Feeling Oceanic: Racial Identity and Postbellum Drift

Abstract

In this essay we draw a historiographical line from J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840)—a representation of the Zong massacre—to Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Turner’s optical opacities render black bodies faceless and fragmentary while also pulling the ground out from under the nominal spectator, an effect that joins typical period representations of black slaves and sailors with a self-reflexive counterpressure that implicates viewers (and readers) in sense-making operations that dissolve as much as they congeal. We offer a transatlantic reading of the painting that foreshadows postbellum concerns about the raced subject as it contends with identitarian drift. In Chesnutt’s narrative we find an unexpected intrusion of the oceanic (through a shipwreck nightmare) into the life of a Reconstruction-era woman who must come to grips with the specter of the sea’s between-space as the fluctuating nonsite where racial identity and ideology is formed and potentially re-formed. Olivia Carteret’s dreamscape coincides at the novel’s climax with the 1898 Wilmington riot, a white supremacist takeover of the local government. Shipwrecked and floating on the open water with her son, she encounters her mixed-race half sister Janet on an approaching boat. As a major conceit of the dream’s narrative, Olivia’s understanding of the legal and social stability of her son’s whiteness and the legitimacy of his inheritance is thrown into crisis as she is forced to recognize Janet as kin. We examine this scene in more detail to show how postbellum writers and artists appealed to the oceanic as an affective medium or canvas upon which negotiations of raced and gendered identities play out, especially those of subjects explicitly caught between national and ethnic imaginaries.