Abstract
Chris Castiglia has recently described how conflicts in nineteenthcentury America were resolved by transposing external social problems into dilemmas of interiority. Thus, the great social reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s (abolition, temperance, sexuality) levied the primary responsibility for both the maintenance and transformation of civic ideals on individual self-governance. Such auto-orthopedics was often accompanied by mobility (slaves from south to north, drunkards from the bar to the home, onanists from privacy to the light of public scrutiny). The reforming subject was dually unsettled: neurotically hypervigilant as well as out of place. A Foucaultian reading would see such interiority as containing, as productive of manageable subjects and tamed identities. 2 I want to suggest that in the particular regional configuration of the Caribbean Sea and its chronically unstable colonial centers, this self-witnessing out-of-placeness was not so ideologically closed.
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