these slave revolts and how little payoff there is.

Of course the reason for this "failure" of vision is in part that this novel was suppose to help raise funds for an African expedition. This raises the question of why abolitionist texts were written. Delany seems to have been taking advantage of Stowe's success in publishing anti-slavery novels. He even sets up the beginning as almost a mirror of the opening of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Is the novel's failure to capture a wide audience due to the timing of publication, or is there something lacking in terms of compelling and sympathetic characters?

By the time the "complete" Blake appeared in weekly installments in The Weekly Anglo-African, it was May of 1862. While the Civil War didn't absolutely put the question of Black emigration to rest--as Bob Levine writes, in 1862 "Lincoln was exploring the possibility of colonizing blacks to the tropics of Central and South America"-- it definitely changed the focus of abolitionists (Levine, Douglass and Delany, 217). Delany in fact turned his efforts to the war upon hearing news of the secession of South Carolina while in Great Britain (220). Identity politics become wrapped up joining forces with Douglass in making a case for the Civil War as a war of emancipation.

In terms of sympathetic characters, it would seem in trying to write something so completely counter to Stowe's work, he also failed to capture that element of sentiment that made her work so successful. This may be a reaction to Stowe's feminized male slaves Tom and Tiff, and preference for a more polemical revolutionary rhetoric.

Moving on to "The Heroic Slave" and possibly Life and Times.

Race and Representation

It occurred to me today as I was alternating between Blake and Levine's book on Delany and Douglass that it's high time for a Douglass biopic. Better yet, an HBO miniseries. Douglass has always seemed to be an impossible figure to cast but for a while now I've thought Jeffery Wright might make a good match. He's still young enough that he could transition from younger Douglass to elder Douglass rather believably. The two problems with him are the voice and the height. Wright may be a trifle too short, but it Joaquin Phoenix can get away with playing Johnny Cash...

Because I still have The Wire on the brain I thought Idris Elba might make a good Martin Delany.

Not bad, you think?

Re-reading Blake is painfully slow but there's too much stuff to ignore. It's fascinating the way in which Delany's back to Africa emigration rhetoric echoes both Clarkson and Equiano in both the potential for Africa to yield riches outside of slavery and in terms of emigrated blacks as "raw material" for new nation builders. What's really strange is how he remains so pro-Christian, even to the point of denigrating native Africans, despite his contempt for the role for prayer over action in some abolitionist circles. A fascinating man, Martin Delany.

Once again it's shaming to realize how much I've pushed aside in just this one decade (1850-1860). Both Levine and Sundquist write about the desire of many in both the North and South to annex Cuba for it's sugar supply. For the South, this is also part of what fuels their push to extend slavery into the Western Territories. Turn the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of miniature version of the Atlantic Triangle (Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature 1820-1865), even to the point of wanting to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. Delany's staging a rebellion there is both a reflection of abolitionist anxieties over what the annexation could mean for the extension of slavery in the States, and a strange sort of reenactment of the Haitian revolution.

Thinking about anxieties over Cuba really clarifies why Haiti might be on people's tongues for reasons other than insurrection. I'm thinking of taking a look at Life and Times next to get more of a sense of Douglass's own thoughts on both Haiti and Cuba next.

From Stowe to Delany

Short post today as I'm transitioning from Stowe, criticism, and other stuff into rereading Blake. It still has the original flags and underlining from when I read it four years ago but for the life of me I can't remember a thing about it.

Reading the introduction today, it occurred to me that I've been ignoring the discussions within abolitionist circles regarding Liberian colonization and black assimilation, the former being Stowe's original position, the later being Douglass'. Delany originally was with Douglass but broke with him later and attempted to raise funds for black emigration to Central America. It might be interesting to look at the way those debates, particularly the ones surrounding Liberian colonization, reflect a sort of belated Middle Passage anxiety. And even if they don't, they provide a different kind of transatlantic context for the literature.

Delany's an interesting character. I know I've said I'm thinking of making the chapter primarily about Dred, but Blake raises interesting questions about literary representation of slaves and free blacks. Because he frames it as a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, it might be interesting to look at the ways in which he plays with dialect, domesticity, and masculinity.

Lost, Dred, and the Enlightenment

I started watching Lost over the weekend to see what all the fuss is about (and to fill the gaping void left by The Wire). I can already tell that "pretty" factor is going to get to me (perfectly groomed brows and smooth armpits after being stranded for 6 days), but nitpicking aside, so far so good. I think if it was merely a survival show, I'd be bored to tears. I overdosed on books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain in my preteen years, not to mention Robinson Crusoe in grad school. Books like that tend to have a limited appeal for me, even when fascinating and well-written. Camping lost its appeal for me when I was about ten years old and really not okay with the lack of indoor plumbing. It was always difficult for me to get lost in the adventure aspect when I was vividly imagining the discomforts of roughing it. But Lost gets right into the supernatural even before we know the names of the survivors. Surviving in the wilderness is only the first step.

Both Lost and some of the reading I've been doing over the last few days have got me thinking of The Great Dismal Swamp as also Stowe's way of discussing Locke, Rousseau, and Paine in conjunction with abolition and insurrection. According Levine, one of Stowe's sources for was a book called The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) by William Cooper Nell.

In a chapter on 'The Virginia Maroons,' Nell writes, 'The Great Dismal Swamp, which likes near the Eastern shore or Virginia, and, commencing near Norfolk, stretches quite into North Carolina, contains a large colony of negroes, who originally obtained their freedom by the grace of God and their own determined energy, instead of the consent of their owners, or by the help of the Colonizatoin Society.' (Levine 161)

It's interesting to think of Stowe of setting up the Maroon community as an experiment in black self governance and revolution. The Virginia Maroon colony (we'll call it that for the time being) is a fairly old one. A 1939 article in The Journal of Negro History by Herbert Aptheker states that as early as 1672 there are reports of insurrectionist activity in the area surrounding The Great Dismal Swamp. This presents the possibility of looking at the history of the Great Dismal Swamp as presenting a mirror for the history of America's evolution from colony to republic. Granted Stowe presents Dred's colony as a brief and ultimately failed attempt at black revolution. Yet the history suggests otherwise. The community is a fairly durable one until approximately 1862.

Although Dred's little community seems to represent a temporary experiment of escaped slaves creating community even to the point of establishing trade with local sympathetic whites, it also represents maroon communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Moreover, these maroon communities enact an ethos of man in his natural state forming communities, and yet fail to achieve that crucial step of creating government. Why?

Part of the answer might be in that there is something unworkable about Enlightenment approaches to civil government for Stowe particularly Locke's ideas on rationality and property in the abolitionist context. Under the Lockian model the slaves escaping to the swamp returns them to a state of nature. The next step should be to come together in social contract to form a civil government. But that doesn't happen. In a way Dred is potentially the fanatical despot who lures slaves away only to sway them to his cause and revolt. If Stowe is doing what Levine suggests and tying Vesey, Turner, and the like to the American Revolution she's also presenting their failures, or rather the limits of that model in the context of American slavery.

There's room for a bit about Haiti in here, particularly in regards to the "perpetual state of revolt" bit but I'm not quite there yet.

This probably goes without saying but I'm setting aside the whole Lacanian approach to the Maritime Imaginary in favor of re-reading some key Enlightenment texts. I'll probably end up bringing some of it back in but for the moment I think this is more productive.

The More One Reads...

I've been reading Maurice S. Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860 in addition to my explorations into Lacan and Althusser. In the introduction he offers this assessment of the latest work in the American Renaissance:

Just as the American Renaissance proved amenable to political interpretation, more recently canonized traditions appear increasingly open to philosophical inquiry. Such inquiry need not entail deconstruction, neo-Marxism, or psycholinguistics, which have for decades been projected back on nineteenth-century texts. The more historically minded can turn to ideas available at the time to invoke, for instance, Hobbes before Foucault and Schelling instead of Lacan, and to view language not through Derrida but through someone like Thomas Reid. In this way, the literature of slavery can be read within the philosophical history not to attenuate theory or cultural studies but rather to advance them through an effort of synthesis that does not exclude philosophy from the domain of politics and culture. (Lee 9)

Oy. Just when I think I'm on the right track, I come across something like this and it sends me back to the drawing board. Lee's book is something I probably should have read before writing my dissertation proposal since he gets at a bunch of different things I'm interested in exploring, namely that literature of this period is invested in vexed philosophical questions regarding the position of slaves in the post-revolutionary moment. Lee does talk about some Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Kant but he's also looking the contemporary German philosophers like Schelling, people I don't even have a passing acquaintance with. I guess I'm not sure which is the most logical place from which to draw my definition of the Imaginary. Should it be from Lacan's concept of The Imaginary or should I drawing from contemporary concepts of the imaginary? Concentrate on Emerson, Kant, and the like? A little of both perhaps...use the Lacanian concept and look how the philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries enacts it? 

Reading Lee's book is both great and panic-inducing because he hits several of my pet points and does it really well. His chapter on Melville even as a section called "The Almost-Ship of State." "No political philosopher of the antebellum period was more provocative then Herman Melville" (134).  This is where I begin my thinking and where the dissertation ends. Of course to get there I have to get through Dred, so I better set Melville aside for now.

In his chapter on Stowe he discusses how Stowe's training in metaphysics manifests in her writing and how the violence of the abolition debates in the 1850s challenged her sentimental theory.  Dred, in depicting not just the plotting of a slave insurrection but partisan violence between whites, challenges her own theories on sentiment and enlightenment in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Violence is seen as inevitable given the limits of moral sympathy and also, in some ways, desirable. This is mostly in line with Levine's analysis but with more emphasis on the way in which Stowe and her contemporaries used literature to explore and critique Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). 

I haven't really thought of Dred as engaging with Enlightenment philosophy in the same way that Billy Budd does. My conception of this chapter has been primarily in terms of abolitionist debates of the 1850s and in the way that representations (or non-representations) of slave insurrections and their actors echo historical anxieties regarding insurrection. In terms of the limits of reason and sympathy I've mainly seen Stowe as in denial about it. But I think Lee's offering a way to engage Dred with something beyond the debates and the echoes of Haiti, etcetera. In terms of my own argument, or what I hope my argument is shaping up to be, the way that Dred both looks at the present and the future in terms of the debate, it also looks at the past, hence the coastal nature of the title character and his tendency to meditate in the hulks of ships. I think given both Stowe's trip to Europe and this concept of her own grappling with Smith I might have something else upon which to build on my concept of the Maritime Imaginary. 

Of course that means I'll have to re-read Adam Smith. Oy squared. 

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.

"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.

The White Insurrectionists

"I admit, Mr. Bradshaw, it's a very dangerous thing to get up steam, if you don't intend to let the boat go. But when the steam is high enough, let her go, say I."

"Yes, but, Miss Anne, other people don't want to say so. The fact is, we are not all of us ready to let the boat go. It's got all our property in it-- all we have to live on." (Stowe 316)

Yet another one of those great quotes that just begs to be made too much of. Dred is littered with maritime references. Slavery is akin to piracy, Clayton lacks ballast, etc. More on this stuff later.

Stowe seems to be exploring white complicity in abolition in a similar vein that she critiqued white complicity in slave-holding in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the same way that "good" slave-holding households were ultimately no different from the Simon Legree's of the South, those who bend or ignore the law in teaching slaves to read are ultimately participating in the same kind opposition to slavery as Vesey and Turner. In both texts the law is the problem . It's a tricky tactic and one that I don't think is completely successful, but in creating Clayton a lawyer is who is bound by law to practice against his conscience Stowe reveals the way white southern moderates are also bound and potentially subject to the same laws as slaves.

Thinking about the way this book both evokes violence and suppresses it makes me how much of John Brown's ghost is haunting the text balong side the black insurrectionists. This presents an interesting point of attack regarding black and white doppelgangers in the texts I'm looking at. I mentioned earlier that Dred was an easy stand-in for black insurrectionists but he can also be a handy decoy from John Brown who was very much at large at the time of Dred's publication. One might be able to argue that at the same time that Stowe invokes the possibility for white insurrection she still makes Dred the scapegoat for anti-slavery violence.

Edited to add: John Brown invoke on page 499 of the Levine edition:

How stinging is it at such a moment to view the whole respectability of civilized society upholding and glorifying the murderer; calling his sin by soft names, and using for his defence every artifice of legal injustice! Some in our own nation have had bitter occasion to know this, for we have begun to drink the cup of trembling which for so many ages has been drank alone by the slave. Let the associates of Brown ask themselves if they cannot understand the midnight anguish of Harry!

Dred cont'd

Eureka quote of the day: 

There is always something awful in the voice of the multitude. It would seem that if the breath that a crowd breathed out together, in moments of enthusiasm, carried with it a portion of the dread and mystery of their own immortal natures. The whole area before the pulpit, and in the distant aisles of the forest, became one vast surging sea of sound, as negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slave-hunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen, alike joined in the pulses of that mighty song. A flood of electrical excitement seemed to rise with it, as, with a voice of many waters the rude chant went on...(Stowe 322-323)

I really like this idea of the collective voice of the people transforming into a sea, the dark side of democracy being this enthusiasm potentially capsizing the ship of state a la Heimert. The potential of connections between these disparate groups is undermined by this enthusiasm. The shared experience eradicates differences but not in the way that would open them up veiwing commonalities. Instead all we have is this "rude chant," this blind surrender to their noise and no knowledge that their noise is just noise. 

This also highlights a problem I keep running into with this project in that sometimes the maritime imaginary is about sailor and slave narratives, sometimes it's about the space of the ship, and sometimes it's about the sea and I either need to deal with each part distinctly or push the others aside and concentrate on one. 

The more I read the more I'm thinking that this chapter should focus mainly on Dred and talk about "The Heroic Slave" and Blake less centrally which doesn't make total sense considering that Dred is the one work that doesn't deal directly with insurrection at sea. However it is a good way to test my theory that texts aren't about transatlantic slave trade nevertheless contain within them an awareness of the Middle Passage. I first thought about doing this with Uncle Tom's Cabin and talking about Tom's trip down the Mississippi as operating as an inland Middle Passage. And with Dred the constant movement of slaves, the awareness of always being in danger of sold away speak to the way in which that inter-state slave trade is forever connected to the Middle Passage. 

Of course this might all change when I'm gathering notes for Blake and "The Heroic Slave." Hopefully I'll settle on something soon. 

Is Dred the antebellum Boogey Man?

I'm rereading Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and thinking about the problem of the figure of the slave in abolitionist literature a post-revolutionary context. It's a problem I outlined in my first chapter and still haven't quite figured out how to flesh it out fully.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dred is the say that it displays Stowe's own evolving thought processes regarding both abolition. On the one hand she writes with an eye towards addressing critiques of the figure of Uncle Tom, allowing some space for black rage in an abolitionist text. On the other, she can't quite bring herself to imagine the revolt itself, let alone the possible success of such a revolt. I'm alternating my re-reading of Dred with Bob Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of Representative Identity. In chapter 4 he notes that Stowe in her appendix containing Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner she excises any mention of the fate of Turner's accomplices. In suggesting that the hammer has yet to definitively fall on the Turner Insurrection, Levine sees Stowe as "rhetorically participating in the political terror inspired by the heroic tradition of the black heroic deliverer as embodied both by [Nat] Turner and her fictional creation Dred" (Levine 174). I've never really thought of the text in this way, although if one is looking at the text as something of a corrective for Uncle Tom's Cabin it makes a certain amount of sense.

Yet I can't quite let go of this nagging feeling that there still something squeamish in Stowe's treatment of violence. Part of it is that Dred isn't just an combination of real-life conspirators Vesey and Turner, but an amalgamation of both literary and real-life figures of slave insurrection going all the way back to Behn's Oroonoko. Turner and Vesey themselves are already imbued with a certain kind of spectral dread (no pun intended) because of this longer history, both in terms of slavery, insurrection and the Haitian Revolution and the literature that accompanies them. This makes Dred almost a comfortably familiar figure upon which to foist white American anxieties regarding insurrection. Part of Melville's genius in Benito Cereno was taking this image of that tall Coramantee-like warrior and making him the decoy for the real leader, wee Babo.

Violence is probably not the thing that Stowe is squeamish about but rather the dislocation of it from familiar sites be they these maroon swamp communities or in threatening slave figures. What if Old Tiff suddenly snapped and massacred the Cripps?

These are mostly older thoughts but I'm revisiting them both as way of recapturing some of the questions that initially drew to this text. I think in the same way that Grainger struggled to reconcile the virtue of production with the evils of slavery, Stowe struggles to deal with the violence of insurrection in a way that both embraces the rights of black to rebel and yet keeps it at a distance.