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.