Positioning Self and Other: Cultural Interaction in Slave Societies

Abstract

The slaves who survived transatlantic crossing had already undergone a forced rite of passage, and were now fully aware of their status as slaves. On Caribbean plantations, a set of highly complex cultural interrelations now emerged, in which racial ideology of colonial mother countries was challenged by new intimacies of everyday reality. The historical setting of this paradoxical situation needs to be examined in order to understand texture of plantation society represented in fiction analysed in this chapter.Colonial ModernityIn modern history following Age of Discovery, transitions occurred which in sum involved a quantum leap in information, with revolutionary epistemological consequences. The formerly unquestioned nexus between culture and territory lost its naturalized inevitability. Mobility of passengers and goods reached unprecedented levels. In field of communications increase in speed was even more drastic. Both developments were necessary preconditions for emergence of colonialism in its modern guise. The dramatic increase in mobility that accompanied technological innovations caused a fundamental change in way space was perceived.In his interpretation of interrelations between mobility and spatiality, Arjun Appadurai builds on Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined community. He interprets imagination as central category of cultural identification. Particularly in case of communities - in his interpretation of modern societies, these are quintessentially - rise of massdistributed media and mass migration led to a paradigmatic change in way cultural identities were constituted. What he describes as glacial force of habitus in his model gives way to quickened beat of improvisation.2 The dramatic increase in identificatory potential put an end to earlier assumptions about immutable cultural loyalty. The most obvious indicator of changing perception of space in early modern times can be found in increasing sophistication of cartography, which Peter Hulme interprets as a significant symptom of modernity and colonialism:Of new European sciences developed in early modern period, cartography probably has most direct and unmediated relationship to colonial practice. Cartography helped European ships sail ocean to their colonial destinations. The territory to be possessed or disciplined or taxed became subject to a regime of surveying and mapping. Cartography seems to be where Western rationality in one of its purest forms - geometry - serves an imperial practice, as what Arjun Appadurai calls the prose of cadastral politics. All of this seems to run counter to grain of postcolonial thinking. After all, view irom above is usually associated either with domination of a literal kind, as with trope of imperial eye, or with claim to scientific neutrality that merely constitutes universalization of technological power, as exemplified, say, in spy satellites.3Settler colonies depended on informational input from mother countries which would not have been possible pror to revolutionary changes in mobility. The technological innovations of time were a necessary precondition for emergence of diasporic public spheres.4 Once this threshold had been crossed and cultural communities were increasingly felt to be communities that could transcend borders in traditional sense of a direct connection through spatial proximity,5 a new level of expansionism was reached.The appropriation of remote regions of earth was grounded in ideology of 'empty space' - potential colonies in European imagination. One of main motivations for this unprecedented scramble for dominance and acquisition of remote spaces was sense of superiority that colonial domination lent mother countries. Needless to say, Europeans primarily emigrated in hope of achieving economic success in New World settlements. …