Race and the Puritan Body Politic

Abstract

On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an an a that spattered my whole body with blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. I wanted was to be a man among other --Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White I heard that my heart must break and melt for sin, and beleeve in Christ, and that we should try our hearts if it be so.... I thought I wil give my self to God, and to Christ, and do what he will for ever; and because of this promise of pardon to al that repent and beleeve, my heart desireth to pray to God as long as I live. --Ponampam (Eliot and Mayhew Tears of Repentance) In his analysis of French colonization in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon relates an experience of a man's reduction to his body, specifically to the skin, when viewed by white racists. On the day Fanon describes above he was assaulted by such declarations as: Dirty nigger!.... Look, a (109) and Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened! (112). In the wake of these statements, [He] had to meet the white man's eyes: An burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity.... My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. (112-13) The statements do not merely call attention to the man's race, but they also compel him to remember his place, thereby encumbering him with an unfamiliar weight of his now distorted body. Despite the successes he might have had in other arenas, as in his profession, these moments freshly stain his exterior with the black from within. The amputation, excision, or hemorrhage that spattered [his] whole body with blood challenges his sense of his own humanity. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. In Black Skins, White Masks the body figuratively explodes because it cannot represent both colonial and identities. Furthermore, the body remains as the marker of difference that de-natures the adopted subjectivity. This inability to naturalize colonial identities as explicated by postcolonial theorists applies to one of the central contradictions in the Puritan missions to Christianize the Indians in New England. These missions tested Puritans' claims of their role in the new world and revealed the degree to which race limited religious inclusion. The degree to which Anglo-Puritans suspected the Indians' conversion, however, circumscribed their own neighborliness as well as the Christianity and humanity of the new converts. Within Puritanism in Massachusetts Bay, the tensions between corporeal models of community--those which emphasized hierarchical relationships and figuratively united members as a body-and more egalitarian contractual models, such as those based on mutually agreed upon terms, might explain the simultaneous embracing and rejection of these newly acquired lambs. While the original covenant was a holy agreement between God and his people, Puritans used the covenantal form to understand their legal and spiritual relationships to each other as well. As a third term, the covenant engages aspects of the body politic as well as the modern contract. While Fanon's experiences on the street qualified the mother country's promises of inclusion, the Puritan distrust of their Native American brethren corresponded with corporeal models of spiritual and social communities but contradicted at points the inherent promises of divine covenants as well as earthly contracts. …