A Psychoanalytic Approach to the History of Racial Capitalism

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

PAUL YOUNGQUIST Black Romanticism: A Manifesto When we reflect on the nature of these men, and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude, that they are a different species of the same genus? —Edward Long, History ofJamaica, 2:356 P AUL O’NEAL, KORRYN GAINES, PHILANDO CASTILE, ALTON STERLING, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Gamer, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amodou Diallo. You know what I’m talking about. All these black people, men mostly, killed at the hands of law enforcement in the US. “The Counted,” a webpage the UK news source The Guard­ ian opened to track these killings, notes that, for 2015, “the rate of death for young black men was five times higher than white men of the same age.”1 How do we as contemporary Americans account for this pattern of institutionalized violence against blacks? How might Romanticists respond, from our positions of relative security and prestige in the academy, to the thread of state sponsored killing that runs through the fabric of our public lives? It isn’t enough to chant, in chorus with the community directly af­ fected, that “black lives matter.” Those who believe otherwise, please raise your hands. And the killing continues. What are we going to do? What can we do? In From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for more than sympathy or even solidarity with activism that aims to restore or maybe just attribute social value to black lives: “The struggle for Black liberation requires going beyond the standard narrative that Black people have come a long way but have a long way to go—which, of course, says nothing about where it is that we are actually trying to get to. It requires understanding the origins and nature of Black oppression and racism more generally.”2 While I’m aware that I’m not part of the “we” she invokes, Taylor opens a door for people belonging to another I. “The Counted,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-uspolice -killings, accessed 26 November 2016. 2. Taylor, From ttblacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2016), 194. SiR, 56 (Spring 2017) 3 4 PAUL YOUNGQUIST “we,” say “we” mostly white middle-class Romanticists, through which to enter into her project ofBlack liberation. Perhaps we can speak to “the ori­ gins and nature of Black oppression and racism.” Perhaps our dislocation from the direct effects of their deadly force offers an opportunity to exam­ ine their motivations in longstanding histories ofsubjection or transnational structures of thought, feeling, and desire. Perhaps as cultural and literary critics we can examine how black lives have—or haven’t—mattered, or for whom, toward the end of advancing the struggle Taylor exhorts for Black liberation. The stakes are nothing less than the world to come. Black liberation, Taylor writes, needs a “strategy, some sense of how we get from the cur­ rent situation into the future.”3 Here too we Romanticists might have something to offer. Hear, for instance, what’s familiar in Taylor’s summa­ tion of the goal of struggle: “While it is true that when Black people get free, everyone gets free, Black people in America cannot ‘get free’ alone. In that sense, Black liberation is bound up with the project of human liber­ ation and social transformation.”4 5 For Romanticists of a certain vintage, Taylor’s language here sounds, well, romantic. It seems to chime with the revolutionary language of Blake, the early Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and maybe Keats too, not to mention that of the French Republi­ cans. The two centuries that separate Taylor from these social reformers, suggests that, however revolutionary their hopes, the project of human lib­ eration failed to materialize in any future that includes our present. For Taylor the measure of that failure is the little word “black.” Human lib­ eration cannot occur without full black participation. So what about Romanticism remains uncongenial to black freedom? Another way to raise that question would be to ask, with Sylvia Wynter, what sort of “man” inhabits Romanticism? Wynter consistently indicts European modernity and its now global avatar with instituting a descriptive statement of the...

ABSTRACTSince the 1960s, historians of the early-modern era have been working with colonial sources to uncover the ways that Africans with connections to the Gold Coast – often known as ‘Coromantees’ in the Anglo-American colonies – shaped the history of the Atlantic World. One of the most influential primary sources used in this literature is a 32-page section of the second volume of The History of Jamaica, written by the planter-historian Edward Long in 1774. ‘The origins of a source’ uses Long’s life and works, both published and unpublished, to tell the story of this source’s creation. In doing so, it provides a detailed case study for how a prominent and controversial intellectual acquired knowledge of African culture, and then repurposed and deployed that knowledge as a tool in the abolitionist debates. It argues that the political context of abolition is essential to understanding Long’s writings on the Coromantee.

For over two centuries after its publication, the colonial administrator and historian Edward Long’s (1734–1813) transparently biased account of the life of the eighteenth century black Jamaican po...

This essay argues that Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) offers a new model for the study of racial capitalism by examining Atlantic slavery’s core antagonisms. By thoroughly interrogating the often hidden ideological and material basis of Jamaica’s plantation economy through its most famous slaveholder and proponent, Hall has written a new history of Jamaica, the Atlantic world, and the development of modern racism.

Edward Long, from The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island (1774)

Edward Long's three-volume work marks a major turning point in the historiography of Jamaica, as the first attempt at a comprehensive description of the colony, its history, government, people, economy and geography. The son of a prominent Jamaican plantation owner, Long (1734–1813) spent twelve years running his father's property, an experience which permeates his vision of the island's past, present and future. Throughout his book, Long defends slavery as 'inevitably necessary' in Jamaica, suggesting the institution to be implicit in the 'possession of British freedom'. Volume 1 gives an overview of British colonial government in Jamaica, a history of the island's initial colonisation by Spain, and an account of the economy, including population and export figures and details of prices paid for slaves during the eighteenth century. This important 1774 book provides fascinating insights into eighteenth-century colonial Jamaica and the ideology of its commercial and administrative elite.

100 Ahmed and ends without Robert Young; she in fact refers her reader very usefully to the work of both scholars, and to much other work besides. A signal strength in this book, therefore, is its constant commitment to a principled inclusiveness which mirrors intellectually the philanthropic projects of the period (‘‘Am I not a man and a brother?’’). There is a genuine interdisciplinary focus, with climate theory here and Linnaeantaxonomythere deftly joined to the analysis of narrative. The range of texts extendsfromRobinson Crusoe (1719) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), with space in between for such provocative pairings of contemporaneous works as that of Johnson ’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774). Ms. Wheeler’s term ‘‘amalgamation,’’ for the subject of her central chapter, defines the spirit of her study generally. What it yields is very fine and consistently compelling. Peter Merchant Canterbury Christ Church University College, U.K. JOHN L. MAHONEY. The Enlightenment and English Literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1999. Pp. xiv ⫹ 625. $43.95 It takes some investigative work to discover this anthology’s history. Although it is not billed as a second edition, small print on the copyright page reveals that it appeared in 1980, when it was called The Enlightenment and English Literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century , with Selected Modern Critical Essays . But it seems to have been conceived even before that: of the dozens of titles cited in the ‘‘Suggestions for Further Reading,’’ only two were published after 1971. In fact, to judge by the selection of texts and the tenor of the commentary,the anthology would have been considered old-fashioned even in the early seventies. It is closest in character not to Tillotson, Fussell, and Waingrow’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969), but to such volumes from the previous generation as R. S. Crane’s Collection of English Poems and Bredvold, Root, and Sherburn’s Eighteenth-Century Prose (both 1932). Such a blast from the past may not be unwelcome, but it seemsmore a curiosity than a serious anthology for a classroom. Most surprising is the narrowness of the canon. This volume is billed as a ‘‘companion volume’’ to Mr. Mahoney’s earlier anthology, The English Romantics : Major Poetry and Critical Theory, with Selected Modern Critical Essays (Lexington, MA, 1978), which contains only the big six Romantic poets and Hazlitt . The selection here is a little broader, but more than 70% of the volume’s pages are given to just five authors: Pope, Swift, Johnson, Boswell, and Burke. They are followed by ‘‘A Selection of Key Eighteenth -Century MinorPoetry’’(oneortwo poems each by Dyer, Thomson, Watts, Young, Blair, Akenside, Joseph Warton, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Chatterton, Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe), and ‘‘A Selection of Critical and Philosophical Prose’’ (extracts from Locke, Addison, Rymer, Shaftesbury, the Wartons, Young, Hume, Hurd, Duff, and Reynolds). Mr. Mahoney excludes drama and most fiction , although selections from A Tale of a Tub and Rasselas make it in. The Restoration is also excluded (except for brief extractsfromLocke’sEssay),asaremany late-century authors. The result is only twenty-eight authors, all male, all firmly canonical. Devoting nearly 450 pages to just five 101 authors has advantages. Selections are uncommonly generous: Rasselas is included complete; Reflections on the Revolution in France is represented by nearly 20,000 words, and Tale of a Tub by nearly 25,000. It does, however, run contrary to most pedagogy in the last 20 years, when the canon has expanded to include not only works by women and minorities,but also less obviously ‘‘literary’’genres.The commentary reflects this attention to masterpieces, piously celebrating great men and great works: Pope is ‘‘the eighteenth -century English man-of-letters par excellence,’’ ‘‘Swift is the master satirist not simply of English but of world literature ,’’ Johnson was ‘‘perhaps a representative of the whole range of human possibility,’’ ‘‘Boswell’s biography . . . stands as a masterpiece of its kind,’’ Burke is ‘‘the statesman/man-of-letters par excellence.’’ The lengthy headnotes are useful, and the texts themselves are fairly reliable, though the sources are not identified. Although Mr...

99 estants that they were now, if not Irish, no longer English.’’ Further chapters discuss mid- and late eighteenth-century playwrights, Charles Macklin, Francis Dobbs, and Gorges Edmond Howard. In this deft analysis of seven Protestant playwrights, Mr.Wheatley delivers on his promise ‘‘to explain how some of the Protestants may have thought about the world to write the plays that they did.’’ John C. Greene University of Louisiana, Lafayette ROXANN WHEELER. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth -Century British Culture. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania, 2000. Pp. ix ⫹ 371. $65; $26.50 (paper). With a detailed and definitive account of Enlightenment racial ideology and imperial discourse framing its central chapter on midcentury intermarriage novels, The Complexion of Race charts an assured chronological course through a parade of the period’s significant Others. Ms. Wheeler makes her reader’s encounter with a succession of relevant writings as arresting and absorbing as any of the encounters those writings themselves contain. Sensitively reconstructing eighteenth -century lines of thought—even reviving certain eighteenth-century usages (with ‘‘contemptuous,’’ for instance, allowed to embrace and erase common or garden ‘‘contemptible’’)—she catches the period’s perceptions of human variety ‘‘in transition from an older conception of difference based on religion to a newer one based on complexion.’’Theblackand white clouds from which Blake’s little black boy so affectingly aspires to be freed gradually gather and build. The book is precise and painstaking in plotting the stages of this progressive ‘‘transference from a cultural emphasisto a bodily emphasis.’’ Telling evidence comes from the illustrated afterlife of Robinson Crusoe: ‘‘a persistent Negroization of Xury’’ and, correspondingly, ‘‘the periodic Negroization of Friday.’’ Skin color is increasingly importantinorganizing human variety; and physical attributes , fixed and visible where cultural criteria were bound to be subtle and shifting , become more and more decisive as signifiers of difference. The result, by the final quarter of the eighteenth century, is ‘‘a deeper and less changeable notion of national and racial differences than was previously fashionable.’’ In this way Ms. Wheeler demonstrates that dark skin color was not always the ‘‘diabolic dye’’of which PhillisWheatley came to write, and warns us against the historical distortion of projecting a relatively recentcolorconsciousnessuponthe early eighteenth century. ‘‘Complexion’’ in eighteenth-century British culture (rather like ‘‘class’’ in the social life of the Victorians) seems a complexandvariable concept now, no longer casually to be considered the chief component in human difference throughout thisperiod.Of course, for reasons which Ms. Wheeler’s conclusion acknowledges, the appeal of that view remains considerable. But so is our indebtedness, now, to a work able to dismantle such inappropriate frames of reference and specify the true terms of the unexpectedly ‘‘fluid’’ eighteenthcentury understanding of human variety. Ms. Wheeler has therefore written a book that is its own resounding justification on a topic that is in some ways its own negation. For eighteenth-century racial theory emerges from these pages as the leopard that does change its spots. Ms. Wheeler is done a slight disservice by an Index which starts without Aijaz 100 Ahmed and ends without Robert Young; she in fact refers her reader very usefully to the work of both scholars, and to much other work besides. A signal strength in this book, therefore, is its constant commitment to a principled inclusiveness which mirrors intellectually the philanthropic projects of the period (‘‘Am I not a man and a brother?’’). There is a genuine interdisciplinary focus, with climate theory here and Linnaeantaxonomythere deftly joined to the analysis of narrative. The range of texts extendsfromRobinson Crusoe (1719) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), with space in between for such provocative pairings of contemporaneous works as that of Johnson ’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774). Ms. Wheeler’s term ‘‘amalgamation,’’ for the subject of her central chapter, defines the spirit of her study generally. What it yields is very fine and consistently compelling. Peter Merchant Canterbury Christ Church University College, U.K. JOHN L. MAHONEY. The Enlightenment and English Literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1999. Pp. xiv ⫹ 625. $43.95 It takes some investigative work to...

This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.

In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person’s identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808).

Race, Slavery, and Polygenism: Edward Long and <i>The History of Jamaica</i>

Edward Long's three-volume work marks a major turning point in the historiography of Jamaica, as the first attempt at a comprehensive description of the colony, its history, government, people, economy and geography. The son of a prominent Jamaican plantation owner, Long (1734–1813) spent twelve years running his father's property, an experience which permeates his vision of the island's past, present and future. Throughout his book, Long defends slavery as 'inevitably necessary' in Jamaica, suggesting the institution to be implicit in the 'possession of British freedom'. Volume 2 presents a survey of the counties of Jamaica, information on religion, education and health, descriptions and racial classifications of the population, a history of the slave rebellions and details of the legal code governing slavery. This important 1774 book provides fascinating insights into eighteenth-century colonial Jamaica and the ideology of its commercial and administrative elite.

Kenneth Morgan's history of Jamaica is a social, economic, political, and cultural assessment of the island's most important periods and themes over the past millennium. This includes the island's development before 1500, with detailed material on the Taino society; the two centuries of slavery and its aftermath between 1660 and 1860; the continuance of colonialism between 1860 and 1945; the background to Jamaican independence between 1945 and 1960; and the evolution of Jamaica as an independent nation since the early 1960s. Throughout, Morgan discusses important themes such as race, slavery, empire, poverty, and colonialism, and the unbalanced social structure that existed for much of Jamaica's history – the small, overwhelmingly white elite overseeing and controlling the lives of black and brown people beneath them on the social scale. Ending with an assessment of the contemporary period, this work offers an authoritative, up-to-date history of Jamaica.

Editor's Note Joshua Piker The Forum that follows centers on Simon P. Newman's article "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," which was published by the William and Mary Quarterly on the OI Reader app in June 2018. This essay represents the first born-digital article published on the OI Reader, and as such it is a significant milestone for the Quarterly. Newman's article will not appear in a print edition of the journal. Instead, it is freely available via the OI Reader. Anyone with an Apple or Android tablet or smartphone can go to the App Store or Google Play, download the OI Reader for free, and use the app to download the article. The OI Reader is an extraordinary resource for early American historians. It allows scholars working with maps, images, sound, computational data, and video to write articles in which source material of this sort can live within their articles—not shunted to a supplemental website, not buried in an appendix, not relegated to the endnotes. That ability expands the range of evidence scholars can present, which likewise expands the sorts of topics they can tackle and the types of arguments they can make in a persuasive and compelling fashion. And all of this occurs within a context in which authors know that their work will benefit from the journal's rigorous editorial process; readers know the articles published on the OI Reader have been both fully peer reviewed and professionally edited; and the publisher of the journal knows that the articles are presented in a form that conforms to the discipline's best practices in regard to stability, durability, citability, and discoverability. This Forum is intended to provide a venue for scholars with expertise in the history of slavery, the history of Jamaica, and digital history to discuss and evaluate both Newman's argument and the digital methods that he deploys. My hope is that the Forum will encourage conversation about digital approaches to our shared field of inquiry and our mutual project of expanding the quality, reach, and impact of our scholarship. The Forum will be published in all versions of the William and Mary Quarterly: print, Project Muse, JSTOR, and the OI Reader. [End Page 3] Copyright © 2019 Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture