Transformations of Gender and Race in Maria Riddell’s Transatlantic Biopolitics

Abstract

Maria Riddell’s Voyages to the Madeira, and Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792), offers new understandings of the mutability and hybridity of race, gender, sex, and nation in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic colonies. By foregrounding Riddell’s engagements with natural history, this article places botanical and zoological classificatory systems in conversation with her depictions of how white women colonists and enslaved African labourers utilized the natural world. In addition to the ideas of contemporary naturalists, such as Linnaeus, Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and Smellie, Riddell’s work is also situated in relation to that of Erasmus Darwin, Edward Long, and Janet Schaw. At a time of significant political revolutions, Riddell’s travel narra tive affords insight into implications for the Caribbean colonies and their function as an environment of sociobiological transformation. While eighteenth-century writing often represented the West Indies as a site of biological and social degeneration, this essay shows that they were also depicted as a site of improvement and a sphere of knowledge-making that produced hybrid identities, knowledges, and cultures.