Defining Pastoral Racism in William Earle's Obi and George Keate's The Interesting History of Prince Lee Boo Kelly L. Bezio (bio) This essay examines two books that, on the surface, seem to offer quite different perspectives on what the intersection of racism and empire looked like at the end of the eighteenth century. One of these texts is the highly sympathetic account of Jamaican slave insurrection: Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) by William Earle, which has been lauded for its abolitionist sentiments.1 An epistolary novel that fictionalizes the life of enslaved revolutionary Jack Mansong, it imagines how he was raised to become an engine of vengeance by his mother, only to be killed by bounty hunters in 1781. This novel seemingly has little in common with The Interesting History of Prince Lee Boo, Brought to England, from the Pelew Islands (1800), which, in its depiction of Micronesian peoples as "noble savages," evinces all the self-aggrandizing paternalism that has been a hallmark of countless orientalist works.2 Focusing on the story of how Palau islander Prince Lebuu comes to England as a beloved guest, this text abridges a longer piece of nonfiction written by George Keate about the shipwreck near Palau of the Antelope, commanded by Captain Henry Wilson, in 1783.3 While the longer account captures the military alliance formed between the Europeans and a Palauan chief, the rebuilding of the British ship, and its return home with its foreign visitor, The Interesting History focuses on the death of Lebuu, who contracts smallpox because he wasn't inoculated upon arriving in London despite his hosts' knowledge of this lifesaving prophylactic measure. Although the former is openly critical of the Caribbean colonial situation whereas the latter is an unapologetic proponent of imperial intervention abroad, they have one very important commonality: they share a deep admiration for a person of color whose death, in the context of contact with the British Empire, they interpret as undesirable. We know very well that empire relied on sympathy, intimacy, kindness, and pleasure to extend its domination in colonized spaces.4 The case of Obi and [End Page 453] The Interesting History is intriguing precisely because their particular affective entanglements with Jack Mansong and Lebuu are not about managing or exploiting the subaltern to legitimate colonial hierarchies. Instead, these particular objects of admiration invited introspection regarding the political subject formation of the colonizer. Specifically, certain inadequacies regarding the ability to provide care came to light as a result of admiration for these figures, which became in turn the impetus for storytelling that imagined the colonizer subjectivity differently, that is, in terms of its failures. What truly unites these two texts—and what makes them a valuable case study—is the way in which they evince narrative structures for transforming certain failures of caregiving or therapeutic intervention into an exonerating discourse that further strengthens empire in the context of what it concedes is obvious wrongdoing. Oddly enough, these texts accomplish these ends by evincing a kind of self-directed racism that, I argue, indulges in a fantasy that the British are a victimized "counterrace" precisely because they imagined that they as a people lacked the capacity to make bodies better.5 I call this delusion "pastoral racism." I draw this term from Michel Foucault's articulation of "pastoral power" (and not from pastoral literary traditions, although they share similar roots).6 Two aspects of his definition are germane to my efforts to delineate the specificities of the racism found in Obi and The Interesting History: the focus on the individual and the aim to enhance biological life in service of the state. Delivering the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University in 1979, Foucault's interest lay in defining yet another power technique beyond those associated with sovereignty, discipline, and biopower, concepts which he had been working on previously. He referred to this technique as addressing "the problem of 'individualising power,' " and, over the course of the two lectures, he dubbed it "pastoral power" to draw attention to its genealogical connection to the shepherd's task of attending daily to the personal needs of the flock.7 According...