The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization: The Project of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Narratives of Slavery

Abstract

The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization:The Project of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Narratives of Slavery Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (bio) In three important ways, Barbara Chase-Riboud stands out from the post-civil rights generation of writers who produced contemporary narratives of slavery. First, over the course of almost a quarter-century, from the publication of Sally Hemings in 1979 to Hottentot Venus in 2003, she has consistently focused each of her five novels on the subject of slavery; no other writer has so insistently made slavery the primary topic and setting of her entire narrative oeuvre. Second, Chase-Riboud has expanded the geographical scope of American writers taking up the subject of slavery. She has explored the dynamic of enslavement in the usual settings chosen by American writers—ships during the transatlantic voyage and American plantations in the South—as well as places not usually associated with narratives of slavery—New England and Philadelphia. Even more significantly, though, she has brought an unparalleled attention to the practice and effects of slavery in Africa and Europe and Asia. Again, no other novelist of her generation has attempted to understand the global scope of slavery with the kind of attention Chase-Riboud has devoted to the subject. Third, in the course of a quarter-century and five novels devoted to the subject of slavery, Chase-Riboud has produced the most extended, searching, and subtle meditations on the curious place of enslaved people in the dynamic of power. Indeed, her five novels can be said to be nothing less than lyrical and candid examinations of the profound dialectic Hegel described between "slave" and "master" in The Phenomenology of Mind. These three distinctive accomplishments—her career-long focus on slavery, her attention to global manifestations of enslavement, and her pointed Hegelian meditations on the master-slave dialectic—suggest to me that there is another way to read the total body of Chase-Riboud's prose fiction. Rather than seeing each novel as a discrete work concerned with particular characters and examining specific conditions (which of course each novel is), we can also see them all together as ongoing ruminations in the large-scale philosophical project on which Chase-Riboud is embarked, a project in which her primary subject is precisely the complex, fragile, and contradictory dynamic of the master-slave dialectic. I do not wish to suggest that we should ignore or downplay Chase-Riboud's works as distinct novels, with distinct subjects, but rather that we can deepen our understanding of the trajectory of her work by probing into the dynamic she makes central to each of her novels. Nor am I suggesting that Chase-Riboud is attempting to produce a universal or uniform formula explaining the master-slave dialectic whenever and wherever it is manifest. Rather, Chase-Riboud's scope (different cultures, different national and international settings, different systems of enslavement) is meant to demonstrate both the shared and unique imperatives that drive some to claim ownership over others. [End Page 758] In this paper, I will attempt to trace the major terms of her project—the way she teases out implications of the master-slave dialectic—by looking at her first, second, and fifth novels. In these three works—Sally Hemings, Valide (1986), and Hottentot Venus—Chase Riboud explores three different kinds of enslavement and asks three related but different questions about the meaning of slavery and its effects. In Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud examines the master-slave dialectic within a personal relationship; her primary question in that novel is how slavery distorts human and sexual intimacy. In Valide, she explores the ironies and contradictions in a society in which slavery is imbricated with power, not as the necessary precondition of power (mastery) but rather as an involved agency in the structure of power. In Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud exposes the deeper meanings resonating from the coincidental rise of scientific knowledge and slavery during the European Enlightenment. In these three novels, Chase-Riboud delineates the various and devious ways slavery is involved in personal relationships, cultural systems, and epistemic models. What makes this a "project," I propose, is Chase-Riboud's nearly-systematic exploration of how slavery as...