The Middle Passage between History and Fiction Introductory Remarks

Abstract

Abstract In the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, one of the leading members of the Russian radical intelligentsia, Alexander Herzen, summed up the mood of disillusionment and distrust of the idea of progress among many of the Russian intelligentsia in a striking passage in his tract From the Other Shore: “If humanity went straight to some goal,” he wrote, “there would be no history, only logic.”1 However, in the modern era, which arguably began with the encounter between Europe, Africa, and the Americas-and thus also with the beginning of the slave trade in the sixteenth century-the main trajectory of Western European thought seemed to aim straight toward “some goal” of human cultural progress, undergirded by the “logic” of unbridled economic development. Defenses of the slave system were based on discursive polarities that soothed the collective consciousness of Europeans. Eurocentric and hierarchical concepts of culture and, based on this Eumcentrism, the civilizing mission of Western European culture, relegated Africa to the subordinate position of the Dark Continent, which represented the fallen image of Europe’s past, and the Americas to the Virgin Land, which contained the hope for Europe’s future.