“STAINED WITH SPOTS OF HUMAN BLOOD”

Abstract

This article explores representations of sugar in abolitionist discourses of the 1780s and 1790s, taking Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) as its starting-point and frame of reference. As several critics have noted, one important feature of this text is its appropriation and reversal of the image of the racial other as cannibal. Such an image is a commonplace of colonial discourse from Columbus onwards, occurring, for example, on either side of Equiano's work, in the Caribbean historiography of Edward Long and Bryan Edwards. In The Interesting Narrative, however, the image is overturned, as it is the white subject who emerges as potential flesh-eater, threatening to consume both Equiano himself and his fellow slaves. At the same time, the strategies of appropriation and reversal Equiano uses are themselves taken up and reworked in the white abolitionist writings contemporary with his book's publication. While many instances of this can be found in the work of Mary Birkett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and others, this chapter focuses on just two texts, William Fox's well known “An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum” (1791) and Andrew Burn's similarly titled but far less familiar sequel to Fox in “A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar” (1792). In both of these texts, the consumption of sugar is represented as a form of anthropophagy, although in Fox's case the cannibalism involved is figurative, while in Burn's it becomes grotesquely literalized.