Narratives of Amelioration: Mental Slavery and the New World Slave Society in the Eighteenth-Century Didactic Imagination
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Narratives of Amelioration: Mental Slavery and the New World Slave Society in the Eighteenth-Century Didactic Imagination by Alpen Razi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Department of English, University of Toronto © Copyright by Alpen Razi 2016 Narratives of Amelioration: Mental Slavery and the New World Slave Society in the Eighteenth-Century Didactic Imagination Alpen Razi Doctorate of Philosophy Department of English, University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation examines the remarkable preoccupation with enslavement in the British didactic imagination throughout the long eighteenth century. Drawing on a range of reformist narratives and writings, I suggest that the representational tendencies surrounding slavery and education in eighteenth-century reform literature can best be understood through what I call the “Protestant utopianism” that informs the didactic imagination of the Georgian era. This study thus examines a specific current of intellectual thought animating representations of colonial slavery—a tradition that was both independent of (and often in tension with) colonialist attempts to naturalize and legitimate the racial ideologies upon which the system of Atlantic chattel slavery depended. In contrast to current critical approaches, which continue to rely heavily upon the lens of imperial race ideology or “colonial discourse” to read slavery in Georgian literature, I examine the ways in which slave societies were engaged as universal landscapes—allegorical and emblematic spaces in which a variety of social process relating to the reform of civil society were enacted. These narratives of amelioration, I argue, continually depict the reform of slave societies not to establish a clear self-other ii dialectic based on discrete racial or geographical differences, but rather to identify Britain’s own unfinished reformation—the everyday forms of mental slavery and social violence which proliferated at home no less than in the far-flung world of the colonies. The reformed slave society emerges in these works not as the enslaved “other” to a triumphalist fantasy of a free and sovereign Britain, but as the model by which an unregenerate England can one day realize its national destiny of becoming a spiritual and worldly Zion—a vision of a regenerate Protestant future purged of mental slavery. Paradoxically, these works present the reformed slave society as a universal ideal and utopian pattern for social and cultural reform at home. In the first chapter, I focus on representations of colonial slavery in Daniel Defoe’s The Family Instructor. Chapters two and three continue this examination in the work of Edward Kimber and Maria Edgeworth, respectively. I conclude by investigating amelioration-era black writing in the U.S. and Caribbean. iii Acknowledgments My gratitude to the Centre for the Study of the United States (University of Toronto), American Antiquarian Society, Chawton House Library, John Carter Brown Library, Huntington Library, and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library for generously funding portions of this dissertation research. I would also like to thank the graduate students and faculty in the Department of English and throughout the University of Toronto. My special thanks to Elspeth Brown, Michael Cobb, Jeannine DeLombard, Lauren Dimonte, Paul Downes, Alexander Eastwood, Melanie Newton, Anthony Oliveira, Tanuja Persaud, Jason Peters, Simon Reader, Matt Risling, Shivrang Setlur, and Sean Starke. Thanks also to the Ethnic Studies Department at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where I found a home for the last year of this project. This dissertation was primarily conducted under the supervision of Sara Salih, who has been an incredibly supportive—and patient—mentor and friend for over a decade. My deepest gratitude also to my supervisory committee, Alan Bewell, Thomas Keymer, and Deidre Shauna Lynch, for the phenomenal support and intellectual generosity they provided along the way. Thanks also to Alison Conway and Carol Percy for their feedback as external examiners. I could not have asked for a better committee, and I only wish I had time to more fully incorporate their suggestions, critiques and insights—I have no doubt the project will be exponentially better when I do. Finally, a very special thank you to Brian Beaton for his intellectual, professional, and personal support throughout this entire process. iv Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Unfinished Reformations: Slave Society, Servitude, and the Problem of Social Death in Defoe’s Didactic Fiction 17 2.1 Introduction 17 2.2. Protestant pedagogy and the problem of social death 24 2.2.1. The Protestant paideia 26 2.2.2. The Schism Act as social death 33 2.3. The Family Instructor: foreign friends and domestic strangers 39 2.4 Amelioration and the obedience of slaves 3. The Protestant Uchronia: Unworlding the New World in Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson 68 3.1. Introduction: the “other” world 68 3.1.1. Unworlding the New World 73 3.1.2. Lockean didacticism 83 3.2. Beyond “there-and-back” 87 3.2.1. The British here: unworlding Britain 87 3.2.2. The American there: an “unworld” of mental slavery 94 3.2.3. Coming back home 108 3.3. Conclusion 121 4. The “Malignant Demon” of Mental Slavery: Servitude, Slave Insurrection and Racial Thought in Late-Georgian Didactic and Juvenile Literature 123 4.1. Introduction 123 4.2. Slave insurrection in late-Georgian juvenile literature 127 4.3.1. Maria Edgeworth’s “Grateful Negro” 139 v 4.3.2 Protestant anti-fetishism in Edgeworthian pedagogy 145 4.4. Late Georgian didacticism at the dawn of racial modernity 155 5. Servitude as Citizenship: Amelioration, Empire Loyalism, and the Rise of the Transnational Black Press 165 5.1. Introduction 165 5.2. “Coloured Citizens of the World” 170 5.3. David Walker and the ameliorative empire 176 5.4.1. Empire loyalism in emancipation-era Jamaica 186 5.4.2. Imagining empire in the Watchman 191 5.5. Conclusion 204 Bibliography 207 vi 1 1. Introduction: Narratives of Amelioration Throughout the long eighteenth century, British writers seeking to promote a message of moral reform and social transformation sought out novel ways to captivate their reading publics as they promoted their didactic purposes. Yet perhaps the single most compelling method they employed to achieve these aims was the imaginative use of the New World slave society as a setting or plot device within their narratives. Indeed, in some of the best-selling and most-influential instructive works of the period—including Daniel Defoe’s The Family Instructor (1715-18), Thomas Day’s The History of Sanford & Merton (1783-89), Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales (1804) and various updates and revisions of the anonymous The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765)—readers were repeatedly confronted with the world of Britain’s slaveholding colonies. This dissertation examines this remarkable preoccupation with enslavement in the British didactic imagination. Why, it asks, did eighteenth-century didacticism so frequently hinge on a discussion of chattel slavery and, conversely, why did considerations of human bondage so frequently engage broader discussions surrounding mental improvement? Drawing on a range of didactic narratives and writings, I suggest that the representational tendencies surrounding slavery and education in eighteenth-century literature can best be understood through what I call the “Protestant utopianism” that informs the didactic imagination of the Georgian era. This study thus examines a specific current of intellectual thought animating representations of colonial slavery—a tradition that was both independent of (and often in tension with) colonialist attempts to naturalize and legitimate the racial ideologies upon which the system of Atlantic chattel slavery depended. In contrast to current critical approaches, which continue to rely heavily upon the lens of imperial race ideology or “colonial discourse” to examine the representational and narrative logics surrounding slavery in Georgian literature, I suggest that such interpretive tendencies actually understate the importance of Caribbean and American landscapes in eighteenth-century 2 didacticism.1 Framing eighteenth-century imaginative works as colonial discourse, I argue, elides the ways in which slave societies were engaged as universal landscapes— allegorical and emblematic spaces in which a variety of social processes relating to the reform of civil society were enacted. As I illustrate in a series of case studies that span the long eighteenth century, the primary engine of these didactic works is a preoccupation with how British society frequently failed to differentiate itself from New World slave societies. These narratives of amelioration, I argue, continually depict the reform of slave societies not to establish a clear self-other dialectic based on discrete racial or geographical differences, but rather to identify Britain’s own unfinished reformation—the everyday forms of mental slavery and social violence which proliferated at home no less than in the far-flung world of the colonies. The reformed slave society emerges in these works not as the enslaved “other” to a triumphalist fantasy of a free and sovereign Britain, but as the model by which an unregenerate England can one day realize its national destiny of becoming a spiritual and secular Zion—a vision of a regenerate Protestant future purged