Constructing the Subaltern: White Creole Culture and Raced Captivity in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Suriname LAURA LAFFRADO Recent expansion and revision of studies of colonial discursive production have significantly extended the generic boundaries of the early American captivity narrative beyond the seventeenth-century Puritan New England prototype established with Mary Rowlandson's narrative, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682).' Consideration of previously understudied texts, some written in languages other than English, that represent diverse geographical American locations reshapes our views of captivity and suggests the complicated context of captivity in the Americas. In the process, those constructed as captors have been refigured to include men of European descent as well as Native Americans, while representations of captives now include men, African-Americans, Mexicans, and others ,2 in addition to the white New England female, whose "passive innocence reinforce[d] white values" and "decoy[ed] attention away from the militaristic thrust of European culture into Native America."3 Among those whose accounts of captivity have recently emerged from the broad New World contact zone, are captives whose voices are muted or silenced. As Walter Mignolo writes, "If scholarship cannot represent the colonized faithfully or allow the subaltern to speak, it can at least break up a monolithic notion of the subaltern and maintain an alternative discursive practice."4It is within this current dialogue concerning captivity in the early 31 32 / LAFFRADO Americas that I position my discussion of Pieter Van Dyk's The Life and Business of a Suriname Plantation Manager, With the Slaves, on a Coffee Plantation (c. 1765), a 66-page play written and set in eighteenth-century Suriname, a flourishing early American Dutch plantation colony on the northern coast of South America. Collaboration by linguists in Surinamese Creole studies has resulted in the recovery from Dutch archives and 1995 publication of several texts from eighteenth-century Dutch Suriname, among them Van Dyk's play.5 Originally published in Amsterdam in both Dutch and Sranan (the Englishbased creóle language of slaves and many whites in eighteenth-century Suriname), Life and Business was "readily available in Suriname in the 1770s."6 The editors, Jacques Arends and Matthias Perl, frame Van Dyk's play in a linguistics context to further "the reconstruction of creolization processes, thus contributing to better insights into problems of language genesis and language change."7 While Van Dyk's text is indeed valuable for linguistic study, it also has much to offer eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies. The supporting roles of five black female plantation slaves mark an intersection of captivity, gender, and race which serves as the site of the play's investigation of unprofitable slave treatment on Suriname plantations. I suggest Van Dyk's Life and Business as a textual location for examination of intercultural and interracial issues of captivity in imperial realms, black female scripts, and continuing expansion and revision of our notions of captivity in the Americas. Life and Business charts tensions on an eighteenth-century Suriname coffee plantation among an abusive white manager; Hendrik, a practical white overseer; and the African slaves who work the plantation. Thirtytwo characters have speaking roles in the play: eight white Dutch creóles and twenty-four slaves. Among these thirty-two characters, there are nine African women and one Dutch creóle woman, fifteen African men and seven white Dutch creóle men. The majority of the characters have minor roles, some with as few as three or four lines of dialogue. The central characters are the white plantation manager, whose name we are never told; Hendrik, the sympathetic white overseer; Filida, a female slave who works in the coffee fields; and Lukresia, a female slave who works in the kitchen. Additionally, in the second half of the play, the plantation's white Dutch creóle absentee owner has a significant supporting role. The development and tension of the play, which takes place over the course of several days, is located in the white manager's transgressive actions . The play begins with his asking "'Why don't those black devils bring my coffee?,'" which leads to his ordering whippings of over one hundred lashes each for Lukresia and Aurora, two female kitchen slaves who...
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