Copyright

by

John Watford DeStafney

2016

The Dissertation Committee for John Watford DeStafney Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Repressions of the Open Sea: Contesting Modernity in Nineteenth Century Maritime Literature of Brazil, Britain, and the United States

Committee:

Sonia Roncador, Supervisor

David Kornhaber

Allen MacDuffie

Jennifer Wilks

Omoniyi Afolabi

Repressions of the Open Sea: Contesting Modernity in Nineteenth Century Maritime Literature of Brazil, Britain, and the United States

by

John Watford DeStafney, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2016

Dedication

To My Parents, Martin and Elizabeth, for all their love and support

Acknowledgements

This project was developed and refined through countless conversations with faculty and friends from the UT Austin community. I was fortunate to work with many wonderful professors along the way and to be supported by the Program in Comparative

Literature—particularly the program’s chair Dr. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza and graduate coordinator Billy Fatzinger, both of whom worked diligently to ensure my employment and progress in doctoral studies. Serving as my masters and dissertation supervisor,

Professor Sonia Roncador was a tremendous and consistent force of encouragement who gave much of her time and insight so that I could progress through the writing and editing of the dissertation. Her experience and energy were invaluable, orienting and enlightening a project and author prone to going off course. Sonia greatly shaped my understanding of Brazilian literature and fostered my commitment to making it my primary focus in graduate studies. Professor David Kornhaber was a terrific source of advice both in forming the dissertation and navigating graduate school and the sometimes murky endeavor of an academic career. David also pushed me to be a better thinker and has provided a model of a well-rounded professional and personal life as a scholar.

Professor Niyi Afolabi proved many times to be an excellent writing instructor and cultivated my interest in Afro-Brazilian studies that constituted the seed of this project.

My focus on slavery and the Atlantic was strengthened and expanded through working with Professor Jennifer Wilks, especially during her stimulating graduate seminar on

Haiti in the American and Atlantic imaginations. Professor Allen MacDuffie also impressed upon me the value of academic writing quality and exposed me to the rich

v field of science and literature in his excellent course on the Victorian period. Both inspiring academics, my brilliant friends Marina Flider and Chris Taylor were instrumental in my writing and helped me to develop ideas in engaging conversations.

More than this, they protected my mental health against the rough seas of graduate school, which I may not have otherwise finished. Thank you to my brother Joe and the other friends and colleagues that enriched my life along the way.

vi

Repressions of the Open Sea: Contesting Modernity in Nineteenth Century Maritime Literature of Brazil, Britain, and the United States

John Watford DeStafney, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2016

Supervisor: Sonia Roncador

Comprising a cold war that endured from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade held the promise of a new phase of modernity in which the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution would be realized so that human liberty, rights, cosmopolitanism, and social justice would flourish at the center of an increasingly international politics. However, nineteenth century maritime literature from the imperial Atlantic nations of Brazil, Britain, and the

United States—all of which were deeply and distinctly involved in the controversy over the traffic—decried the frustration of these ideals both before and after official acts of abolition and emancipation. As the sea offered unique perspectives on the transnational coloniality underlying the growth of western nations, maritime writers succeeded in disclosing the clandestine colonialist exploitation that sustained the progress of these empires during slavery and after abolition. This comparative dissertation explores literary interrogations of the ideals of western modernity through a synthesis of authors of different race, nationality, and literary status in order to sketch a generic field of western maritime literature. Each of the dissertation’s three chapters focuses on four authors—

Adolfo Caminha, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville receive repeated concentration—

vii and Brazil, Britain, and the United States are represented in every chapter. Race and the identity of the subject constitutes the central dialogue of the fictions explored in chapter one, which attempt to reconstruct fluid ontologies that evade the strictures of colonialist thinking. Personhood confronts the fluidity of the law in chapter two as maritime texts chart contests and circumventions of law in the extra-sovereign space of international waters. Chapter three examines the intersection of ontology and law through the moral concepts of natural law and crimes against nature, incorporating maritime texts that dramatize the employment of these rhetorical tools of meta-jurisprudence in pursuits of justice that ultimately liberate and oppress. Throughout, the mobile maritime environment and the slave trade foster the imaginative setting through which late- nineteenth century authors reveal the fluctuations of coloniality in western modernity.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: “In Landlessness Alone Resides the Highest Truth”……………….1 New Spaces, New Perspectives ...... 18 Slavery and Enlightenment ...... 24 Chapter Descriptions...... 33 In Relation to Literary Criticism ...... 38

Chapter 1: Re-imagining Race and Subjectivity through Maritime Encounters and Colonialist Seductions ...... 44 White Savagery and Chiasmic Sight in Equiano's Interesting Narrative .....53 Melville's Revision of Color in Benito Cereno and Moby Dick ...... 68 "Narcissus" and the Birth of Conrad's Homo Duplex Technique...... 83 The Danger of Blackness in Caminha's Bom-Crioulo ...... 105

Chapter 2: Navigating the Fluid Force of Law in the Maritime World ...... 126 "Laws for the English to See" in Brazilian Literature ...... 137 Heterogeneity of Law and Maritime Fraud in Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America ...... 161 The Law and the Lie: Two Faces of Imperialism in Conrad's Typhoon ....177

Chapter 3: Crime and Nature: The Liberations and Judgments of Natural Law in the Maritime Space ...... 207 Deadly Encounters of Natural and Naval Law in Melville's Billy Budd ....216 Natural Law Meets Natural Science Part I: Lord Jim and the Indifference Between Us and the Criminal ...... 242 Natural Law Meets Natural Science Part II: Bom-Crioulo's Dissemination of Nature...... 261

ix

Conclusion: The Continuing Curse of Lawlessness ...... 285

Bibliography...... 303

x

Introduction: “In Landlessness Alone Resides the Highest Truth”

Two pivotal moments in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an

American Slave (1845) that lead Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) toward freedom arrive in his brutal fight with the slave-breaker Covey in which he refuses to submit1 and the following inspirational vision of liberty that arises as he watches the ships glide freely on the Chesapeake Bay:

You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will

1Douglass’ mental and physical struggle against Covey remains one of the greatest scenes of slave resistance in all the abolitionist literature of the Americas. It has influenced many authors (and undoubtedly countless other individuals) including Herman Melville, who, as several critics have noted (even generating a collection of comparative essays of edited by Levine and Otter, 2008), appropriated a great deal of Douglass’ writing in his fiction. Sterling Stuckey’s African Culture in Melville’s Art (2009) highlights this line of influence particularly in the music and dance of Moby Dick and Benito Cereno. In the fourth chapter of this project (unfinished and not included in the dissertation), I will demonstrate how the novel published only one year before Moby Dick, White Jacket (1851), recasts Douglass’ interior monologue in one of the most poignant scenes of the novel, a trial of resistance that Melville would play out in fiction after fiction. 1

take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the [Chesapeake] bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. In romantic stream-of-consciousness, the metaphoric thrill of the sea seems to lift the enslaved Douglass toward freedom, but in his July 5, 1852 speech to the Rochester

Ladies Anti-slavery Society2 (sometimes known as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of

July?”) Douglass provides a realist counterpoint to his autobiography’s famous imagery of ships as “freedom’s swift winged angels”:

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave- trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine- drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the

2 Douglass’ audience is also quite significant. A devoted activist of women’s rights after the Civil War, Douglass pulled no punches in addressing the ladies of Rochester, which probably included Susan B. Anthony since she lived in Rochester at the time. More importantly, the Abolitionist movement and the Temperance movement (combatting alcohol induced domestic violence and public health concerns related to alcohol and the nineteenth century ‘Saloon,’ eventually resulting in Prohibition in 1920) served as the two primary entrance points for women in American politics. Mature political organizations consisting only of women grew around these two nineteenth century polemics of American life, and from there continued to gain relevancy and finally suffrage in 1920 (As Ken Burns’ Prohibition explores, it is not a coincidence that this date coincides with the passing of Prohibition, constituting the nineteenth and eighteenth amendments, respectively). 2

cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray…The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States. I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell's Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake.

During this sobering and intentionally inflammatory speech (“I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will use the severest language I can command”), Douglass recalls the prevalence of slave ships that populated the waters around Baltimore when he was a boy and remain in his manhood. A maritime subject of color of the nineteenth century, he is

3 well-acquainted with the ship of freedom and the ship of bondage. Having also worked in the ship-yards in Baltimore—a city famous for building Baltimore Clippers, slave ships that could outpace the British anti-slave trade squadron and were popular among slavers destined for Brazil and Cuba—Douglass was deeply impacted by the internal slave trade and devotes this address to denouncing the hypocrisy of a nation that had officially declared the international slave trade to be piracy while permitting it to thrive domestically. Known for his rhetorical employment of chiasmus, Douglass’ writing mastered the dualities of the maritime world and the experience of black maritime subjects. In this performance, Douglass shatters the repressive effects of patriotism that celebrates a national myth of freedom in an era of slave trading, a rhetorical mask of coloniality that continues to be a paramount ethical quandary of the United States in the twenty-first century.

Attentive to the sea’s movements of opening and closure and their relation to justice and individual rights, maritime literature explores the dialectical paradigm of freedom and discipline in order to interrogate the humanist bases of modernity and chart the reterritorialization and interpellation of the modern political subject. The experience of people of color ranged dramatically at sea: ranging from the insuperable dehumanization of the hold in which slaves were literally packed like sardines, to the first breaths of freedom or paid labor that many Afro-Americans gained by setting sail and working on ships. This dissertation delineates the intersection of canonical and non- canonical as well as black and white writers in their depiction of the maritime tension of

4 freedom and discipline and the modern subject’s struggle to self-actualize against the limits of identity, force, commerce, and law. While not always with the same objectives, the literary works of white former sailors Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), and Herman

Melville (1819-1891), and Brazilian Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897), cohabit this problematic with those of black writers like Frederick Douglass, African American intellectual Martin Delany (1812-1885), and Afro-British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano

(c. 1745-1797); all of which map the unstable tensions of individual agency against systemic forces of modern social control and a transnational culture of white-supremacist law and order. As fictions written at the end of slavery and after abolition, the new freedoms of western civilization are carefully measured against the shadow of slavery, and the protean dynamics of power and subjugation at sea confound the narratives of progress propagating in fin-de-siècle imperialisms of Europe and the Americas. The tension between movement and closure permeates western maritime literature in response to the techniques of transport and confinement that drove the late-modern period, and the ship, particularly the slave ship, serves as the paramount symbol of the modern subject’s struggle with possibility and interpellation.

Chaos and order constitute the reverse face (the master’s perspective) of this opposition between freedom and discipline, and the interaction between these two sides of the same antagonism structures the colonialist encounters of law and order found in

5 nineteenth century maritime literature. Particularly evident in the American Civil War3 and the Haitian Revolution, the slow fall of slavery became a tempest that threatened the order of civilization because it constituted the deepest test of the antagonisms of western culture. Instability threatened Brazilian sovereignty in the forms of African-led slave revolts in the 1830’s, the suspension of the rule of law with regards to the slave trade during 1831-1851, and the desire to establish political and demographic order with the end of slavery and the monarchy in the late 1880’s. Beginning with the highly controversial Fugitive Slave Act (1850), in the 1850’s and 1860’s the United States disintegrated over this question of the relation of freedom and rights to differing bodies, and would not politically resolve it for at least another hundred years. This national tension builds in Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859), illustrating the climate of revolt and chaos on the eve of the Civil War. As England’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century hegemony largely depended upon its commercial and military employment of the sea, the integrity of the empire demanded constant vigilance on

3 Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” (1838) presciently decries the crisis of law that would lead to the national dissolution that defined his life and the late-nineteenth century U.S. At only twenty-eight years old and a full twenty years before his rise to national prominence in the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858, Lincoln highlights the threat of internal disorder to the Union of American States: At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. I will cite other portions of this speech in the second chapter’s discussion of the force and heterogeneity of law.

6

British ships and strict naval laws. Widespread mutinies coupled with transatlantic wars with the United States and France precipitated a repressive culture of discipline in reaction to Britain’s imperial anxiety of order. Melville’s Billy Budd (1891) explicitly reproduces the climate of colonialist anxiety and intimates that it is ultimately responsible for Vere’s court martial judgment of Billy, and Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-

Crioulo [The Good Negro] (1895) depicts a brutal and pervasive law aboard Brazilian naval vessels that prompted major mutinies in 1893 and 1910.

The sea (often but not always the Atlantic) provided the material and imaginative site of contest for this dispute of chaos and order, particularly because the maritime space was and still is to a degree characterized by fluidity, invisibility, and the absence of sovereign law and force. The crises of rule of law and international discord precipitated by illicit slave trading in the first half of the nineteenth century provided the central model for the conflicts of law and identity that run throughout the literary representation of the remarkable nineteenth century maritime space—as in the satire of maritime lawlessness in Brazilian playwright Luís Carlos Martins Pena’s (1814-1848) comedy The

Two or the Mechanical Englishman [Os dois ou o Inglês machinista] (1842). In the construction of modernity from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the sea constituted an extra-national and therefore extra-legal space away from and in-between sovereignties, which made it a relatively ‘free’4 space for the exercise of and escape from

4 In fact, modern international law largely originated in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the political need to resolve maritime conflicts, both with respect to the question of the sovereignty of newly “discovered” peoples (the major impetus for the Iberian Second Scholastics) as well as the confrontations between the imperial maritime powers. One of the founding jurists of modernity and its 7 power. However, this freedom from the arm of sovereignty also meant political disorder and the freedom to assault, steal, and slave. Chapters two and three of the dissertation elaborate maritime literature’s investigation of the enforcement and philosophy of law through depictions of and allusions to the slave trade, which created the greatest of dilemma of legality and came to represent the consummate crime in the nineteenth century West. The political challenges inherent in the navigation of an unsovereign and uncivilized space precipitated intense moral debates over conduct at sea. As a sublime symbol of nature unchanging and unsullied by man, the sea came to represent the moral authority of natural law, and consequently the maritime space of slavery and freedom served as an appropriate arena for the interrogation of national ethics and western social justice. Chapter three charts the use of the ocean as a natural space that, away from civilization, becomes the place through which society (re)orients itself to natural law.

The fact that Douglass’ denounces the domestic slave trade as late as 1852—the transatlantic trade ended officially in the United States 1808—illustrates the fluid and asymmetrical relations between law, commerce, and colonialist exploitation that persisted throughout the nineteenth century Atlantic world. Reproducing the floating coffin,5 late- nineteenth century maritime literature looked back upon and conjured the supposedly international law, Dutch writer Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum [The Free Sea] (1609) in order to legitimate the recent Dutch capture of the Portuguese merchant ship Santa Catarina. Grotius employs natural law theory in order to establish the principle of just war in positive law, and this text became a founding document of modern international law. Like the natural law theory of British liberalism, this political theory developed for the purposes of challenging the Iberian imperial hegemony of the sixteenth century which emerged through their advances in exploração. Locating moral authority in nature instead of the church permitted protestant nations political and economic freedom from Catholic sovereignty —an alternative if ultimately still “mystical authority” on which to found international law. 55 A term employed to refer to slave ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ishmael is buoyed to safety by Queequeg’s floating coffin at the close of Moby Dick. 8 defunct slave trade in order to voice social anxieties over slavery that were stifled in the past as well as highlight the continuation of colonialist exploitation in the present. These depictions and allusions to slavery generated comparative criteria for analyses of new colonialist models like the European New Imperialism, the rise of post-Civil War U.S. imperialism and Segregation, and Brazil’s nationalist project of demographic and cultural

‘whitening.’ In British colonies and the western United States, the exploitation of yellow and brown ‘coolies’ from China and India immediately replaced the use of black ‘slaves’; just as migrant laborers and sweatshop workers continue to produce items like food, garments, and coffee for wealthy western consumers of the twenty-first century. Decades after the end of the traffic, Conrad’s fictions such as Typhoon (1902) and Lord Jim (1900) present ‘new’ conditions of dehumanizing coloniality at sea and in the colonies that are all too similar to the era of the slave ship. Conrad’s “Narcissus” centers the black body under the question of labor and complicates this theme through repeated allusions to slavery in order to invite comparison between the ostensibly free workers of the story and slaves, fashioning from this synchronicity a larger meditation on race and labor in the fin- de-siècle West. Adolfo Caminha’s depiction of the Brazilian navy in Bom-Crioulo weighs naval discipline against the slavery that Amaro escaped. Other works like

Herman Melville’s novella of slave revolt Benito Cereno (1856), Virgílio Várzea’s

(1863-1941) stories of the southern Brazilian coast of Santa Catarina in Seas and

Countrysides [Mares e campos] (1895), and Castro Alves’ (1847-1871) poem “The Slave

9

Ship [O navio negreiro]” (1868) look back upon slaver vessels in order to reinterpret the past and present of the American empires of the United States and Brazil.

Through invocations of slavery, these late-nineteenth century narratives project a dual critique of past and present through which they procure the common ground of coloniality spanning decades and different imperialisms. Since the abolition of the trade spanned decades and never really ended human trafficking (instead coinciding with a flourishing of exploitive labor around the globe and especially the maritime world), the slave trade became the central imaginative model of the impotency of modern enlightenment before modern coloniality. As I bring texts from Brazil, Britain, and the

United States into focus through the transnational polemics of the slave trade and maritime coloniality, I seek to generate new understandings of familiar authors like

Melville and Martins Pena as engaged voices of global abolitionism and counter- coloniality in constant dialogue with the cosmopolitan maritime community. In addition to Melville, this project reveals Conrad, Caminha, and other maritime writers to be particularly concerned with slavery as an embodiment of the immorality of socioeconomic progress in the West. The slave ship becomes the umbilical symbol of the repressed realities of modernity, a sign of the dark dominations that fuel the free world beyond our visible horizon.

The abolition of the slave trade serves as the historical centerpiece for my project, and, while encompassing a plurality of actors and nationalities, the incredible history of this conflict may be freshly elucidated through the relations of Britain, Brazil, and the

10

United States. In his landmark history The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade:

Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (1970), Leslie Bethell quickly notes the surprising and crucially important fact that the slave trade reached its apex in the years surrounding its abolition. The first two-thirds of the nineteenth century was both the period during which all major nations involved officially abolished the slave trade as well as the period in which the greatest number of slaves were transported from

Africa and sold in the Americas (x). According to Bethell’s demographic research, in the year 1800 more than two-thirds of the Brazilian population were people of color and more than one-third were slaves, whereas in states dominated by slave agriculture slaves constituted the majority of the population (3-4). Unlike the Southern United States, the

Brazilian slave population did not replenish its numbers through natural reproduction, which led to the slave trade’s greater importance than in slave societies with stable or increasing population rates (4). During the nineteenth century when British and French importation of slaves had sharply decreased, Brazil imported two-thirds of all slaves taken from Africa so that the diversified transatlantic slave economy, which included

American and British capitalists, oriented itself towards Brazil.

Continuing an official foreign policy that began with Parliament’s 1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the Treaty of Paris ending the Napoleonic Wars in 1815,

Britain negotiated with Portugal and then newly-independent Brazil under the primary stipulation of progressive abolition of the Brazilian trade—the main issue for British foreign policy negotiations in the first half of the nineteenth century. Following the

11

Anglo-Brazilian Treaty of 1826, the Brazilian anti-slave trading laws of 1830 and 1831 were openly disobeyed by the Brazilian public and government, allowing for the mass importation of African slaves for twenty years despite the legal prohibition.6 In The

Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (1972), Robert Edgar Conrad emphasizes the bellicose atmosphere of relations between Britain and Brazil during the final two years of the trade’s existence in Brazil and suggests that Britain effectively forced the hand of the

Brazilian government after twenty years of ‘laws for the English to see.’ Conrad’s influential history depicts a dramatic confrontation between two nations that, after twenty years of systemic disavowal of the bilateral treaty, escalated to the brink of war:

Humiliated by British incursions into Brazilian harbors and their seizure and

destruction of slave ships in Brazilian territorial waters, faced with threats to legal

shipping, military conflict, and even a blockade of Brazilian ports, the

government of the Empire was compelled in July 1850 to bow to British demands

in exchange for a promise to suspend the naval attacks. Even then, however, the

Brazilian government was reluctant to act against the slave trade, and one more

threat, delivered in January 1851, to send British naval vessels rampaging into

Brazilian ports, was necessary to activate the long-delayed Brazilian suppression

of the traffic in Africans. (Conrad 15)

Brazilian slavery endured another thirty-seven years, and British involvement in the slave economy and abolitionist effort in Brazil continued until 1888. The Cuban traffic

6 To give a statistical idea of the intensity of the Brazilian trade in its last half-century: on average, every six years during the nineteenth century Brazil imported as many African slaves as the United States did in its entire history (Voyages Database). 12 continued until 1867 but in far smaller numbers than the Brazilian trade, and the long- awaited end to Brazilian importation of slaves constituted the most significant event in the slow disintegration of African slavery in the New World.

The crises of rule of law and international discord precipitated by illicit slave trading in the first half of the nineteenth century provided the central model for the conflicts of law and identity that run throughout the literary representation of the remarkable nineteenth century maritime space. In the construction of modernity from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the sea constitued an extra-national (and therefore extra-legal) space away from and in-between sovereignties, which made it a relatively ‘free’7 space for the exercise of and escape from power. However, this freedom from the arm of sovereignty also meant political disorder and the freedom to assault, steal, and slave. Chapters two and three of the dissertation elaborate maritime literature’s investigation of the enforcement and philosophy of law through depictions of and allusions to the slave trade, which created the greatest of dilemma of legality and came to represent the consummate crime in the nineteenth century West. The political challenges inherent in the navigation of an unsovereign and uncivilized space precipitated

7 In fact, modern international law largely originated in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the political need to resolve maritime conflicts, both with respect to the question of the sovereignty of newly “discovered” peoples (the major impetus for the Iberian Second Scholastics) as well as the confrontations between the imperial maritime powers. One of the founding jurists of modernity and its international law, Dutch writer Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum [The Free Sea] (1609) in order to legitimate the recent Dutch capture of the Portuguese merchant ship Santa Catarina. Grotius employs natural law theory in order to establish the principle of just war in positive law, and this text became a founding document of modern international law. Like the natural law theory of British liberalism, this political theory developed for the purposes of challenging the Iberian imperial hegemony of the sixteenth century which emerged through their advances in exploração. Locating moral authority in nature instead of the church permitted protestant nations political and economic freedom from Catholic sovereignty —an alternative if ultimately still “mystical authority” on which to found international law. 13 intense moral debates over conduct at sea. As a sublime symbol of nature unchanging and unsullied by man, the sea came to represent the moral authority of natural law, and consequently the maritime space of slavery and freedom served as an appropriate arena for the interrogation of national ethics and western social justice. Chapter three charts the use of the ocean as a natural space that, away from civilization, becomes the place through which society (re)orients itself to natural law.

In addition to the maritime hegemony of Britain, Brazilian slavery and the imperial politics of the Atlantic world may be better comprehended through comparative reference to the United States, which constituted the other major slave empire of the

Americas but maintained a radically different relation to the traffic itself. In contradistinction to Brazil (and the Caribbean colonies of the French, Spanish, and

British), the United States relied little on the transatlantic slave trade because a variety of ecological, economic, and social factors allowed the slave population to grow at rates similar to the free population (Bergad 52-60). In tropical slave systems, high mortality and low birth rates led to greater dependency on the trade, and estimates suggest, for instance, that Brazil imported more than ten times as many African slaves as the United

States.8 If Britain and Brazil respectively constituted the primary proponents and opponents of its abolition, the United States was profoundly divided in its relation to the

8 A variety of factors—notably tropical disease and brutality of sugar cane production—contributed to the fact that slave populations in Brazil and the Caribbean did not repopulate, which perpetuated the constant importation of new slaves to fill the labor force. On the other hand, the African American slave population grew so that while the U.S. imported less than half a million slaves total, the American South contained almost four million slaves at the start of the Civil War. For a thorough comparison of demographics see the chapter “Slave Populations” in Laird W. Bergad’s The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (2007). 14 trade: geographically yes, but also through ambivalent foreign policy, jurisprudence, and widespread participation of private citizens in various forms of maritime commerce that sustained slave trading around the world. Although the United States abolished the slave trade shortly after Britain, they did little to enforce the law and refused to sign bilateral agreements allowing the British navy to inspect slavers. As a result, slave ships destined for Brazil and the Caribbean were able to hide behind the American flag in order to maintain the trade, a practice which formed part of a larger culture of subterfuge and fraud at sea that centered on but was not limited to the slave trade.

Joining all three nations in the thematic focus of each chapter, this project adopts its comparative triangulation in order to illustrate the interrelation of western subjects through a transnational problematic of modern progress revolving around maritime coloniality and the slave trade. Through the connections established across national literatures and racial lines, my delineation of nineteenth century maritime fiction reimagines the conventional relationships and divisions between the diversity of subjects of Brazil, Britain, and the United States. The inclusion of black, white, Brazilian, and

Anglophone authors within a shared literary conversation also attests to the need to reevaluate the development of western modernity through a fuller account of its marginalized constituents. As maritime literature departs from land in order to assume a new perspective, it reconstructs the constitution of the nation in its transnational identities, heterogeneous politics, and vagaries of justice. C.L.R. James values Melville’s fiction for its depiction of characters that, “far more than American,” are representatives

15 of “a crisis that will be a world crisis” (34). Each representing a distinct empire, a comparative study of the maritime literature of Britain, Brazil, and the United States reveals a common endeavor to situate the individual and the nation amidst the fluid forces of identity, law, and morality engendered by the maritime mobilization of the modern period. More specifically, comparative analysis of the three nations demonstrates a collective concern for the past of slavery and its post-abolition translation into new forms of exploitive labor. For each of these three nations, the narrative of slavery and the nineteenth century is deeply entwined with that of the other two, and the thematic and formal exchange between literary texts from Brazil, Britain, and the U.S. offers new insight on their sociopolitical relations and the development of western literature as a transnational interrogation of coloniality.

While scholars have considered the maritime fiction of Melville and Conrad and their relations to modernity, and there are several comprehensive historiographies of the trade and its place in the relations between Brazil, Britain, and the United States; there remains a need for investigation of Brazilian maritime literature in the context of the international crises of the slave trade and maritime discipline as well as literary study that places Brazilian with American or British authors in dialogue over this great nineteenth century polemic. Maintaining a perennial but conflicted relation with French and

Portuguese culture, the study of Brazilian literature may be expanded with a new consideration of foreign influence and particularly one that highlights the significant aesthetic, ideological, and political influences of the United States and Great Britain. By

16 bringing various forms of Brazilian literature into conversation with British and

American texts, I hope to begin to erode the conception of Brazilian literature as marginal in relation to other western writing of the late nineteenth century.

Brazilian social theory has a long history of imagining the nation in comparison to the United States, and, since the reverse is not true, an analysis of the great continental slave society of South America and its international relations with the North Atlantic facilitates a better understanding of U.S. concerns of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century Brazil shares fundamental social and political dilemmas with the United States and the rest of the Atlantic world, particularly a preoccupation with keeping order in society with a deeply fractured law. The revolts of 1830’s Bahía and the Brazilian Navy in 1893 and 1910 are driven by forces also catalogued in the mid-nineteenth century

United States by Melville, Douglass, and Martin Delany. While Melville consistently emphasizes the liminal cultural exchanges of Estadounidenses (the Spanish word for citizens of the United States which does not exist in English) in South American waters— including the entirety of Benito Cereno, the longest portion of White Jacket,9 and parts of

Moby Dick—literary scholars have yet to examine him in dialogue with South American literature and history. Neither the fiction of Conrad nor Melville can be easily restricted to British or American experience, respectively, and, rather than seeing their works as foundational narratives of nineteenth century nation-building, I elaborate the

9While the sailors must spend their Brazilian stay confined to the ship, the U.S. frigate Neversink that provides the setting for White Jacket (1850) even hosts a visit from Emperor Dom Pedro II while they are stationed in the Bay of Guanabara. While not explained in the narrative, this American warship’s long stay in Rio de Janeiro coincides with the British vigilance of the Brazilian slave trade which resulted in a British naval threat to the Brazilian capital. 17 deconstructions of national identity effectuated by the mobility, subalterity, and cosmopolitanism found in the “routes” (Gilroy’s term) of maritime literature.

While my debt to the paradigms of black Atlantic and transatlantic studies is considerable, the centrality of the Atlantic misrepresents the common presence of the

Pacific and Indian oceans in maritime literature and the significance of these spaces to western imperial nations. Nostromo, Typhoon, Lord Jim as well as Benito Cereno and parts of Moby Dick and White-Jacket all take place in seas other than the Atlantic. These works highlight the interconnection of the world such that events in the Indian and

Pacific oceans condition life within Atlantic nations like Britain and Brazil. The constitutive center of the West, rather than being in London or Paris, could be found in the movements of peoples and the exchanges of power born in these migrations. The light emanating from these two metropoles originates in what the West has always labelled the darkness, generated by people of color in and from ports like Bahía, Bombay,

Baltimore, and Benin—all of which are related through the constructions of modern coloniality.

New Spaces, New Perspectives

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in,” writes Emerson in

“Experience”—written in 1844 during the peak10 of illegal transatlantic slave trading—

10 In fact, the 1830’s and 1840’s—when the importation of slaves to Brazil was illegal but tolerated— constituted the most intense period of the slave trade, and as a result the literature about this period is profoundly concerned with the trade, its conclusion, and its effects on Atlantic societies and the adoles cent western rule of law. 18 and many of the nautical texts studied in this dissertation transport the reader from innocence to experience, revealing the horrors of distant colonialist activities. The journey to sea sheds new light on the nation left behind by exposing its foreign dimensions concealed by distance and discourse. This sense of distance and invisibility surrounding maritime experience led many maritime authors—most of them former sailors—to reproduce maritime conflicts and highlight their effects on the entire western world. Applying Foucault’s theory and terminology from “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and

Heterotopias” (1967) to the romantic-realist dialectic of Douglass and Emerson, in many of these maritime texts the reader encounters a movement from utopia to heterotopia.

Emerson’s quote points to the same dual nature of maritime existence found in Douglass’ chiasmus of the sea’s symbolic but also very real facilitation of freedom and bondage.

The nineteenth century narrative heterotopia of the ship illuminates the oppressive and unstable spaces hidden from the citizenry on land as well as the false utopias of national myth that repress clandestine cruelty. Heterotopias subvert utopian optimism: they are critiques that expose asymmetry, incongruity, and misconception in the popular and official representations of the nation. Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea: Melville,

Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002) constitutes a significant contribution to this line of studies for its attention to the sea and the connection between Melville and Conrad. Casarino’s book elucidates the fiction of Conrad and Melville as exemplars of “the modernist narrative of the sea,” through which he outlines a spatial theory of modernity departing from Foucault’s concept. In his explication of heterotopias through analyses of the ships

19 in Conrad’s “Narcissus” and Melville’s White-Jacket, Casarino explicates the theoretical function of the ship as a heterotopia insofar as it “embodies…the desire to escape the social while simultaneously representing it, contesting it, inverting it” (28) The fictional ships of nineteenth century maritime literature stage contests over social values seen through familiar and novel perspectives and thereby seek to reconstruct public consciousness.

Reflecting the possibilities of freedom and bondage11 that the maritime environment held for subjects of color and white sailors,12 the ship’s exemplariness as a heterotopia derives from its combination of movement and closure. The ship’s ability to circumnavigate, to remain in both the limitless space of the sea, but also to put into contact all the ports of the earth, makes it a model heterotopia. Foucault paints the maritime heterotopia as an intermediary space between opening and closure:

“the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself,

that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the

sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes

as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their

11 Amaro’s story in Bom-crioulo constitutes the most elaborate exploration of the dialectic of freedom and discipline: he “escapes” slavery by being impressed (spending night in a cage with iron bars) into the Navy, a confinement that bears him to the open freedom of the sea. Later he becomes more acquainted with naval discipline, finding himself in chains, and then interned in an asylum. 12 While largely determined by race, white maritime subjects were also pulled between freedom and bondage in their experience of the sea, a fact very present in Melville’s fiction and his attention to impressment. His eponymous narrator White-Jacket struggles against the openings and closings of maritime life and echoes Douglass: “Let me fly!,” but quickly realizes his bondage to the Royal Navy: “Nay, White-Jacket, the landless horizon hoops you in” (299). While Ishmael’s name associates him with blackness, White-Jacket and blue-eyed Billy Budd both find themselves caught in networks of discipline as they move across the seas. 20

gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization,

from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic

development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been

simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia

par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the

place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates” (9).13

Because of its movement toward the unknown, the ship constitutes a primary imaginative space in modern culture. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, the ship “brings newness into the world;” it is the medium of the introduction of alterity and the universal cannibalism of culture; the ship transports between inside and outside and remakes this distinction.

Foucault’s statement that the ship is the heterotopia par excellence resonates clearly through the transcultural encounters aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick (1851), the multinational transatlantic slave trade depicted in African Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of

America, and the tackings of identity and law in African Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting

Narrative (1789). The heterotopia is a mobile microcosm, and, as evident in many of

Melville’s novels, the maritime space facilitated contact between people from all parts of the world.

Forming a dialectic of power with the free movements of the sea, maritime mobility and lawlessness stimulated the disciplinary closure of the ship, both in its own space—the deck, the masts, and the dark hold—and through the codified regime of

13 It is worth noting here that as Conrad’s writing entered the twentieth century –which, because of automobiles, airplanes and other forces of modernization, signaled the end of the maritime world order— his works largely turn inland from the sea and focus on spies, terrorism, and the repressions of the state. 21 control and punishment that characterized the floating societies of slave, naval, and merchant vessels in the nineteenth century. While the ocean represented a welcome escape for characters like Ishmael (Moby Dick) and Amaro (Bom-Crioulo), they increasingly face discipline at sea, and for most nineteenth century sailors maritime life was tightly controlled through confinement and corporal punishment. Anticipating the notion of the heterotopia a generation before Foucault, C.L.R. James’ Mariners,

Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

(1951) extols Melville’s ability to depict modern sociopolitical challenges (specifically for James twentieth century totalitarianism) through his floating microcosms—charting the disciplined cosmopolitan spaces of modern mobility like Ellis Island, where James found himself confined by U.S. Immigration as he wrote his study. Experts of maritime closures, Melville and Caminha both served on naval frigates of their respective nations and turned this experience into prose on the subjects of flogging and discipline, naval law, and secreted male homosexuality. Thus, the textual ship exposes the spatial repressions veiled by the isolation of the seas and the distance of the machinations of the colonial system. In the literature synthesized in my project, the ship and, more accurately, the perception and voice of the sailor are the media that opens the West to the revelation of coloniality that circumnavigates the globe.

In the preface to “Narcissus,” Conrad defines his art in spatial terms of enlightenment, as the “attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth” (Portable 705). Recalling the image in Heart of Darkness

22 of meaning forming through an external haze, Conrad fashions truth as the exposure of limits and repressed realities, and—as his fictional eye roves to the ends of the seas—his work explores the inside (“us”) by illuminating and thinking through the exterior.

Maritime fiction pursues justice by “bringing to light” dark truths hidden outside of the nation and behind its utopian imaginations. Explicating Foucault’s construction of the heterotopia in The Order of Things (1966) (while sounding like Derrida), Casarino declares that “the modernist sea narrative is la pensée du dehors of the nineteenth century: it is the thought of the outside” (15). Maritime fiction expands spatial consciousness as the new perspectives of the heterotopia rewrite the utopian vision of the nation. A phrase Foucault employs in The Order of Things to define the object of his

“archeology,” nineteenth century maritime fiction elaborates a distinct “space of knowledge,” in which a realm of the unrepresented clamors for justice (xxiii).

In addition to its reconfiguration of modern space, nineteenth century maritime literature undermines the temporal rupture of before and after abolition, casting the shadow of slavery across different historical moments and generating a comprehensive critique of modernity as coloniality in development. Nineteenth century maritime literature responds to and highlights the “mudanças vagarosas” (vagarious changes—a word etymologically derived from ‘waves’) in history: the tendency for ideological and material progress to ebb and flow and develop in dialectic relation so that ideologies from different periods coexist in the same time and within individuals. Casarino points to

23

Ernst Bloch’s articulation of this concept as the “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” and submits that Melville’s heterotopian ships demonstrate

the spatial coexistence and articulation in the same time period of historically

heterogeneous social formations…[and] modernity as constituted by the violent

impact of old and new, and by the ever-growing contradictions produced by their

forced cohabitation. (25)

Ideological revolutions are slow and contain many movements forwards and backwards.

To illustrate this principle with a contemporary example: in 2016 the United States remains in the Civil Rights Movement, whose flourish in the 1950’s and 1960’s was a period of increased visibility in a process begun with modernity and slavery. An attention to ideological belatedness and asymmetrical progress manifests in the retrospection and nostalgia that characterizes many of these maritime works. Many of the texts return to pre-abolition of the trade or institutionalized slavery in order to rethink and question the rupture of abolition in the context of new or persisting forms of coloniality. Narratives written after abolition like Bom-Crioulo, Seas and Countrysides and Billy Budd14 depicted the era of slavery as an uncanny point of comparison for present injustice, or, conversely, the specter of slavery haunts the representation of the present as in Conrad’s fictions.

Slavery and Enlightenment

14 Another important example which has not been included in the dissertation is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1888), which takes place in the 1840’s and includes a ‘brown-water’ journey on the Mississippi River. 24

As it has been for post-colonial theorists, the coevolution of slavery and the enlightenment stimulated late-nineteenth century maritime literature to expose the fraternal relationship between modernity and coloniality through the narrative prism of the slave ship. Louis Sala-Molins’ Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French

Enlightenment (2006), for instance, places slavery as the center of its critique of the contradictions of Francophone modernity. Susan Buck-Morss opens her historical analysis of duplicitous European ideology, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), by noting the centrality of the concept of slavery to the articulation of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment so that

By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western

political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations.

Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as

the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take

root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery—the systematic,

highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in

the colonies—was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the

point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic

system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very

Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it. (21)

The ubiquity of the rhetorical use of “slavery” as metaphor—especially in the liberal democratic theory of capitalist slave economies like the United States—constitutes a

25 striking example of the power of colonialist discourse to mask reality and build the divide between theory and practice.15 After abolition, literature adapted the metaphor of slavery in order to highlight the ongoing social problems that remain unsolved despite the triumphs of emancipation and democracy.

The dual identification of modernity with enlightenment and colonial exploitation has been notably established in the theories of “coloniality” associated with Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (b. 1928) and Argentine philosopher Walter Mignolo (b.

1941), major figures of perhaps the most influential Latin American school of post- colonial theory.16 Generally, I agree with and will implement some of Quijano and

Mignolo’s formulations with regard to coloniality and modernity (what Quijano calls

“modernity/rationality”), particularly the notion that modernity is coloniality, that modern western culture ideologically constructs itself through an orientalist/occidentalist dichotomy that projects the colonized and non-western nations as traditional,

15 Or note Bhabha’s use of Locke as an example in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in which he states that the ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. (126-127) Without explicitly stating so, Bhabha identifies the great distinction between socioeconomic conditions and the theory and rhetoric of natural law that served as the foundation for much Enlightenment philosophy. 16 See also John McLeod’s introduction to The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, which affirms this strict relationship between the development of the modern world and colonial exploitation: “Colonial wealth would not have been possible without the killing, enslavement and exploitation of colonized peoples…the fortunes and success of modern Europe—perhaps modernity itself—depended squarely on the pecuniary pursuits of empire. Empire, colonialism and colonized peoples are not marginal, or additional, to the history of Europe, but lie at its very heart” (2). 26 undeveloped and unenlightened in opposition to the modernity of western civilization.17

The maritime texts analyzed here inspect the veracity of the western self-definition and its principal values such as freedom, rule of law, whiteness, and moral superiority. I consider modernity, coloniality, and ‘the West’ to signify different aspects of one historical knot of concepts, which counter-colonial maritime narratives underwrite by charting the margins and obscured foundations of the West.

By the term ‘the West’ I mean a story. Rather than geographical expanse or a collection of national territories, ‘the West’ is used in this project to denote an imagined community whose contested self-identifying determines its extents in both space and time. The West developed as and continues to be a worldview, organized around ethnocentric and epistemological hierarchies.18 Geographically, the West is typically found in the Americas and Europe, but I use the term to indicate a system of cultural values, a hegemonic optimism. If one analyzes features of western modernity such as scientific positivism,19 it is evident that this belief was at least as formative to Brazilian

17 Thus, as Hegel erects his labyrinthine universal history (Philosophy of History 1837), he also speculates that Africa has no history in order to reinforce the onto-civilizational difference between the philosophical German culture and the absent African one. 18 In Silencing the Past, Power and the Production of History (1995) Michel-RolphTrouillot defines the West as the historical confluence of “a global wave of material and symbolic transformations. The definitive expulsion of the Muslims from Europe, the so-called voyages of exploration, the first developments of merchant colonialism, and the maturation of the absolutist state set the stage for the rulers and merchants of Western Christendom to conquer Europe and the rest of the world”. (74) Trouillot also notes that this complex political transformation was “paralleled by the emergence of a new symbolic order,” and that the invention of the Americas…the simultaneous invention of Europe…the westernization of Christianity, and the invention of Greco-Roman past to Western Europe were all part of the process through which Europe became the West” (74). 19 Positivism, as Miller says of the Enlightenment in Elusive Origins, was “something fragmented and contradictory rather than consolidated and monolithic” (11). Ideologically, I define positivism as a scientific methodology that optimistically seeks to explain all phenomenon through a single paradigm. Most notably, positivists thought to forge moral and psychological theories using material sciences such as 27 culture (Comte’s positivist motto “Order and Progress” appears as the only text on the flag, for instance) as to French culture, its ‘origin.’ Brazil is deeply (but not only) western, and this quality becomes especially apparent through an analysis of the shared maritime literary imagination of Brazil, the United States, and Britain.

This dissertation demonstrates that the post-colonial preoccupation with continuing coloniality existed in the literature of late-maritime modernity,20 a genre with unique perspective on slavery and post-abolition exploitive labor. These texts examine western progress through interrogations of its philosophical paradigms of ethnic difference, law, natural morality, and subjugation. The nineteenth century literary reconnaissance of coloniality outlined the shadow of slavery, reassigning the metaphor of slavery to widespread but often ignored exploitation of labor. Coloniality signifies both material relations of power and ontology so that, as Quijano notes, “repression” occurs not only by force but “above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification”

(“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” 23). The maritime texts examined here asses mechanics, chemistry, and biology. While positivism and the phrase “order and progress” are most often linked to French social theorist Auguste Comte (1798-1857), I will refer almost exclusively to what I label biological positivism: the positivist theory that departed from evolutionary biology evident in thinkers like British proponent of social darwinism Herbert Spencer as well as a host of continental thinkers like German Ernst Haekel (1834-1919), some of whom I will discuss in my third chapter’s analysis of the treatment of biological positivism in late-nineteenth century literature. More influential than Comte’s positivism, ‘biological positivism’ applied evolutionary biology to create theories of race and ontology, social organization and law, as well as morality. Chapter three explores how ideas of race, sexuality, and criminality that conform to models of biological positivism are evaluated and undermined through fictional narratives.

20Maritime modernity refers to the period between the late fifteenth and the early twentieth centuries, from the voyages of discovery to the implementation of the automobile and the airplane—from the Renaissance until Modernism. During this long period, ships moved and restructured the world both ideologically and physically. 28 colonialist “modes of signification” against the oppressive social conditions in the colonies and at sea. Through this insight into spaces of coloniality, the narratives generate perspectivist critiques of colonialist discourse that challenge claims to the natural or ontological quality of western colonialist values and expose them as forms of social repression.

Paul B. Miller’s assertion in Elusive Origins (2010), that a “skeptical attitude toward the universal applicability of the Enlightenment might be said to constitute a founding principle for the historical imagination of especially Hispanic Caribbean writers,” also characterizes the Brazilian, American, and British texts explored in this project (2).21 Following Frederic Jameson’s technique of symptomatic reading, Miller finds that Caribbean writing “expose[s] and explode[s] [the] outright paradoxes and incommensurabilities” of western modernity, or the Enlightenment’s “collective unconscious” (4). Yet while Miller examines fictional and theoretical revisions from mid-twentieth century writers like Alejo Carpentier and C.L.R. James, my study delineates the contemporary critique of theory and society undertaken by nineteenth century maritime literature. Similar to how Elusive Origins traces the development of twentieth century Caribbean literature and theory in dialectic response to the European

21 In addition to Miller’s text, other critics have demonstrated prominent nineteenth century authors to be in dialogue with enlightenment principles. An influential Brazilian example may be found in Roberto Schwarz’s essay “Misplaced Ideas,” which proposes that this dissonance between discourse and reality “made for a skepticism in matters of ideology,” and this skepticism, most fruitful in literature, was an essential orienting force for nineteenth century Brazilian writers like Machado de Assis. Similarly, Bernhard Radloff’s Cosmopolis and Truth: Melville’s Critique of Modernity (1996) argues that Melville’s writing develops through a “confrontation with modernity understood as the program of humanist rationalism” (1). Recent contributions of post-colonial scholarship to this lens of literary study include Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire (2008), and Jonathan Elmer’s On Lingering and Being Last (2008).

29

Enlightenment, this project unites nineteenth century Brazilian, British, and U.S. maritime literature in critical dialogue with enlightenment discourses of ontology, law, morality, and science. Viewed together, these national literatures exhibit a shared interrogation of colonialist politics that illustrates the ideological and material connection of different national actors and individual perspectives within western modernity.

My project situates late-nineteenth-century maritime literature as a particularly potent window into the ongoing realization of western culture as a synthesis of antagonisms, which, pivoting around the false shroud of the slave trade demonstrates the continuing pursuit of social justice in western societies. The analysis of ideological antagonisms within the texts—self-conscious and unconscious—offers a useful methodological approach to the explication of the intervention of maritime literature in the social debates of late modernity. The fictions of Melville, Conrad, and Caminha are especially expressive of the heteroglossia of language, what Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay

“Discourse in the Novel” (1935) describes as “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present” (291). Most non-literary discursive forms (particularly scientific and legal writing) are structured upon a single, unified argument and a coherent thesis; it is this ability of literature to evade the limitation of argument and respond with dialogue that creates the effect of these maritime texts. Following Bakhtin’s theory, fiction’s heteroglossia, or polyphony of viewpoints

30 and discursive modes, enables a robust examination of the social and ideological antagonisms of western cultures:

Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its

incorporation), is another's speech in another's language, serving to express

authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special

type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and

expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the

character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such

discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the

while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they-as it were-know about

each other (just as two exchanges in a dialogue know of each other and are

structured in this mutual knowledge of each other); it is as if they actually hold a

conversation with each other. (Dialogic Imagination 324)

Dialogic form is essential to maritime literature that captures mobility and cultural negotiation competing and protean interests. The heterotopic viewpoint derived from both real maritime social conditions and the imaginative setting of maritime literature endows the genre with a rich heteroglossia of ideological principles that must be deciphered and evaluated by the reader. It is this same heterogeneity or ideological disorder within the novels that constitutes their edifying potential, since they engage

31 readers in a profoundly creative activity of critical thinking required to organize their meanings.22

A prominent technique of subversive literary dialogue with colonialist philosophy, many of these works duplicitously exhibit the trappings of colonial fictions, disguising critiques under banners of western progress. These maritime heterotopias generate a critical perspective of colonizing forces and ideology by tracing the routes of their coloniality. Rehearsing the unmasking of enlightenment discourse, maritime plot structures often follow a chiasmic revelation in which the superficial view of the ship from a distance gives way to the horrific reality it bears in the hold or on deck—a revelation that under the ‘redeeming ideas’ of colonialism one finds “just robbery with violence.” Shifts in perspective and insight into maritime sociality permit these texts to challenge the principles of racial and cultural division that structure nineteenth century societies, and, with sailors moving constantly through and around multiracial subjects, the maritime mise-en-scène provides an ideal platform for the construction counter- narratives of enlightenment and colonialist principles. In this way, these texts seduce readers to participate in rewriting ontological categories and notions of justice.

Melville’s writing constitutes the most direct and sustained use of the technique of

22 They are, following Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological theory of reading, particularly literary in their ability to stimulate active and critical interpretation through the strain required to assimilate their contraries and omissions into an organic unity.22 For Iser, it is both the “unwritten” and “unexpected” aspects of the literary work that stimulate imagination and critical thought in the reader (Iser 51-56). Nor is this version of literariness as ambiguity unique to Reception theorists like Iser or Jauss. Ralph Ellison proclaims in “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” that “the es sence of the word is its ambivalence” and uses this ethos of “complexity” as his criterion for literary representations of blackness (Shadow and Act 25).22 32 seduction, and, like Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo, mingles literal, sexual seduction with this performance of ideological revision. In their stories of maritime multiracial contact,

Conrad and Equiano reverse paradigms of ethnocentrism by occupying and redistributing colonialist rhetoric. Marking these techniques of ideological seduction, the tropes of the mask and false flag recur in these Atlantic tales and signal the disguises and confrontations of discourse operating through the heteroglossia of the text.

The conceptual disorder of maritime texts is aesthetically reflected in their depiction of the sea as a site of confusion and invisibility, a site of madness where the boundary between sea and sky dissolves so that new delineations may be formed.

Disorientation—synesthesia, the inability to discern, the loss of sense and sensibility— characterize the narratives of the slave ship and the ship that is out of joint with the law, as they do in Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). Coleridge’s poem establishes a vocabulary of imagery for nineteenth century maritime literature such as when the mariner shoots the albatross and commits a crime against nature, disturbing the natural order of the seas and stopping the progress of the ship. Especially at sea23, disorientation characterizes human experience in modernity, and maritime literature offers a revelation of uncertainty to question positivist claims to knowledge and reductive orientalist ontologies. Notably in texts like Benito Cereno, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Bom-

Crioulo, and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, subjective mobility’s destabilization of

23 Because of the seaborne diasporas of modernity, the sea holds symbolic importance for this disorientation, but the experience of subjective disorientation characterizes modernity on land as well. An excellent example of urban disorientation is Ralph Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” (which does take place on the heterotopia of Manhattan Island).

33 identity manifests throughout narratives that blend tempestuous settings with crises of subjectivity and epistemology. The centerpiece of this spatial trope emerged on canvas in

British romanticist painter Joseph Turner’s The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying; Typhon Coming On (1840). Turner’s painting depicts the chaos of an approaching tempest which beautifully bleeds all the elements together, but a closer look reveals shackles and limbs being buried by the waves. Finished in the height of the international polemic of the booming illegal traffic and maritime fraud, Turner’s abolitionist painting captures the ongoing struggle over a slave trade that has been abolished but continues to thrive. As I explore in chapter three’s discussion of applications natural law theory, in several texts the metaphoric ship of the nation has lost its moral orientation to divine natural law; in chapters one and two, the complex play of identity and fluid maritime law generates radical instability and uncertainty for sailors and slaves in maritime literature.

Chapter Descriptions

The texts analyzed in chapter one unfold in fluid maritime culture in order to generate creative ontologies that respond to a western ethos of order that seeks to delimit racial and cultural identities in a fixed hierarchy. With varying purpose, nineteenth century maritime writers expanded the project of enlightenment towards a greater representation of color and did so through the lens of the maritime encounter—in symbolic accordance with the dual-function of ships in introducing subjects of color into

34 the West. Paul Gilroy’s anti-essentialist theory of transnational black identity argues that

“modern black political culture,” rather than the traditional “roots and rootedness,” ought to think through “identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). For Gilroy, reading “black

Atlantic” texts “demands careful attention to the interplay between these two dimensions of racial ontology” (ibid). Ifeoma Nwankwo’s guiding idea of Black Cosmopolitanism

(2005) highlights the ways that black subjects have through colonization been forced to negotiate special “modes of self-definition” in response to national, cultural, and ontological marginalization (10). The negotiations of black and white identity driving the fragile dynamics of maritime cosmopolitanism emerge at the heart of many nineteenth century maritime works as authors examine mobile zones of transnational contact such as the ship and the port.24

Anticipating developments in twentieth century theory, many of these works stage the differential consequences between fixed, essentialist concepts of human ontology— especially those derived from nineteenth-century scientific theory—and constructivist

(anti-humanist) or performative approaches to the representation of human beings and their existence in the world. Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo (1895) ambiguously

24 A thorough use of the topos of the sea in order to describe the transcultural flow of modernity may be found in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000). Transposing the material fluid mobility of transoceanic migrations into the nature of individual and cultural identity, Bauman begins by defining the physics of fluidity in order to then “deploy ‘fluidity’ as the leading metaphor for the present stage of the modern era” (2). Baumann’s fluidity of identity departs from the notion of change, arguing that subject s of liquid modernity adapt their identity in response to the pressures of the modern world and are subjects dislocated from more stable forms of traditional culture.

35 interpellates his Afro-Brazilian protagonist Amaro between a variety of oppressive structures and personal struggles, soliciting a complex analysis of his identity. Herman

Melville’s Benito Cereno (1856) constitutes a brilliant example of writing performativity into black ontology, but Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) also buries the self of its Afro-Caribbean protagonist in the interpellation of race and his inscrutable performance of life and death. A pragmatic literary model far more influential than the three texts just mentioned, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

(1789) doubles the racial roles of coloniality by mimicking British ethnocentrism while exhibiting an intrinsic distaste for whiteness.

In the maritime literature featured in chapter two, the lawlessness of the sea becomes the object of the modern endeavor to give order to chaos, and the maritime space becomes both a means to evade the law and an engine of the law’s production.

Modernity developed in part through the increasing interrelatedness and complexity of international politics, an international order precariously established through conflicts of competing juridical orders. The transnational and mobile space of the late-nineteenth century sea became the real and symbolic site for the convergence and conflict of a plurality of national and international laws. Heterogeneity within a single legal order also constituted an essential problem of modernity, largely spurred by the fluid juridical status of slaves and free blacks in the Americas. Variability in the force of law often drove this heterogeneity, and many of these literary texts represent the malleability of the law in the nineteenth century Atlantic world. The desire to establish, be recognized by, and,

36 conversely, circumnavigate the law in the extra-sovereign space of the sea profoundly shaped the cultural imaginary and literary productions in Brazil, the United States, and

Britain.

Of different times, genres, and levels of reputation, the two Brazilian authors integrated in my second chapter’s analysis of the force of law form an unlikely grouping in literary criticism. Virgílio Várzea’s Seas and Countrysides [Mares e campos] (1895) chronicles the permeation of slave trading in mainstream Brazilian society that subtly highlights the lack of force in the ‘laws for the English to see’ that only nominally regulated the Brazilian coast from 1831-1851. Written (though not performed) during the height of the illegal traffic, Martins Pena’s comedy The Two or the Mechanical

Englishman (1842) drily satirizes the supersession of lucrative custom over international law and bourgeois morality in the Brazilian southeast. My synthesis of the two seemingly unrelated Brazilian authors demonstrates the pervasive and enduring impact of the slave trade on national conceptions of law and social identity and reconfigures the extents of abolitionist literature in Brazil.

Written in the shadow of the Dred Scott case and The Fugitive Slave Act, Martin

Delany’s novel of antebellum revolt, Blake, or the Huts of America (1859), tracks the movement of the law as its hero traverses the United States and the Caribbean. Since scholarship like Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic has effectively explored Delany’s philosophical engagements with the openings and closures of black identity, I examine

Delany’s novel primarily through its portrayal of the navigations of black and white

37 subjects of the heterogeneous law of the Atlantic world. The difference between force and the laws became particularly acute in the circum-Atlantic milieu because of the distancing and obscuring space of the waters, and Delany’s Blake brings the clandestine and duplicitous operations of the sea to the light of landed society. Another study of the fluidity of maritime law, Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon (1902) casts light on conflicts between different laws, ideologies, and practices found within single Atlantic nations.

Conrad’s narrative challenges the internal discord of both motivations and results of the imperial humanitarianism of western societies. Together with Conrad’s fictions discussed in my other chapters, this tale explores the contradictions of the British empire that styled itself as the avant-garde of law and abolition while expanding its imperial project and exploitive systems of labor.

My third chapter rejoins the topics of the first two in a study of the literary examination of the ontology of the law and the laws of ontology that merged in modernity’s primary meta-legal discourse of natural law. The relation between ontology and jurisprudence becomes a central question in literary works that examine western exploração and its interpellation of subjects before the law. Culminating in the late nineteenth century, the question of the existence of a moral order to the universe was driven to the foreground of international politics by more than a century of debates over

Atlantic slavery, which often sought to establish moral authority through natural law.

With the popularization of natural law theories in philosophical, political, and scientific theories, this family of ideas became the object of literary scrutiny that ironized the

38 pursuit of a moral order and explored its potential as a tool of diverse and often oppressive ideologies.

Herman Melville’s Billy Bud (1891) stages the modern struggle for justice in systems of positive law that serve power over nature. Likewise, abolitionist movements and anti-slavery literature like Castro Alves’s Os Escravos (1883) appealed to slavery’s status as a crime against natural law, but confronted the easy-adoptability of this paradigm as pro-slavery arguments also made prodigious use of natural law theory to establish the eternal validity of slavery. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and Adolfo

Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo (1895) probe confluence of natural law theory with late- nineteenth century biological positivism that engendered new and often problematic discourses of natural law. Lord Jim deconstructs the self in its correlation to race and morality that might be traced to any laws of human nature, and The Good Negro [Bom- crioulo] foregrounds the use of natural law as a force that condemns racial and sexual identity in Brazilian society. In these texts, the modern subject’s access to freedom and justice becomes premised on the relation between criminality and nature constructed by the competing and collaborating discourses of modernity.

In Relation to Literary Criticism

Many Americanists writing during or after the academic turn to post-colonial literary criticism have located in Melville’s fiction a sustained revelation of the racialized problematic of the transnational politics of the nineteenth century. Whether invoking his

39

“Isolatoes,” “Motley crew,” or “cannibals,25” scholars since C.L.R. James have firmly established a post-colonial line of Melville scholarship that attends to the themes of race, hybridity, subaltern identity, and political domination. While Melville has been recuperated as paradigmatic voice of counter-coloniality by twenty-first century postcolonial scholars, the extent of his attention to coloniality and specifically the slave trade remains to be articulated. Melville can rightly be called an abolitionist writer, a fact which has not been recognized because he was not appreciated during the abolitionist

1850’s (Moby Dick did not sell-out its first edition in its author’s life-time) and because his reputation as a great writer was established prior to the 1960’s when race would emerge in American literary studies. A response-text to the fallout from Uncle Tom’s

Cabin (1852),26 Benito Cereno’s (1856) narrative of slave revolt is now recognized as one of his masterworks, but even Moby Dick (1851) may be read as a treatise on

America’s two great colonial sins of slavery and the extermination of the American

Indians. I read Melville’s fiction as a radical study of American identity seen through the cosmopolitan outside, from the sea’s complex interplay of the realization of modern hybrid identities and the related discharge of biopower upon modern bodies that culminated in the transatlantic slave trade.

25 These three examples are taken from the titles of the works of R.E. Waters, David J. Drysdale, and Geoffrey Sanborn, respectively. See bibliography for full titles. 26 Immediately following the release of Stowe’s novel, which was an international bestseller, “Tom Shows” travelled the nation and popularized the story through interpretations that ranged from abolitionist propaganda to racist minstrel show. Most Americans of the 1850’s knew the story only through a Tom Show, and the surviving meaning of the label ‘Uncle Tom’ probably derives from these shows rather than the novel (in which Tom dies at the end to protect the escape of two female slaves). 40

Because of its complexity and prescient representation of multiple social issues that would occupy twentieth century theory, Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo has been subject to a remarkable variety of critical explication. Unfortunately, a significant amount of literary criticism since its publication in 1895 has derided the novel, objecting until the 1960’s to the obscenity of the book’s portrayal of interracial homosexuality, and, conversely, in recent decades to its homophobia and racism. Furthermore, Caminha’s self-styling of the novel through a scientific, naturalist methodology belies the heteroglossia of the text and critique of natural law and modern progress that I identify in the novel. Since the question of race has been largely overshadowed by sexuality in recent scholarship, my first chapter’s analysis of Bom-Crioulo focuses entirely on racial identity and the complex production of racial ontologies in the post-abolitionary West.

My third chapter elaborates the deconstructive workings of Bom-Crioulo and the confused integration of traditional natural law theory and evolutionary natural science that emerges around the novel’s complex depiction of sex and nature.

Of the seemingly innumerable book-length studies of Conrad, almost all explicitly treat the Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo., yet, conversely, very few incorporate “Narcissus” or Typhoon into their studies. Like “Narcissus,” Typhoon has never received significant critical attention despite being written following Lord Jim and

Heart of Darkness and being intimately related to these two novels. The fog that for many surrounds his two most famous works may be cleared considerably through comparative readings of “Typhoon and “Narcissus.” Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim

41 should be read together with “Narcissus” and Typhoon in order to fully comprehend

Conrad’s exploration of race in the white supremacist hegemony of the West during a period that is both post-abolition and simultaneously the zenith of western imperialism and scientific racism. To this end, I join analyses of “Narcissus,” Typhoon, and Lord

Jim with references to Heart of Darkness in order to better elucidate the classic maritime phase of Conrad’s writing from 1898-1902, a phase which retains a remarkable and unrecognized coherence. By synthesizing the renowned Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim with infrequently read texts like “Narcissus” and Typhoon, I construct a more comprehensive and integrated picture of Conrad’s maritime critique of modernity developed through spatial and temporal explorations.

This dissertation traces the far-reaching (and not merely secondary or peripheral) convergence of counter-colonial maritime literature27 that provoked colonialist hierarchies from across racial and other social lines. Writers of African descent like

Martin Delany and Luiz Gama have only very recently received critical attention and remain in need of further investigation and situation in national and transnational socio- literary contexts. Martins Pena’s canonical status in Brazilian drama deters his inclusion in black Atlantic literary studies, but Pena’s drama foregrounds the illicit Brazilian slave trade with singular sardonic force and recommends him to conversation with Douglass and Gama. Virgílio Várzea receives little interest in contemporary scholarship, and his

27 Bhabha has referred to this kind of writing as a “colonial contramodernity,” a term that I find misleading since these authors develop modernity in their opposition to coloniality (Location of Culture 248). Modernity consists in the dialectic between coloniality and liberal theories of justice, so these contrarian voices constitute a core piece of modernity. 42 position in nineteenth-century writing on Brazilian slavery and Luso-Anglo contests of maritime sovereignty remains to be recuperated as part of a larger recognition of the extent of the polemic of the slave trade in literature. Forming part of their counter- colonial technique, the marginalized persons and issues in these texts are central to their critique of western modernity, and my project attempts to reorient our understanding of their works by exploring the relations of center and periphery within the narratives and of the texts themselves in relation to larger narratives of literature and the history of ideas.

My focus on Conrad, Caminha, and Melville28 illustrates the place of all three at the center of the maritime literary critique of western culture as it stood at the fin de siècle, centripetal forces that as sailors and writers navigated the margins and the fluid spaces of the colonial systems supporting modernity.

28 The classification of these authors as canonical leaves room for debate. While Conrad was an important literary figure in his time, Melville died in relative obscurity, and Caminha has never enjoyed more than modest popularity. Melville is certainly canonical today, but Caminha’s reputation remains somewhat marginal, especially if we consider the fact that his novel’s status as a naturalist text often precludes respectability even among those that are aware of it. 43

Chapter 1: Re-imagining Race and Subjectivity through Maritime

Encounters and Colonialist Seductions

Along with brief analysis of other nineteenth century maritime texts, this chapter engages with the theme of racial identity in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (1789), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and

Benito Cereno (1856), Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) and

Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo (1895). There is no uncomplicated philosophy of identity in any of these works—they are all ideologically hybrid, particularly with respect to their judgments of the racialist ontology of the human around which their society was organized. More specifically, each text interrogates the politics of reason driving the construction of racism around maritime laborers of color but also embeds mimetic and diegetic subversions of colonialist ontology, mixing contradictions to stimulate a reevaluation of human ontology and difference. As a multiracial site of great subjective mobility and rapidly shifting perspectives, the maritime environment facilitates the literary exploration of the depths of the self and the coherence of racial and cultural identities.

As was the case for most of the West throughout the nineteenth century, the approach of abolition in the United States and Brazil immediately raised the question of the incorporation of the now free people of color into the body politic, which would dramatically restructure the political, economic, and social systems of western nations.

44

Consequently, the literature of this period foregrounds the debate around racial integration that gained urgency in the years anticipating and following abolition.

Pressured by Britain for its first thirty years as a nation to end the transatlantic traffic,

Brazil was the last slave society to abolish institutionalized slavery in 1888. In the wake of the Berlin Conference of 1885-1886, Britain was then returning to Africa under the vigor of a “New Imperialism” that would take a familiarly destructive approach to extracting wealth from the continent. Since the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833, British merchants had transported Indian and Chinese indentured servants known as ‘coolies’ to plantations in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and

Africa. Particularly sensitive to the relation between western identity and coloniality,

Christopher GoGwilt’s The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-

Mapping of Europe and Empire (1995) frames Conrad’s works as a crucial part of the imaginary construction of ‘the West,’ which emerged in the context of new European and

American imperialisms around the turn of the twentieth century. As a result of this exploitive international contact, the mass reterritorializations of the imperial system, the end of slavery, and the continued importation of foreign laborers, the fin-de-siècle West was required to reconcile itself with or, as many believed, solve the problem of its own color. Having created a broad cultural identity by means of contradistinction to barbarous29 cultures and their color, the West had inextricably woven the barbarians into the heart of its physical and imaginative identity. Great imperial economies had been

29 Rather than other terms like savage, uncivilized, colored, etc., I employ barbarous in the Greek sense of “foreign” because of its flexibility, having no more absolute meaning than “them.” This flexibility has been essential to the strength of the vague identifier ‘western.’ 45 built by what Frances Ellen Watkins Harper called the “fearful alchemy” of black slavery, and many Atlantic nations were now populated significantly by peoples of color whose disparagement had been fundamental to the imaginative and material construction of western identities.

Since the sea was the medium for the diaspora and displacement of peoples in circumnavigation between the old and new worlds, the maritime environment promised a fruitful setting for the literary exploration of the social management of blackness in white-supremacist civilization. Most notably through the slave trade, maritime mobility dislocated individuals and removed biographical elements such as family and cultural expression: the Atlantic was a great engine of what Orlando Patterson has termed “natal alienation,” the cultural process of familial and historical loss of identity characterizing the lives of slaves and their descendants (3). The rupture of reterritorialization effectuated by transoceanic movement included national as well as international migration. In nineteenth century Brazil, agro-economic development led to mass relocations from the Brazilian Northeast and Bahía to Rio de Janeiro and other Southern areas, and a similar internal slave trade in the United States transported African

Americans southwest from the mid-Atlantic states to the Mississippi Delta region. These migrations involved free-persons as well as slaves, and spurred the continued existence of the slave ship in the Atlantic after imports from Africa had ceased in Brazil and the

United States. In response to economic and legal pressures, planters often relocated in order to continue their business. Many French slave owners migrated from Saint-

46

Domingue to Louisiana after the Haitian Revolution, and some Confederate planters left for Brazil following the American Civil War. The continued and sometimes intensified mobilization of slavery in its final stages contributed greatly to the emphasis that maritime literature placed on the traffic after its official abolitions, notably in works like

Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1856), Castro Alves’s “The Slave Ship” (1868),

Joseph Turner’s portrait The Slave Ship (1840).

In spite of this legacy of the slave ship and the frequency of human exploitation in the nineteenth century seas, former slaves, free blacks, and subaltern whites also attained upward social mobility by using the maritime environment to find new labor opportunities and strategies of resistance. As it does for Babo in Melville’s novella, the sea could represent escape or reinvention for nineteenth century subjects, especially those systematically disadvantaged in by the prejudices or laws of a particular locality.30 Many

Afro-Atlantic subjects were able to find freedom or free labor aboard ships and in ports,

30 In addition to earning wages and experience in the shipyards of Baltimore, Douglass’ plans for escape include avoiding detection on the waters, and, after the popularity of his first autobiography caused his friends to worry he might be captured (despite his celebrity he was still a fugitive slave in the antebellum United States), he sailed for Ireland and England where the great expanse of the Atlantic and more progressive racial attitudes would protect him. Additionally, In Brazilian Aluísio Azevedo’s realist novel (different from his later naturalist work such as O cortiço) O Mulato (1880)—not itself a maritime work, but one in which the Atlantic fundamentally shapes the identity of the protagonist by mediating the visibility of race—maritime opacity also opens the possibility of escaping unwanted racial identity and the social restrictions that for many accompanied it. Dr. Raimundo José da Silva, the eponymous protagonist of Azevedo’s novel, succeeds in establishing a brilliant career and reputation in Europe and Rio de Janeiro, both of which are distant voyages from his native Maranhão. In the conversation that introduces Raimundo to the novel, his uncle and a clergyman discuss his return, opining that he should stay away since his mother was a slave and, “no one is ignorant of his biography, they all know who he came out of [ninguém aqui lhe ignora a biografia; todos sabem de quem êle saiu!]” (48). Contrasting with his marginalization by local society on legal-racial grounds, the narrator details the prominence and respect enjoyed by Raimundo in Germany, Switzerland, and Portugal— where he graduated in Law at the university at Coimbra, the oldest and traditionally most prestigious of the Lusophone world. Raimundo is a successful man of the Atlantic world, but this status only remains if Raimundo is distant from his home in Northeastern Brazil: there he is irremediably a pariah. 47 which stands central to the stories of Frederick Douglass, Amaro in Bom-Crioulo, Henry in Blake, or the Huts of America, Olaudah Equiano, and Babo from Benito Cereno—even if all of these characters encounter significant limits to this pursuit. During and after slavery, the maritime world offered a culture of labor in which people of color could earn wages in an integrated (though discriminatory) work environment. Cesare Casarino’s study Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002) supports this notion both with respect to Melville and as a historical phenomenon, asserting that “sea labor had been the first fully international, multiethnic, multilingual, and also increasingly multiracial labor force since at least the Renaissance” (5).31 Although ships were hyper- repressive and supremely organized spaces (partially in reaction to the freedom and lawlessness of the sea surrounding them), many subjects of color were able to achieve a degree of personhood and independence through maritime employment. Maritime literature explores these liberations and their limits, dramatizing interracial encounters of both conflict and cooperation and reflecting on the possibilities of freedom, personhood, and transculturation in colonialist maritime culture.

The question of labor and its connection to race in western societies offers a crucial locus of interpretative power in the novels, especially since those societies examined themselves in the shadow of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century.

Much cultural criticism during the eve of abolition and in the decades following it

31Casarino goes as far as to aver that “the wage was invented at sea,” a pithy expression of the historical detail that sea labor operated through the wage system prior to its adoption by industrial capitalism and was a forerunner of modern wage-labor (5). In other words, the sea allowed for the development of the wage labor system that would eventually be utilized in the factories on land. 48 highlighted the extreme dependence of Brazilian society on slave labor from the broadest commercial productions to the most intimate domestic tasks. The black Brazilian male body, while also sexualized and painted with violence, was primarily considered with respect to labor. Melville’s Benito Cereno and Moby Dick also foreground black bodies of labor at sea and chart their exploitation by white loci of power. On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain and the other European powers were engaging in a renewed exploitation of non-white bodies—this time located in the New Imperialism’s possession of Africa legalized through the Berlin Conference of the mid-1880’s and the exploração32 of Coolies from India and East Asia—both of which superseded the maritime extraction and displacement of African populations to the colonial holdings of the Americas. Bom- crioulo and “Narcissus,” when read in this light, fundamentally interrogate the continuing coloniality surrounding the forced, possessive labor of the black body—both foregrounding the black subject’s interpellation as worker through the eponymous appellations.

Just as the titles Lord Jim and Nostromo highlight and interrogate issues of colonialist exploitation and British domination of non-British subjects at the foundational level of language, the inclusions of the racial slur in the title The Nigger of the

“Narcissus” and Bom-crioulo signal the desire on the part of both Conrad and Caminha to plant the question of race and the social position of the new black citizenry at the fore of the white supremacist imaginary. Notwithstanding the personal prejudices of the

32 In this essay I will occasionally employ the Portuguese word exploração, which means both exploration and exploitation—these two concepts quite suggestively share the same signifier in Portuguese.

49 authors, both novels present the subject of color in complex and ambivalent ways which ultimately opens the space for the reader, requires him or her, to create their own judgments and concepts of the black subject and their treatment by white supremacist society. In each case, the eponymous title names the protagonist not in their language

(the language of the other) but in the damning letters of white ownership, epithets which fix the inferior nature (ontology) of the black subject before the reader even opens the novel, analogous to the racist thinking that would judge a black subject before meeting the person. The deconstructive exploration of the relation between surface and depth, so comprehensively pursued in Lord Jim, jumps to the fore in the critically ironic relationship that emerges between the titles of Bom-crioulo and The Nigger of the

“Narcissus” and the representation of the title character found within the novels. Each novel is headed by the appellation forced on the black protagonist by white society and ironically diverges from the personality traits and the actions of the eponymous heroes of the texts. Amaro, “the good nigger” receives his name from the naval authorities who benefit from his extreme capacity for work that results from the combination of his incredible strength and docile acquiescence to orders. However, and here I introduce to aspects of his character that do conform to the racist stereotypes of Naturalist (and

Brazilian abolitionist) literature, he is given to erupting into brutal violence when under the influence of alcohol, ultimately rejecting the authority of the navy and murdering his beloved Aleixo in jealous revenge at the close of the story. In the case of Conrad’s novel, the dissonance between title and character arises from James Wait’s profound

50 unsuitability to the label “nigger” pinned to him by the title, narrator, and the white sailors of the Narcissus. In both of these post-abolition fictions, the black protagonist negotiates his place in the turn of the century labor face against echoes of slavery. In response to this central problematic of western nations, late-modern maritime literature enacted a rehearsal of the challenge of integration (the color line) that multiethnic nations like Brazil and the United States would face in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yet as Occidentalism and Orientalism constituted each other through the divisive discourse of the West, the one penetrated the other through imaginary and physical contact. Accordingly, many texts of late-modernity treat the real and imagined interstitial spaces between/within these two sibling cultural constructs.33 Melville’s works are particularly illustrative of this interpenetration, and the maritime environment and western ship become the media for the fruitful absorption of marginalized culture into the mainstream West. The intensified transculturation present in maritime society provided authors with a singularly rich example of the way that all culture is hybrid, that hybridity is a condition of every culture and individual subjectivity.34 The black Atlantic texts analyzed in this dissertation trace the mobility of transcultural development characterized

33 Beyond the texts studied here, João do Rio’s The Enchanting Soul of the Streets (1904) masterfully weaves the oriental within the occidental as the narrator wanders through the clandestine, orientalist spaces of Rio de Janeiro in order to reveal opium dens, African rites, and other scenes relegated to the oriental by Occidentalism. As a major port—the maritime on land—some seaside neighborhoods of Rio closely mirror the floating maritime territory of ships. 34 In “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality Quijano highlights the modern paradigm of monad ic subjectivity—the supremacy of the individual posited by liberal humanism, capitalism, and Cartesian rationalism—as a fundamental philosophical error that denies the identity of the subject as irreducible “intersubjectivity” and ultimately supports colonialist oppression (26). In hypothesizing a self that is built from alterity in which identity is an attachment to and incorporation of the other, psychoanalytic theories from Lacan as well as Laplanche & Pontalis affirm that identity is largely formed through external influences, a principle which may be extended to cultural identity. 51 by contact with others that determines a subject’s cultural identity. Maritime society offers an example of what Mary Louise Pratt labels “contact zones,” between distinct cultures, which she describes in Imperial Eyes (1992) in order to “emphasiz[e] how subjects get constituted in and by each other” through “co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (8). Often truncated or driven by abuses of power, these transcultural negotiations and “improvisations,” provide the central theme in the maritime texts analyzed in this chapter.

In the course of the development of the abolitionist genre and its critical explication, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative has become a paradigmatic text of maritime literature and writing on race in the Atlantic world, and I begin my analysis with

Equiano’s text as a foundational novel of the genre and a point of departure for my examination of subjective mobility. Equiano’s circumnavigations are punctuated through alternately pro and anti-western observations provide readers with an account of his negotiations between cultural influences. Melville dismembers occidentalist/orientalist identities and recomposes his characters in hybrid pieces, or casts characters of color in mobile and performative subjectivity. Similarly, qualities drift across race, gender, and sexuality in Caminha’s Bom-crioulo. The eponymously stereotyped protagonist Amaro constantly reevaluates himself against machinations of power and the flexible racialism of Brazilian society, and these self-soundings generate his complex and sympathetic

52 interiority. Finally, Conrad brings to the light the encounters and “interpenetration” of

East and West found throughout the world’s seas.

In literary response to the limiting ontologies of race argued in diverse modes of enlightenment from religion to science, Conrad and Melville are both deeply invested in demonstrating the ultimate ontological indeterminacy and instability of the human—at the levels of individuals, groups, nations, and races. In Caminha and Equiano, rather than upholding the mystery of human nature, there is a profound exploration of the black protagonist, which undercuts superficial racialism of reductive ontologies. The delineation and erasure of human categories serves as a prominent focus and challenge of the Atlantic fin-de-siècle literary representations of the peoples of modernity. In this way, the material and imaginative production of the Atlantic world acts as a kind of portal of new subjects and interpretations which engender new ontologies. The Brazilian,

American, and British writers examined here generate creative ontologies to supplement what is silenced and distorted by the material and cultural hegemony of western coloniality.

Racist and anti-racist, progressive and imperialist: these nineteenth century maritime novels are post-colonial in their critique but written as masks of coloniality that live within the time, space, and language of colonialism. They look like ‘products of their time.’ In varying degrees, they expose the colonial discourse to attack by reproducing it as a platform for its own undoing: they are subversive seductions, mimicries of colonialist thought that open inwards and look outwards toward new ideas.

53

These works by Caminha, Conrad, Melville, and Equiano all seduce the prejudicial reader by inhabiting the rhetoric of international coloniality while concealing a critique of that ideology. From inside the orientalist discourse which paints (non-white) types of people as savage and inferior, these fictions deconstruct the ontological concepts of the white-supremacist power hierarchy that dominated the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. Dialogic vessels of antagonistic ideas, each text contains passages which perpetuate Atlantic racism through a devaluation of black culture and the aesthetics of the body. Some works, like Caminha’s Bom-crioulo and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, seem to betray a genuine ambivalence on the part of the author and to contain irreconcilable and unintentional contradictions. The antagonistic elements of other writers, such as Melville, appear to be calculated ironies. In Conrad’s novel the narrator describes “the nigger’s” face as an “ugly mask,” and yet he stands superior to the white trash that surround him on board the Narcissus. This complexity constitutes a central challenge to the analysis of all of these works, and to interpret them one must consider and distinguish between levels of irony, the historicity of the rhetoric, and lapses of self- contradiction. None35 of these texts are entirely free of offensive passages, and, conversely, all of them effectively undermine the logics of nineteenth-century racism.

Equiano’s White Savagery of Chiasmic Perspective

35 Though the word “offensive” does not apply to Equiano, there are colonialist passages and assertions of British superiority over other nations. 54

Certainly true of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or

Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (1789), the ambivalence or contradictions present in most of these texts has been a significant source of critical debate and confusion. In “The Path Not Taken: Cultural Identity in the Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano” (1999), Robin Sabino and Jennifer Hall summarize this discordant reception, declaring, “two hundred years of response to this text has failed to result in consensus regarding the cultural identity of its author: Equiano has been characterized variously as a fraud, a plagiarist, an apologist, a hero, a capitalist, and a guerrilla fighter”

(5). As Jocelyn Stitt’s “Olaudah Equiano, Englishness, and the Negotiation of Raced

Gender” catalogues, the question of Equiano’s cultural ambivalence revolves around his narrative’s celebration of English masculinity and claims of the superiority of British culture. In Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Anti-slavery

Writing, Christine Levecq’s review of scholarly work on Equiano effectively recognizes this problem, and she attributes this ambivalent reception to Equiano having been “in search of an identity” (122). Like many texts of British abolitionist literature, the slave- narrator humanizes and authorizes the black subject in a discourse that promotes the civilizing power of the British empire.

The sense of ambivalence attached to Equiano’s text also assists my articulation of maritime counter-colonial literature that frequently reproduces and subverts white supremacist ideology. Like Benito Cereno, “Narcissus,” and Bom-crioulo, the heteroglossia of the Interesting Narrative pushes the reader to disentangle and reevaluate

55 ideological principles. Equiano’s narrative displays a hybrid identity that is first announced on the title page by the coexistence of his African name and his colonized name. Educated in two cultural traditions, Equiano’s ideological duality enhanced the work’s revolutionary power by making it more sympathetic to conservative white readers around the Atlantic while simultaneously interrogating western culture and its tolerance of slavery. Equiano turns western ideology against itself by, for instance, arguing that capitalism would grow with the abolition of slavery and decrying the failure of the force of law in the Atlantic world. However, this kind of ideological discord remains a challenging question to the scholarship of many authors, constituting, for instance, the most intensely debated issue in Conrad studies.

Further complicating Equiano scholarship, scholars such as Vincent Carretta have argued that Equiano invented his story and in particular his African origin, which has sparked some disappointment at the lack of authenticity of the narrative, evident in articles like Carretta’s “Does Equiano Still Matter?” (2006). In this essay, Carretta affirms the continued value of Equiano’ text as a cultural artefact and articulation of slave experience and transatlantic maritime society. While Carretta is right to uphold the importance of the Interesting Narrative, we might go further and consider the creative construction of Equiano’s text and his self-fashioning as an expression of the fluid identity of black subjects and their complex techniques of identity formation. Rather than invalidating what many consider to be the foundational text of abolitionist literature, the fictional production of the Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or

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Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) constitutes the seminal literary performance of the personal and cultural creations of identity through which black subjects engaged the alienation and double-consciousness imposed by the reterritorializations and cultural genocide of western modernity.

Equiano’s Interesting Narrative falls outside of my temporal focus of the late nineteenth century, but I include it both because of its strong influence on later maritime texts and its coincidence with the beginning of my primary historical theme: the campaign to end the slave trade. Moreover, Equiano’s text needs to be reimagined in the context of Carretta’s dislocation of the author’s origins and the wider scholarly recognition that his narrative privileges strategy and craft over factuality. Equiano’s authorship should be comprehended in light of his invented identity, and I incorporate the

Interesting Narrative as an eighteenth-century root-text of the creative ontologies found in the late-nineteenth century maritime literature that I examine throughout the dissertation.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds his readers in “The Talking Book,” his introduction to an anthology of Atlantic slave narratives, the revision of racial-political ontology in the black Atlantic depended on the production of language and the writing of color. A collection that features Equiano’s archetypical narrative, Gates’ anthology begins with a meditation on the centrality of language to the struggle of Afro-Atlantic peoples during slavery. Socio-economic and political progress depended on the act of defining the black subject. It was mostly through public written discourse that racist

57 exploitation was justified, so that in opposition, “slaves and ex-slaves met the challenge of the Enlightenment by writing themselves into being” (4). Including but not limited to slave narratives, the literature of the nineteenth century carried out an essential role in defining the nature of the world and establishing the relations between different groups of people. Literary works of diverse type and origin explored the ontology of the human and its ramifications in social behavior, influencing a transnational imaginary of the

Atlantic in its attitudes, behaviors, and laws.

From the fifteenth century, the maritime reterritorialization of peoples and nations constituting western modernity stimulated the increasing production of ethnocentric colonialist ontologies whose primary purpose stood in (de)limiting the nature of these peoples, restricting their ontological freedom and determining their nature. The orientalist that privileged west by delimiting east operated through the combination of specific ones between us and them such as modern/primitive, civilized/savage, rational/irrational, Christian/heathen, progress/non-history, free/servile, and white/colored. In “Americanity as a Concept,” Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel

Wallerstein define coloniality through its structural supposition of an ethno/eurocentric hierarchy (550). The hierarchy of coloniality operates through a flexible adaptation of ethnic difference but rigidly served a system of control that managed the new transatlantic system of labor opened by the exploração of the New World (551).

The ontological difference between peoples in western thought grew in conjunction with the economic exploitation of New Worlds; the flourishing of the

58 knowledge of western modernity was quite literally invested in the subordination

(exploração) of those who could be defined as non-western36. In Silencing the Past: and the Production of History, historical theorist Michel-Rolph Truillot argues that the emergence of the West and the Renaissance coincide with Europe’s colonial expansions of the sixteenth century, during which time several philosophical debates arose surrounding “the questions of the ontological nature of conquered peoples” and the nature of humanity more generally (75). As Trouillot explains in reference to the Haitian

Revolution, the colonialist belief that slaves were unsuited to freedom and incapable of revolt “was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants” (73). Theories based in religion and natural science such as the ubiquitous (traceable at least to Plotinus with Thomas Aquinas being the most influential exponent) ‘great chain of being’ provided a comprehensive ontological hierarchy and retained its popularity until the twentieth century. The late eighteenth century German comparative anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840) helped to move ontology towards scientific theory and divided the world’s races into eight categories.37 Later, as science siphoned off the authority of religious thought in the

36 Linebaugh and Redikker have provided an excellent example of this alliance in their chapter on The Tempest in The Many-Headed Hydra which presents Shakespeare’s part ownership in a West Indies merchant vessel.

37 It is worth noting that some early race theorists like Blumenbach denied the inequality of the races. Although Blumenbach postulated that all other races degenerated (due to environment) from the original Caucasian (he introduced the term) race, he also explicitly denies the inferiority of the indigenous cultures of the Americas and Africans. Citing specific acquaintances including an African-German (born and died in present day Ghana) Professor Anton Wilhelm Amo who received his doctorate at the University of Wittenberg and taught in Halle and Jena. Another clear example may be found in the phrenological study of University of Heidelberg anatomy professor Frederick Tiedemann, whose 1839 paper for the Royal 59 nineteenth century, the rise of the positivist discourse of the natural sciences articulated the white supremacist ontology with the absolute authority of the scientific law of the natural world.

As the letter of the law and government edicts made institutions like politics and the church unavailable for black intervention, literature (if often in the somewhat limited form of the slave narrative) represented an arena more open to black dialogism that addressed subjects like ontology, the law, and the foundations of morality in a transcultural world. Yet in this case, the role of literature in constructing black identity in the West also distorted the writing of black ontology. As a literary form like any other, abolitionist literature and the slave narrative genre developed according to the patterns of literary discourse, through the adoption and modification of fictional tropes and themes.

Consequently, many narratives are truer to generic conventions than the life experience of their authors. Although Equiano’s work would serve as a model for subsequent abolitionist literature, Levecq’s explication notes the critical consensus that segments of his narrative also reproduce scenes from earlier texts (128). The idyllic description of the author’s pre-captive life in Africa, for instance inaugurates many transatlantic slave narratives before and after Equiano’s. Other slave narratives, such as Mahommah

Baquaqua’s circum-Atlantic Biography (1854), were constructed by white writer-editors in complex ways that conceal the autobiographical authenticity of the black storytellers.

Society of London, with considerable numerical data and images of brains, concludes that “the brain of the Negro, is, that neither anatomy nor physiology can justify our placing them beneath the Europeans in a moral or intellectual point of view” (525)

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Still, slave narratives and abolitionist literature with reductive representations of blackness and ideology of the white elite were essential to producing social change by raising consciousness of the abolitionist cause.

Equiano’s title asserts the black authority of the text—“Written by Himself”— foregrounding the ontological capacity of writing of “the African.” Through these markers and plot conventions like the description of African society, the middle passage, and transatlantic mobility, Equiano’s novel carefully circumscribes abolitionist themes and holds the narrator as a counterexample of white-supremacist ontology. The narrative’s introductory depiction of Olaudah’s childhood in Igboland (present day

Nigeria), capture and transport to the coast, suffering of the middle passage to America, and enslavement in Virginia tell the general story of slavery in order to build a rounded critique of the slave trade. After changing hands in America, Equiano comes to serve an officer in the British Royal Navy, beginning a picaresque narrative of transatlantic voyaging reminiscent of works like Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and anticipating works like Martin Delany’s Blake or the Huts of America (1859). Equiano proceeds to be renamed Gustavus Vassa and denied liberty he was promised, only to later purchase his freedom. After manumission, Equiano continued to work as a sailor even assisting slave traders and undertaking a voyage to the Arctic, all the while commenting on the precariousness of freedom and legality in the black Atlantic. Equiano’s participation in the slave trade and his varying statements of acculturated colonialist ideology that emerge as he circumnavigates the Atlantic

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In addition to its message, black writing itself came to represent a threat to the order by many whites in slave societies since its very existence contradicted white- supremacist ontologies. While it is generally known that in some places and times slave literacy was legislated, it is a telling fact that in the earliest and one of the most famous examples from the United States—a law passed in immediate reaction to the Stono

Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina—the state assembly prohibited slave writing with no mention of reading:

Whereas, the having of Slaves taught to write or suffering them to be employed in

writing may be attended with great Inconveniences. Be it therefore enacted by the

authority aforesaid That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever who shall

hereafter teach or cause any Slave or Slaves to be taught to write or shall use or

employ any Slave as a Scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever hereafter

taught to write Every such Person and Persons shall for every such Offense forfeit

the Sume of One hundred pounds, Current money. (cited in Rasmussen 201)

Later statutes modeled on the 1740 South Carolina ban would include reading as a forbidden practice to slaves, but writing constituted a greater threat to the deep-seated colonialist ontology because—in addition to its political power to organize resistance and challenge paternalist justifications for slavery—it generated the imaginative space for self-definition and would allow the black subject to produce and therefore shape western culture, thereby rewriting the ontologies that support social structures. While the reader

62 of color remained a bystander external to the culture they observed, a person of color writing western literature would change what that culture was.

In many of these novels, the reductive racism of language begins with the very name on the cover as evident in titles such The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Nostromo

(along with Lord Jim in an inverse manner), which provide fundamental examples of the master’s violent appellation of the subaltern eponymous hero. Conrad’s narratives depict

James and Gianbattista, but these men are known by the names imposed upon them by the master class. This technique was employed two years before Conrad’s “Narcissus” in

Brazilian writers Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo (1895) and earlier in Aluísio Azevedo’s

O Mulato (1880), as well as in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). Equiano, too, describes being physically forced to identify himself through the name Gustavus Vassa, a designation he disliked. The title page of his Interesting Narrative—his critical letter to the West—lists both Olaudah Equiano and Gustavus Vassa, a particularly poignant example of double-consciousness. Ultimately, many Atlantic heroes are read under colonized names that possess their labor-value and violently determine their being-for- society as items of commerce.

Equiano engages in rational critique of the culture of racism around the Atlantic— some of it brilliant—from a remarkably hybrid perspective, moving between African and

English culture, praising and denouncing aspects of both, and basing his arguments on the humanity of the African and the growth of British capitalism. Equiano’s journey in- and-out of slavery is also ontological: he rewrites his subjectivity into a Western logic.

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Doyle recognizes the trope of a “swoon” in many Transatlantic texts, including Equiano’s

Interesting Narrative, and explains that this physical disorientation “distills the ‘undoing’ effects of the Atlantic crossing and economy. That is, the fainting swoon marks the crossing of a social and ontological threshold” (6). From that moment in his narrative,

Olaudah must reform his identity through the addition of the English language and western conventions. Gates proposes that Equiano’s related movements across lines of identity, legal status, and territory “serve to highlight the sense of becoming, of a development of a self that not only has a past and a present but multiple languages” (20).

Cosmopolitan Equiano’s narrative derives much of its richness from his ability to manage the fluidity between his African self and British cultural hegemony while moving around the radically hybrid maritime environment.

Equiano’s mingling of western ideals with an Afrocentric perspective of the Atlantic world and the author’s consequent ability to negotiate between African and western culture of the eighteenth century, often developing powerful critiques of the civilization that functioned through white-supremacist hegemony. Equiano’s viewpoint is particularly complex because, due to his almost-ceaseless travel across and around the

Atlantic, his subjectivity became one of extreme hybridity as he absorbed ideas from

Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. He was a devout and studious

Christian and an intrepid defender of value of African culture, held countless jobs as both a slave and a freeman (including working on a slave ship), and ultimately became a thoughtful observer capable of analyzing the diverse cultural elements in the transatlantic

64 milieu. For instance, Equiano’s narrative provides a cogent comparison of slavery, in which he gives evidence of the ubiquity of slavery in African culture, but also explains that New World slavery is qualitatively unique because it operates through far more brutal and inhumane treatment of the enslaved (36-39). Having read and travelled extensively, Equiano’s thorough knowledge of the colonial West allows him to identify the failures of this culture and catalogue the savagery of whites. Equiano utilizes the same language that had been used to dehumanize people of color —“savages and brutes”—and easily applies it to many of the white citizens of the West. He exposes

Christianity to function mostly as a mask covering iniquity and brutality. Highlighted by

Laura Doyle’s commentary on his Interesting Narrative, a further element of Equiano’s chiasmic racial discourse is his ability to expose a lack of reason in the behavior of whites. As he does with Christian morality, Equiano’s transcultural fluency enables him to critique the (lack of) reason of white-Atlantic subjects; he repeatedly discredits the fundamental principles of racial distinction by judging white subjects in terms of the standards of whiteness used to claim racial superiority.

Though he is well-acquainted with slavery inside the African continent, Equiano’s first experience with the sea occurs when traders bring him to a slave ship, where the sight of white Europeans and their transatlantic idol terrifies him. As Cathy N. Davidson notes, Equiano’s encounter with white monstrosity reproduces already extant conventions of “contact narratives” found in travel literature and Enlightenment fiction like Jonathan

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (“Written by Himself” 19). Equiano’s adaptation of the

65 cannibal encounter trope provides one of the novel’s most powerful effects since it rehearses familiar feelings of European readers but with a reversal of perspective. Eerily recalling Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Equiano’s first encounter with white men is a marvelous nightmare, and the culture of the slave trade is one of unimaginable horror, peopled by “ugly” white monsters: “I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and they were going to kill me” (57). The scene overcomes his mind and the

Igbo boy faints in the face of such exotic white evil. Beyond this first moment of contact with “civilized” man, Equiano continues to suspect both that he is witnessing the supernatural and that the savage white men are cannibals who desire to consume his flesh. Much of the power of his narrative derives from Equiano’s ability to turn the

West’s chauvinistic terminology like ‘savage’ and ‘cannibal’ against itself. As in white- supremacist racism, Equiano’s initial judgments unite aesthetic and moral denunciation, the powerful ideological combination that Conrad and Melville repeatedly interrogate.

In a humorous irony, Equiano constantly fears white anthropophagy. The monstrous spirits called who call themselves white men are so barbarous and alien that the man from Igbo territory lives in constant apprehension of that he will be eaten to satisfy the strange appetites of these other-worldly creatures, or “spirits,” as he often calls them. Indeed, particularly in his recollection of his early encounters with colonialism and the Europeans, Equiano effectively inverts the centrist topography and interprets the colonizers from an Afrocentric perspective. On the one hand, Equiano’s fashioning of the (aesthetic) other as a cannibal demonstrates that not only the hegemonic West

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“orientalizes.” On the other, Equiano’s anxiety of the exotic European’s cannibalizing was quite astute, since the most common fate of the black body captured into Atlantic slavery was to be brutally converted into sugar. The genuine and reasonable aversion felt by Equiano towards the white other demonstrates the contingency of perspective underlying racialism and cultural identities formed through contradistinction.

Beyond the rational, political critique of the during slavery, Equiano’s autobiography particular persuasive power insofar as it provides a chiasmic presentation of the aesthetics of racism from which to criticize the western subject. Many abolitionist texts demonstrated the contradiction between the institution of slavery and the West’s philosophy of individual rights, or, as Levecq explains, “most writers of the time” employed the terminology of Enlightenment Liberalism to attack the slave trade.

Although his text effectively engages this argument through reason, other passages in

Equiano’s counterpoint create a more forceful critique because they are primarily aesthetic. Upon recovering, he appeals to some of the other slaves for an explanation of the new reality before him: “I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair” (57). As in this passage, the most remarkable segments of the Narrative provide a reversal of feeling, not just one of logic.

While much of his critique of the West is rationalist, some of Equiano’s judgments of whites are immediate; they are not generated through a rational process, but rather constitute an aesthetic reaction, as if they were natural facts. Such a relation is what

Kwame Anthony Appiah terms “intrinsic racism,” meaning that the judgment does not

67 derive from any fact of the world; it feels self-evident, and therefore cannot be rationally disabused (In My Father’s House 14). Equiano’s work communicates the feeling of racism from the black perspective and offers examples of black-supremacist aesthetics, and having the racial gaze reversed sharply undercuts the sense of the validity of the systematized racial prejudice of the West.

Just as he effectively challenges imperialist sociopolitical ideas, Equiano succeeds in bringing to light the praiseworthy characteristics of Africans, if in idealized fashion .

In his account of the physical features of his compatriots, Equiano declares that

“deformity is indeed unknown amongst us.” This remark proceeds an anecdote of pure cultural relativism, an excellent example of the author’s ability to unite lucid argument and experiential evidence:

in regard to complexion, ideas of beauty are wholly relative. I remember while in

Africa to have seen three negro children, who were tawny, and another quite

white, who were universally regarded as deformed by myself and the natives in

general. Our women too, were, in my eyes at least, uncommonly graceful. (37)

Equiano’s text subverts racist aesthetics by simply articulating the subaltern perspective of beauty, which, once vocalized in the lexicon of the colonizer, undermines the claim to supremacy of the colonialist aesthetic. Equiano’s descriptions of the white other as savage undercut the universality (i.e. truth) of racialist aesthetics in favor of a relativist reading of the body. Through his craft, Equiano enters the imaginary, ideological space of the colonizer, and from there can dispute its claims through its own modalities.

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Ultimately, Equiano’s very voice revised the ontological beliefs that supported slavery, and, as his narrative attests, the revaluation of western categories of identity resulted in challenges to systems of power and law regulating conduct around the

Atlantic. Depending on region and context, the slave who should become free often represented an ontological-moral incongruity that, in challenging white supremacist ontology, called into question the relationship between the white subject and the law, both political and natural. Equiano’s demonstration of personhood threatens the continuity of the white captain’s “usage” and designation of his black subject, and as a result Equiano is returned to slavery by the silencing force of a new master:

Upon this, Captain Doran said I talked too much English, and if I did not behave

myself well and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. I was too well

convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said; and my former sufferings

in the slave-ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollection of them made

me shudder. However, before I retired I told them, that as I could not get any right

among men here, I hoped I should hereafter in Heaven, and I immediately left the

cabin, filled with resentment and sorrow. (98)

This anecdote of Olaudah’s meeting Captain Doran illustrates once again the threat that the black voice and the reason it carried constituted for the master-slave relationship.

This connection between oppression and silence on the one hand, and freedom and discourse on the other, stands at the center of Gates’s analysis of the slave narrative form in works spanning from Equiano’s narrative of 1789 to Douglass’s in 1841. Highlighting

69 the importance of illiteracy to the functioning of slavery, Gates points to the “direct relation between reading and writing on one hand, and legal freedom on the other” (5).

The antagonized voice always accuses, and so the masters carefully guard its silence, through force and, when appropriate, law. As a medium of signification (Derrida’s

“writing”), the black voice undermines white-supremacist ontology (worldview). The power of this enunciation lies both in its message of critique as found in Equiano’s rational and economic denouncements of slavery and western rule of law, as well as in the medium itself since this very expression contradicts the ethnocentrism of writing that has always been a core principle of western ontological superiority. Both because of its timely publication and masterful synthesis of slavery in the Atlantic world told through a single sympathetic voice, the Interesting Narrative was an immediate success and would remain the most influential abolitionist text until the flourishing of American abolitionist literature in the 1840’s and 1850’s (Carretta 3). Equiano’s Atlantic text became a model for future abolitionist slave narratives and other black Atlantic writings, a crucial contributor in a campaign of letters seeking to rewrite racialist ontology and racist laws.

Melville’s Revision of Color and Civility

In unison with Equiano’s impressions of the savagery of whites and Conrad’s projection of darkness onto Europe in Heart of Darkness, Herman Melville’s Benito

Cereno and Moby Dick subvert the occidentalist dichotomies of rational/natural and civilized/savage that are anchored to the opposition between whiteness and color.

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Melville’s fiction demands a rethinking of identity in the international context: in Moby

Dick and Benito Cereno the narrators are forced to encounter the (racial) other in order to transcend the prejudice of limited knowledge. Cultural stereotypes fail and new values and behaviors are demonstrated across racial lines as Melville’s fiction disassociates ethnicity and morality. As with Equiano’s, Melville’s writing also includes a reversal or deconstruction of racist aesthetics: whereas Equiano depicts a nausea toward whiteness, Melville disassembles phenotypes in order to further his project of anti- essentialist racial politics. I now briefly examine Moby Dick’s ontological interpenetrations before turning in more detail to Benito Cereno’s dramatic deconstruction of white supremacist modernity/rationality.

Since the posthumous publication of Billy Bud and the revival of Melville in the first half of the twentieth century, critical studies of Melville’s major works have increasingly turned their attention to the themes of race, sexuality, and identity. Many

Americanists writing during or after the academic turn to post-colonial literary criticism have located in Melville’s fiction a sustained revelation of the racialized problematic of the transatlantic politics of the nineteenth century. Cristopher Freeburg’s Melville and the Idea of Blackness (2012) adopts Mary Louise Pratt’s notion and styles Melville’s ships as “zones of contact,” which included “various types of cultural exchanges, collaborations, and social frictions between whites and indigenous people, slaves, and other nonwhites” (10). Whether invoking his “Isolatoes,” “Motley Crew,” or

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“Cannibals,38” scholars have firmly established a post-colonial line of Melville scholarship that attends to the themes of race, hybridity, subaltern identity, and political domination. It is important to note here that this area of Melville scholarship principally focuses on the sea narratives examined here: Moby Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Bud.

Part of my objective will be to continue demonstrating and analyzing the fact that

Melville always conceived of the sea as a site for the complex interplay of the realization of modern hybrid identities and the related discharge of biopower upon these modern bodies, and that the trans-oceanic setting of his fictions was necessary to his critique.

As recent scholarship has engaged more with questions of social power, literary critics are now more aware of critical portraits of imperialism found throughout nineteenth century literature. Geoffrey Sanborn explains that his study of Melville confirms the existence of post-colonial critique from within colonialism, a colonial counterculture. However, this counter discourse to colonialist theory, Sanborn notes, must be realized by an interpreter, and “they must be read in a way that sometimes seems to be available only in ‘historical hindsight’” (11). Indeed, this explains (to a degree) the perplexing fact that late-twentieth and early twenty-first century critics are able to produce powerful critiques of coloniality in works that were previously—and in the case of Caminha and Conrad still are—thought to perpetuate it. Even more than Melville, such a rationale sheds light on the dramatic discord between my readings of Conrad and

Caminha, and their reception during the first hundred years following publication. The

38 These three examples are taken from the titles of the works of R.E. Waters, David J. Drysdale, and Geoffrey Sanborne, respectively. 72 post-colonial fascination with Melville is no surprise; of the authors analyzed in this chapter, his work presents the clearest attack on colonialism.

Melville undermines cultural chauvinism using two methods: he depicts the savagery within the civilized, and the civility within the savage. In the third consecutive chapter devoted to his tedious judgment of the aesthetic representations of the whale.

Seeming at first a ‘throw-away’ chapter of dry detail and a ridiculous title, “Of Whales in

Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars” contains one of the most radical valorizations of savagery and memorable passages of Moby Dick:

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that

condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-

hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no

allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel

against him. Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his

domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-

club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great

a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon… As with the Hawaiian

savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvelous patience, and

with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a

bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its

maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric

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spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.

(222)

In this passage, Ishmael articulates his precise definition of the savage, a concept that he has employed and played with throughout the novel. Furthermore, Ishmael fully identifies as a savage and explicitly links savagery to whiteness. The final allusion suggests that the artist too is a savage, able to sustain intense focus in molding form. To be savage is to achieve a kind of physical fulfillment, as Queequeg does in his brilliant,

“unconscious” rescue of a drowning sailor.

Illustrating the civility in the savage (i.e. person of color), Melville uses a physiognomic reading of the non-white to dissolve the qualitative difference between the races. In both cases Melville invokes the science of phrenology in order to sever its connection to race and remove the conceptual differentiation of racial identity. Just as

Ishmael describes Queequeg as being “George Washington, cannibalistically developed,” in Benito Cereno Delano remarks that the facial “physiognomy” of a mulatto slave on board the San Dominick “has features more regular than King George’s of England”

(219). The implicit argument made here is that may common metonymic identifiers of race actually refer to physical and mental qualities that transcend racial divisions.

Beyond reversals of identity categories, Melville challenges the monadic humanist model of the human subject—which Quijano identifies as being central to modernity—through his descriptions of liquid metempsychosis: the blending and interpermeation of identities found throughout his fiction. Moby Dick features many

74 depictions of maritime hybridity and the indeterminate complexity of personal and cultural identity. In his study of Moby Dick and Benito Cereno entitled African Culture and Melville’s Art (2009), Sterling Stuckey highlights “a certain fluidity of cultural thought and practice [that] occurs when Melville relates one culture to another, enabling him to imagine the flow of influences, to layer one beneath, or above, the other” (5).

This “layering” of subjectivities emerges quickly in the novel with the initial bedroom encounter between Ismael and Queequeg. This episode stands as a (delightfully) disorienting representation of a totally syncretic world: a stage on which all aspects of identity are blending. Later, Ishmael becomes the agent of intersubjectivity as he urges the sailors: “let us squeeze ourselves into each other,” as they squeeze the newly harvested sperm. Throughout the narrative, Moby Dick functions as an exercise in queering the Atlantic World, revealing and reveling in its marvelous creations, and voicing the supreme variegation of peoples encountered in ports and on the sea. The marriage of George Washington and a cannibal, like that of Ishmael and Queequeg, is a marvelous union. Ishmael becomes vaguely39 pagan and homosexual; there is no firm identity shift but rather an overflowing of self between the two characters: “a cosy loving pair” (66).40 Moby Dick contains an unusually clear and distinct model of hybridity in which metonymies of identity like sexuality and religion flow in and sometimes out of

39 A word that also means wave-like: “vaga” in Portuguese both means “vague” and is an antiquated word for “wave.” The English word probably comes from the French vague, which is commonly used to refer to waves of the sea. 40 The fact that, at the beginning of Moby Dick, two masculine sailors of different races are married offers perhaps the best example of the degree to which Melville anticipates progressive attitudes of the twenty - first century. Among canonical, white authors Melville’s writing contains the least ambiguous recognition of the rights of people of color and queer sexuality. 75 individual subjects without being bound to an essence. Stuckey recognizes that Melville has “in the act of creating, actually fused characters into being, both in Moby Dick and

Benito Cereno”—but this fusion is not static (5). There is a spilling over of identities like liquid from solid containers: the liquid is being, the containers are the definitions of human ontology. Through his chiasmic thinking and love Ishmael transcends his own categories of self and the categories that distinguish (separate) the cultures of Ismael and

Queequeg—of center from periphery.

An epic of imperialist seduction, Moby Dick contains a heteroglossia of beliefs about race, and, while insisting on cultural relativism, Ishmael occasionally makes colonialist remarks that align people of color with savagery and inferiority. Contrary to the repeated inversions of the valuation of whiteness and blackness, in “The Line,”

Ishmael declares that Manilla rope is “much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp,” because “hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold” (227). Immediately prior to this remark, the narrative solicits the special attention of the reader by parenthetically asserting that “there is an aesthetics in all things” (ibid). Such a note permits the reader to extend the following description as metaphor to other aspect of the world, such as human skin color.

In this passage, then, Ishmael parrots a classic and non-relativist racist aesthetic, which is wholly inconsistent with his thinking in the previous two hundred pages.

In the infernal chapter that describes “The Try-Works,” Ishmael’s rhetoric seems to regress into conventional attitudes of white superiority and associations of darker skin

76 with both savagery and evil. Not surprisingly, the “the pagan harpooneers” operate the try-works, which is a kind of kiln found on deck and used to process the spermaceti. The entire chapter bears the unmistakable ambience of a hellish rite, and the harpooneers are painted as evil priests. Ishmael highlights “their tawny features” and “the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth” while he recalls that “they narrated to each other their unholy adventures,” and that “their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace” (327). Ishmael’s demonic vision widens until he glimpses the ship, “the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul” (327). Melville deliberately suffuses Ishmael’s recollection of the experience with classically xenophobic language, assuring that this attitude, which is directly contrary to Ishmael’s thinking throughout most of the novel, stands out.

The fact that Ishmael is uneven in his beliefs regarding race and culture may suggest that the paramount quest of Moby Dick is not Ahab’s pursuit of the whale, but rather the narrator’s becoming Ishmael: his acquisition of the outsider perspective that allows him to transcend the hegemonic prejudice of the West. Looking back on the events of the novel, the narrator writes from an enlightened perspective that he only acquired through the experiences he relates. In “The Try-Works” the narrator describes his thoughts and feelings as they occurred at the time of the voyage, and Melville is careful to create this distance between the Ishmael’s attitude on that past night on the

77

Pequod and his attitude in the present of narration. Immediately following the previous quote, Ishmael marks his distance from his feelings on that night, explaining, “So it seemed to me as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship of the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others” (ibid). The narrator seems to be suggesting that the dark turn of his mind at the time colored his vision and constituted the

“fiend shapes” of the harpooners. In the final paragraph of the chapter, after one of the most brilliant allusive passages in the novel, Ishmael further renounces his past state of mind , “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness” (328).

Ishmael had emerged from a state of darkness into one of illumination, in which the nonwhite races appear beautiful and savagery universal. Benito Cereno also shares this basic structure: the American captain moves from the mental darkness of racialism to a sudden revelation of the cleverness of the African slaves.

Benito Cereno’s primary message is a critique of racialism, and its mode is that of black theater, a skilled performance by the slaves in revolt that sets in relief the irony of

Captain Delano’s sympathetic racial essentialism. A common theme and trope throughout these works, in Melville’s story of slave revolt the tension of the situation derives from the white subject’s inability to comprehend the performativity of the black

78 subjects. Black performativity41, which necessarily defies the preconceptions of black peoples as simple or naïve, challenges the racialist classifications dominated the public ideology of the nineteenth century West. The racist mind necessarily fails to engage with the irony of the black performance, at least in part because the racist perspective denies the black subjects the depths and subtleties required for irony. There is no recognition of the complexities of double-consciousness nor the cultural aesthetics that black subjects have developed in the context of the Transatlantic order.

The proud romanticism of Captain Delano seduces the reader of noble sentiments and affirms a racialist understanding of humanity, only to be obliterated by the revelation of black performance at the end of the novella. Delano’s romantic associations pull himself and the reader away from the frightening truth masked by the performance of the black cast on the slave ship. Benito Cereno is more than anything else, a tail of Delano’s ontological confusion: his failure to interpret the situation at hand arises from his inability to transcend his superficial ontology which denies the black agency which in truth drives the entire plot. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Melville’s naïve American captain has lost his orientation to the natural and moral world. Alluding to the “throats unslaked, with black lips baked” of Coleridge’s mariners, the starving, disoriented crew and slaves of the San Dominck in Benito Cereno report having “lain tranced without wind; their

41 Scholar Geoffrey Sanborn also recognizes the performativity of the racial other present in Moby Dick when the harpooners act as if they might devour the terrified Dough-Boy (15). In “The Cabin-Table,” Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, perceive the anxiety of the white cabin boy and play up the image of the non-white cannibal in one of the novel’s best comedic scenes. The scene is discussed in a fascinating section on the subaltern’s exploitation of stereotypes through mimicry.

79 provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked” (165).

Delano is adrift at sea and in thought, a congruence of perdition between the protagonist’s ontological categories and physical, aesthetic environment. Melville’s novel of slave revolt is a dramatic story of uncertainty, of surface and depth, of the mind lost at sea and failing to apprehend the modernity in which it sails.

In opposition to the fixity of essentialist notions of identity, Benito Cereno features a remarkable representation of black performativity. The question of performance constitutes one the most broad and fascinating areas of Afro-American studies, and scholars now produce rich studies of topics in black culture such as theater and dance, mimicry and minstrelsy. Even in Melville’s late-colonial texts, black performance holds an important place in the narrative, evident in the theatrical scenes from Moby Dick (discussed above) and especially the performance that constitutes most of Beneito Cereno. With the relation between performativity and human identity popularized in academic scholarship by Judith Butler’s writing, Butler’s theory did much to establish the vocabulary of performativity in studies of identity. Although Butler’s original work was primarily concerned with gender, the performative theory of identity can be applied to any metonym of identity, certainly race. Butler’s performativity seems to develop out of her training in Existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and

Nothingness and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a philosophy which frequently reverses the long-affirmed Platonic metaphysical principle of essence before existence

(Butler 519). The existentialist inversion of traditional metaphysics gives primacy to

80 existence and denies any a priori essence to things; the human being’s identity becomes what it is and does, rather than an embodiment of an essential character. Such a philosophy necessarily undermines racialist thinking and points to the anti-racist power of performance. Yet Delano, the naïve white Yankee, fails to see the play for what it is because his tender racialist beliefs negate the performativity and complexity of black subjects.

Delano’s attitude toward the African type (to him uniform) is constantly one of admiration, but his praises reveal the dangers of essentialism. Enhancing the effect of the story, Melville critically raises the question of racial essentialism through tropes that have been at the center of the aesthetic discourses of both hegemonic coloniality but also post- colonial writers and Black Modernisms. The musicality of peoples of African descent, for instance, often functioned as a positive, unifying trope for black aesthetic production in the twentieth century. Captain Delano sees “a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune,” yet this compliment should not be separated for a wider ideology of biological essentialism which supports it (212). Delano`s eulogy of musicality proceeds and quickly bears the fundamental error of his misapprehension. He mistakes the slaves’ subtle dramatic performance for a natural and ontological behavioral essence: “When to this [the harmonious and musical nature] is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of bland attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors…” (212). Benito Cereno demonstrates the error in both

81 sides of racial essentialism and the way Western thought has deceived itself as to the nature of the various peoples unified and hierarchized under its conceptualization of humanity. Here the error is presented through the distance of dramatic irony that exists between the narrator and the plot of Melville’s story, between the fabula and szujet—the two realities of truth and illusion juxtaposed through the reading of the text.

For almost the entire narrative section the reader encounters only the “tableau,” a remarkable revolutionary theater that showcases Babo’s masterful histrionics, even though his true maneuvers and those of his fellow slaves are not related until the deposition presented at the end. These two leaders have been holding frequent council in order to carefully execute their revolt—they are sophisticated political strategists and not simple, primitive creatures. We learn that Cereno’s great friend Aranda, the owner of the slaves and other cargo, was murdered only after careful deliberation and to dispassionate, calculated purposes. The skeleton of Cereno’s friend Aranda is used by

Babo to erect a symbol of warning to Cereno and the Spanish crew. The remains replace an image of Columbus—rewriting the myth of European exploration of the New World from the glorious to the macabre—and Babo constructs a pun on the ship’s motto,

“follow your leader,” as a threat to anyone who would resist his revolt. With his morbid substitution, Babo rewrites the discovery myth and suggests that gruesome death has been its legacy. Quite the opposite of Delano’s racialist image of blackness, Babo is clever and even sinister in his reclamation of power: “Babo asked him whose skeleton that was and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white’s” (245). None

82 of Babo’s ironic and playful language is explained in the deposition that concludes the story, perhaps because it was lost on Cereno, or simply left to the reader to decipher. In any event, Babo’s plan is loaded with cunning, significance, and wit.

The primary symbol on the San Domick—“the principle relic of faded grandeur”—is a carved shield that centrally features “a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writing figure, likewise masked” (164). In a text that constantly blends regular irony with dramatic irony, this image of the dual masks provides an allegory for the novella. The roles assigned to this image at the beginning of the novel now reverse: the writhing figure, the reader learns near the end, is actually

Cereno or white colonizers more generally, and the “dark satyr” now becomes Babo,

Atufal, and the slaves. The leader of the slaves who plays the role of Cereno’s valet,

Babo ejects ironic allusions to the revolt throughout the narrative, but these deeper meanings are not glimpsed by Delano. The strange encounter in the liminal maritime space ultimately reveals that neither colonizer nor colonized are what they are believed to be, and the master’s distinction between master and slave is premised on a false ontology, a self-serving lie. Skin, like masks, do not reveal the nature of the subject, and the text’s symbols of coloniality reveal the fallacies of colonialist philosophy.

Consistent with the critique of phrenology and physiognomy present in Moby

Dick, Captain Delano’s judgment of human beings proves erroneous when he derives it from the physical appearance of others. In one instance, rather than nurturing his well- found suspicions with regards to Cereno, Delano allows assuages himself by

83 contemplating the shape of Cereno’s head: “he was struck by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as well as ennobled about the chin by the beard. Away with suspicion. He was a true hidalgo Cereno” (187). This time in reference to the Spanish Captain instead of the slaves, Delano is once again fooled by appearance, unable to see past surface illusions and ideological masks. The positivist ambition of reading the soul on the body leads, once more, into misunderstanding.

In Benito Cereno, Melville dramatizes the very problem of the white confronting the complexity of “the black.” The American captain’s misinterpretation of the scene in

Benito Cereno illustrates the fallacy in all essentialist ontologies of the human and gestures toward a performative theory of the self. Captain Delano embodies Fanon’s statement that “the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him” (BSWM 2). Delano’s idyllic vision of the slaves aboard the San Dominick entirely misconstrues their nature by simplifying and fixing it. In Black Skin, White Masks,

Fanon cleverly terms the difficult to encapsulate Western order of racism as “the epidermalization” of a structure of power and values (43). Fanon’s neologism may serve as a proper name for the construction of race that came to be the primary metonymy of the subject in the political order of the West during Colonialism. Race became the dominant sign of society, and the signifier of white or black established the individual’s place in the world in spite of the fluid and variable signified. The true fallacy of racism is that it is violent metonymy in which the designation of a race—through skin color, hair,

84 wealth, lineage, etc.—is given to be essential and is extended to explain the entire subject, determining their every thought and action. In his introduction, Fanon defines the legacy of racism as “centuries of incomprehension,” intimating that the foundation of racism is misunderstanding, a failure to read the text of the world. Racialism is indeed an epistemological failure; the employment of (inaccurate: black people are not black, white people are not white, Asians are not yellow) skin color as a signifier of any other property is fundamentally a misunderstanding of causality and the constitution of human beings.

Delano’s “weakness for negroes,” mostly manifested in idyllic admiration, exhibits the way that racialist notions usually result in racism. Praise of naturalness implies a lack of sophistication and civilization (even if viewed with nostalgia by the civilized). Throughout the principle narrative, the blacks are animalized by the narrator’s manifestation of Captain Delano’s ideology. The captain’s eyes delight in the simple beauty of the ship’s black women, who are for the captain “naked nature,” a kind of uncivilized innocence that is the embodiment of romantic nostalgia (198). The Captain’s reflections on the docility and stupidity of the black race “deepened his confidence and ease” and turn him ever away from the deeper truth surrounding him in the form of rebellion.

The moment when he is relieved from his anxiety by glimpsing “a slumbering negress” and “her wide-awake fawn” provides the most acute example of Delano’s zoomorphism of blackness. The Captain is pleased and calmed by the “natural sights” of the slave women, whose primitive beauty he extolls. For Delano, these women are

85 virtuous insofar as they represent “naked nature;” they are “unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves” (198). Here Delano engages in flattering racialist reduction of the black female subject. The inventive effect of Benito Cereno develops from the inverted subversion of positive racial stereotypes maintained by the sympathetic

American. In praise, Delano still degrades blackness; and this reduction, Melville’s novel illustrates, is an error. Ultimately, Delano’s ideology condemns the black race as

“too stupid” and of “a limited mind” (201, 212). The irony, of course, is that Delano bears the liability of a limited mind, weighed down by racial essentialism. He fails to think, to recognize the potential for revolt on the San Dominick, just as French planters made the same intellectual error on Saint Domingue, and at the same time (1799).

Eventually, the “mask [is] torn away,” and Delano sees the reality of slave revolt that has been concealed by the theater of the slaves (231).

Benito Cereno dramatizes the French imagining of the Haitian revolution.

Melville’s drama of revolt invokes the Haitian revolution throughout the story. In each case, the white ontology of blackness misinterpreted the reality by projecting a reductive essence onto people of color. The overthrow of French power in Saint-Domingue was not represented in the French imaginary, it was unthinkable. In reference to the Haitian revolt, Michel-Rolph Truillot outlines the way in which the West’s philosophical system could not incorporate the idea of the revolt of Saint-Domingue prior to its occurrence; that the confluence of events between 1791 and 1804 were “unthinkable facts in the framework of Western thought” (82). Melville’s drama of slave revolt on the San

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Dominick unfolds through the same conceptual blockage embodied in Captain Delano.

The American captain—a most well-meaning and unsuspicious man—encounters brief, dim suspicions, but his thinking is never able to turn the corner of recognizing, of seeing the reality of revolt and organized black resistance. Through the fallacy of Delano’s perspective, Melville’s Benito Cereno pointedly introduces complexity into the Africanist literature of the United States, undermining stereotypes of pro and anti-slavery ideology.

As for Conrad, the contradictions and ambiguity in his presentation of racialist thinking are precisely what generate the revelatory force of his novels: what the reader needs “to see” is the incongruence between the foregrounded label “Nigger” and the regal characterization of James Wait. If Melville’s characters exceed racialist expectation and even revolt against it, Conrad’s James Wait will directly confront racist terminology and demonstrate its violent misrepresentation of the black subject.

As the ship and setting of Benito Cereno off the Chilean coast connect epistemological failures of individual prejudice to the transatlantic slave trade and international imperial politics, Moby Dick’s navigations of the mobility of subjectivity and the instability of cultural difference are frame through fundamental symbolic allusions to slavery and imperial conquest. It remains largely unrecognized that the greatest American novel begins with an invocation of slavery and ends with an image of the slave ship. With “Call me Ishmael,” the narrator identifies himself as an outsider— bestowing his unique perspective throughout the novel—as well as with a fundamental

Judeo-Christian slave archetype: Abraham’s first son by Hagar the slave, later cast out by

87 the jealous Mistress of the house. Ahab commands the Pequod, a floating allusion to seventeenth century Pequod Indian Wars of New England. As this symbol sinks below the “great shroud of the sea” with Tashtego (the harpooner and symbolic representative of the Native Americans) hammering the “red flag” of American bloodshed into the top of the mast, another rises in the novel’s half-page epilogue—a floating coffin—to mark the slave trade. In the novel’s brief epilogue marked by a line from Job (God’s tortured servant), a floating coffin buoys Ishmael to safety after the rest of the crew parishes. The term “floating coffin,” was common slang for the slave ship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Without explicitly mentioning slavery, this final image synthesizes the earlier commentaries made throughout Moby Dick on slavery surrounding Pip and the

“motley crew”42 of color that labors to secure the mad fortune of whiteness represented by Ahab’s absurd pursuit of the white whale. Suffering for the mirage of white civilization (this is why white Moby Dick appears first as a phantom), the whiteness of the whale contrasts with the crew of color, and the laborers of color that sustain43 maritime commerce are condemned to the heaving waves of torment by the avarice of white hegemony. The white whale is like the ivory of Heart of Darkness—an invented idol of white civilization that enslaves the other races by dictating the world’s labor.

White colonialism pursues a wrongheaded and fantastical goal, subjugates, and, mingling the red and the black, destroys the other races in the name of this pursuit—this is the plot

42 This is the term Rediker and Linebaugh use to describe the “mobility and multi-ethnicity” of maritime society (Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism 5). A hallmark of Melville’s maritime fiction, the characters aboard Conrad’s Narcissus also provide a particularly good example of a motley crew. 43 At one point in Moby Dick, the white second mate Stubb literally stands on top of the African harpooner Dagoo in order to hunt a whale. 88 of Moby Dick and the tragedy of modernity that Melville tells throughout his maritime fictions.

“Narcissus” and the Birth of Conrad’s homo Duplex Technique

Conrad’s “Narcissus” developed within the late-nineteenth century transatlantic social problematic in which the question of the citizenry of black subjects after abolition became central to Western societies. This novella, which Conrad said cemented his vocation as an author, tells the tragic story of an eponymous black protagonist, who despite his heroic proportions is unable to find his place in maritime society. Yet, as much as the title character James Wait, “Narcissus” depicts the attitudes of the crew that surrounds him: the novel functions as an aesthetic meditation on the motivations and effects of racialist thinking in hegemonic white-supremacist culture as well as the techniques of power and modes of discourse that sustained the racial hierarchy of the post-abolition Atlantic. The novel functions as a reorienting heterotopia in that it simultaneously alludes to slavery and positions the black worker away from slavery in a station of relative equality as a sailor on a ship bound for England. Jimmy dies before the ship completes its course from Bombay to London, and the setting on the ship positions the Afro-Caribbean protagonist in a space of unusual freedom that simultaneously invokes a legacy of bondage. The free black of the nineteenth century ship shares his workspace with lower class whites, and as a multicultural encounter in which racism flows north and south “Narcissus” depicts the evolution of racist ideology in response to

89 socioeconomic and demographic changes of industrialized and reterritorialized modernity.

Unlike the novella itself which Conrad feared would fail to land “like a stone falling in water…gone and not a trace shall remain,” Conrad scholars have always been attracted to the preface to “Narcissus.” Taken as a kind of aesthetic manifesto akin to

Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, critics often cite Conrad’s statements in the preface as explanatory emblems of his technique, using his stated desire ‘to make the reader see’ as a tool for reading the darkness surrounding Marlow in the following two masterpieces that have cemented Conrad’s legacy in prose. “It even seems easier, somehow,” as Michael North suggests in The Dialect of Modernism, “to consider this brief essay as prefatory to a whole new century than to the novel of which it was an afterthought” (37). As explained in the introduction, statements from Conrad’s preface outlining his ethics of illumination are central to my elaboration of nineteenth century maritime literature, and this chapter seeks reconnect the famous preface with the infamous novel and the three that follow. North’s complaint points to a larger critical disintegration with respect to Conrad in that the rare scholars that do analyze

“Narcissus” generally treat it in isolation from its preface, but perhaps more significantly, without relating it to the other novels of Conrad’s great period of maritime works that it inaugurates: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Typhoon.44 Of the seemingly innumerable book-length studies of Conrad, almost all explicitly treat the latter three

44 One might also include Nostromo in this list, but, although it takes place in South America and involves both British and American colonialist financiers, I have left the novel following Typhoon out of the dissertation because of its popularity and lack of emphasis on the maritime. 90 works, yet, conversely, very few incorporate “Narcissus” into their studies. Heart of

Darkness, for instance, should be read together with “Narcissus” in order to fully comprehend Conrad’s exploration of race in the racist hegemony of the West during a period that is both post-abolition but also the zenith of imperialism and scientific racism.

This section of the dissertation endeavors to situate “Narcissus” at the heart of Conrad’s maritime exposure of coloniality and distinguish it among these other works as placing particular emphasis on the theme of race both in terms of blackness and whiteness.

Further contributing to the confusion surrounding The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

(1898) are Conrad’s use of racist language in this and other novels, but also the problematic representations of blackness found in Heart of Darkness. Although the latter work was written after the novel that features the Afro-Caribbean protagonist James

Wait, readers of “Narcissus” almost always encounter Heart of Darkness (1899) first, so their experience with the former shapes their reading of the latter. Similarly, the sway of already established critical opinion greatly limits scholarly perspectives and perpetuates the partial interpretation Conrad’s work. The most well-known example of this phenomenon centers around Chinua Achebe’s deeply negative criticism of Conrad and notorious remark that he was “a bloody racist” (“An Image of Africa” 9). As a result of this complicated problematic of expectations, “Narcissus” has remained the most poorly understood of Conrad’s works in academic scholarship through the present day. My argument for the importance of “Narcissus” to an understanding of all these works

(including Heart of Darkness) constitutes the cornerstone of my larger objective with

91 respect to Conrad, which is to sketch a coherent ‘classic maritime’ phase of his work that includes “Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Typhoon. Together, these texts accomplish a consistent and interrelated project of exposing coloniality as a fundamental but often invisible component of western civilization—an illumination that could only occur at or across the sea. In addition to their revelation of transnational politics and ethics, these narratives sound the mobility of the subject and “Narcissus,” the first in the series, places special emphasis on the fluid processes that construct subjectivity and the interpellation of identity through social discourse.

As Casarino’s chapter on “Narcissus” as a model heterotopia recognizes, the ship’s name reveals it to be a mobile mirror of the British empire, a synecdoche through which Britain may examine itself, its whiteness and blackness, civility and squalor (26).

Like Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo, “Narcissus” reflects the West’s blackness that developed as a result of the slave trade. Jimmy comes from St. Kitts in the Caribbean heart of the traffic, but he also defies racialist stereotype and represents the refined members of western society—he breaks the alignment between whiteness and civility, as does

Donkin. Thus, the floating mirror functions as a heterotopia by cultivating new perspectives on the constitution of the West, which includes complex identities refracted through class, race, and language. James is a descendant of slaves, but, like Equiano, he has mastered the western identity that racialist ontology associated exclusively with whiteness; whereas white characters like Donkin embody positions of servitude and inferiority. Deviating from conventional social roles, the ship projects a reality

92 incongruous with colonialist ontologies and therefore capable of reorienting western values and beliefs.

Though published as Children of the Sea in the United States, the title The Nigger of the “Narcissus” forces an immediate consideration of derogatory racial signifiers and urges the reader to evaluate the power of racist address and the linguistic space of people of color within Western society. In his essay “Force of Law,” Derrida proposes that “To address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it seems, the condition of all possible justice,” though Derrida goes on to assert the impossibility of attaining to such justice (949). A pessimist idealist, Conrad’s work dramatizes the injustice of the word faced by the black subject at the turn of the twentieth century, denying his identity at the levels of character, narrator, and even the book’s title. Despite Jimmy’s urbanity and the fact that he sails towards London—the heart of nineteenth century anti-racist ideology— his blackness and his origins in slavery follow him through the appellation “the nigger.”

Through different levels of voices, the text oscillates between equality and discrimination, between love and hate of Jimmy and the reader must negotiate her own beliefs as the text wavers on the question of the place of the black subject in western society.

As the ship reflects an image “us”—the British empire—the novel represents the nation as a seaborne vehicle of transnational labor, a space both isolated and confined that stages new processes of social stratification in light of the new figure of post-colonial

Britain. As occurs in Caminha’s novel, “Narcissus” reconfigures markers of identity like

93 race, dialect, and occupation so that these characteristics may be reassigned to unconventional characters. Floating in isolation from the nation (Casarino), the ship can neither be absorbed into the traditional narrative of white Albion nor the liberationist identity born of abolition: the “Narcissus” embodies contradictions, as a heterotopia.

Sailing from Bombay to London, the ship represent the beautiful and the ugly of the empire: “she was the most magnificent sea-boat ever launched;” she bore ragged and dirty men, prone to touching solidarity and despicable insults (338). The jarring description of the “repulsive mask” of Wait’s face constitutes an important part of the novel’s exploration of racial aesthetics, which follows the pattern of duality structuring the text. Like Equiano’s narrative and Melville’s Benito Cereno, “Narcissus” interrogates conventional notions of beauty and ugliness, which are shown to be conditioned by racial ideology and ethnocentrism. Yet in spite of Casarino’s effective elucidation of the Narcissus as heterotopia, his chapter does not address the relation between this symbolic setting and the individual identity and race of the protagonist. At the center of these imperial contraries lies Afro-descendent James Wait, who speaks the

King’s English in the Indian Ocean and finds himself surrounded by lowly whites and tempests. The titular man and ship are inextricably linked: the novel’s heterotopic maritime setting facilitates the literary interrogation of the dialectic of Wait’s identity as both individual and social interpellation.

Despite his relatively equal status as employee of the Narcissus and his evident superiority over white crew members, Wait remains bound by his relation to slavery,

94 inescapably “the nigger.” Jimmy’s origin in the text invokes the convention of natal alienation characteristic of slave narratives: his name on the ship’s registry is illegible and his answer “Wait!” is not initially recognized as a name. His label, “the Nigger,” further negates his identity, which is the central issue of the narrative and is symbolized through the opaque storm. Jimmy’s fatal end also echoes the tragic fate of countless slaves at sea: thrown overboard into the silent deep, into total invisibility. Wait was born in St. Kitts—known as “the mother colony of the West Indies” for being one of the earliest colonies settled by French and British colonists, whose settlement required a campaign of extermination of the Kalinago Indians and provided a Caribbean base of operations for these North Atlantic empires. Conrad’s protagonist is a highly symbolic cipher for complex British history and the transnational body of the post-industrial empire. Jimmy’s movements embody the strange migrations of British coloniality between London, the Caribbean, and Asia—a rerouting of the British importation of

Indian coolies to West Indian colonies immediately following the abolition of black slave labor in the 1830’s. James is the quintessential, indeterminate child of coloniality, a reflection of the colonial self returned to the colony for reevaluation. “Narcissus” and

Lord Jim share a doubled protagonist—James “Jimmy” Wait is an analogue to Tuan

Jim—and both depict the epistemological limits of the orbiting secondary characters in an impossible pursuit of a legible ontology of the protagonist. Both Jim-novels deconstruct racial categories and are self-portraits of the British empire through the realist filters of western prejudice.

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The contradictions of “Narcissus” may be reorganized as evidence of problematic of relations framing race, labor, social inclusion, and the instrumental adoption of racialist thinking in the fin-de-siècle Atlantic world. As in the fiction of Melville and in the theory of Cesaire, Conrad’s works including “Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, Lord

Jim, and Typhoon all bring to light the intersection of racism and the maritime labor of

British imperialism. Nostromo and The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (along with Lord Jim in a slightly different manner) both exhibit a title illustrating the master’s violent designation of the subaltern eponymous hero. This technique was employed two years before Conrad’s “Narcissus” in Brazilian writer Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo, as well as in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig from 1859. Conrad’s narratives depict James and

Gianbattista, but these men are known by the names imposed upon them by the master class, the names that possess their labor-value and determine their being-for-society.

Perhaps a testament to the complexity of a work focused on the way that westerners read race, the novel has been subject to a surprising array of critical readings.

In his chapter on “Narcissus” in The Dialect of Modernism (2001), Michael North notes the incredible reticence on the theme of race that has characterized scholarship of the novel. North’s study of the relations between race and language in modernist literature bemoans the observation that “it is hard to find a critique of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ that takes seriously the race of its title character” (37). Most notably, race in Conrad’s work is given extremely little attention until the 1960’s, and really does not become a major topic of inquiry until the 1980’s and the emergence of first-generation postcolonial

96 criticism. From the beginnings of post-colonial criticism until quite recently,

“Narcissus” has been derided as a racist and insignificant work, but the current tide of

Conrad criticism has begun to recuperate this pivotal novel in Conrad’s literary career.

Some recent scholarship on Conrad glimpses new complexities in his treatment of race and relations of coloniality which demand rereadings of marginalized texts like

“Narcissus.”

A brief account of the more recent examples of disparaging criticism will allow a more clear outline of the issues of reception at stake with regards to the novel. Nigel

Messenger’s article “'We did not want to lose him': Jimmy Wait as the Figure of

Abjection in Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (2001) delivers a thorough and uncomplicated judgment of the novel as racist and views the representation of the black protagonist as an example of the abject, invoking Kristeva’s definition of the term. He contextualizes the novel through the popularity of degeneration theory in mid-1890’s

England, as well as Conrad’s desire to be accepted by the conservative publisher W.E.

Henley. In discussing critical reactions to the racism found within the novel and in its title, Messenger approvingly cites Cedric Watts’ remark from his The Deceptive Text

(1984) that there is a “contrast” between the representation of blackness in “Narcissus” and “the more radical, skeptical and humane Heart of Darkness and Nostromo”

(Messenger 67). On the contrary, the opposite is true: the Africans in Heart of Darkness are greatly dehumanized (though as a result of European imperialism) whereas James

Wait is represented as a “superb” human being amidst the rabble of poor-white

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Europeans aboard the Narcissus. This point of comparison on the representation of blackness and whiteness in “Narcissus” and Heart of Darkness provides an invaluable lens for examining Conrad’s writing on race.

Messenger cites other scholars in support of his contention that “Wait’s portrayal draws on many stereotypes and prejudices” (ibid). Although there certainly are disturbing passages in the novel (most notably the first description of Jimmy: “a head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and flattened face—a face pathetic and brutal: the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive mask of a nigger’s soul”), James Wait is decidedly and crucially not represented as a black stereotype from the turn of the twentieth century. Messenger does correctly point to the way that the intellectual and literary climate at the end of the nineteenth century was deeply concerned with interrogating the edges of the human and that the “pessimistic implications of evolution,

'degeneration theory' and the new pseudo-science of criminal anthropology seem to reach a crescendo during this period” (68). Yet, in “Narcissus” it is not Jimmy’s humanity that is questioned by the narrator and crew, but is instead the squalid, ‘white trash’ figure of

Donkin, whose ontological status is debated and even denied by the crew. It is Donkin that the crew disdains and remonstrates, saying “you’re only a thing” (50). In the analysis of Jimmy and Donkin, Messenger’s reading of the novel fails and falls victim to his expectations of the novel’s racism. Instead, through its reversal of expectations, or reconstitution of the (stereo)typical social hierarchy, Conrad’s novel creates the space for a revaluation of racist thinking.

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Conrad’s dual reputation as both colonialist and counter-colonial writer stems in part from his fundamental technique of disrupting binary symbolism through the crossing and slippages of the symbolic referents. As central to Heart of Darkness as it is to

“Narcissus,” Conrad constructs duplicitous symbolism so as to require the reader to question the validity of symbolic associations: he instills the work with symbolic hybridity which frustrates easy interpretation and necessitates a constant revaluation of meanings in the textr. Conrad often executes this mystification by attaching whiteness and blackness to the same person or object. This duplicity—Conrad once referred to himself as homo duplex—generates much of the difficulty of Conrad’s fiction, a property which has led to both critical confusion and lasting fascination. While the novel’s title has stigmatized the book under an assumption of racism, the title functions as part of the complex play of racisms—directed by and towards both black and white characters—that fills the novel, whose Afro-Caribbean protagonist defies racial stereotypes through civility and mystery.

Implicating itself through its seemingly casual use of the word nigger, Conrad’s novel also satirizes the banal perpetuation of racism through which interpersonal exchanges reproduce social symbols. Reminiscent of Marlow’s sarcastic outrage in

Heart of Darkness, the narrative mocks the association of blackness with evil through the figure of the cook, a man whose religiosity is made the subject of ridicule throughout the novel. When Jimmy looks in to the cook’s quarters to greet him, he “boom[s] out inside a magnificent ‘Good evening, Doctor!,” which causes the cook to “[jump] up as if he had

99 been cut with a whip,” and later to report: “I thought I had seen the devil” (19). Aside from representing an inversion of the relation of the black character to slavery through the whip—a technique which recurs in “Narcissus,”—the passage illustrates the contrast between the reality of the black subject and his demonization. Though Wait seems to have been having a little fun by shouting his greeting to the “doctor,” his words are nothing but polite, and the cook’s connection of Jimmy with the devil can only be explained by racist prejudice and aversion. The novel contains a final allegory that subverts the conventionally negative symbolic value of blackness in Belfast’s response to

Jimmy’s death. After Wait’s corpse drops into the ocean, his shipmate Belfast weeps over his loss and laments that “He went for me, like a lamb,” which seems to cast Jimmy as a Christ figure (126). The last words spoken about him tearfully and lovingly link

Jimmy to Christ, perhaps as a sacrificial lamb marked by the stigma of blackness.

Ultimately, the meaning is rather obscure, and Conrad plays with manichean notions of good and evil through which racial identity is constructed.

Rather than abject or lowly, James Wait is noble—literally, he is tall and often placed in a superior position to the rest of the crew as the text abounds with tropes of his being above them. He is also eloquent and generous. There is a dignity in his bearing and speech not shared by the rest of the crew, and he gives clothing and food to the destitute Donkin45. The representation of Jimmy throughout the novel inverts the white- supremacist hierarchy of race, evident, for instance, when the narrator describes him as

45 A comic analogue for James Wait is Sheriff Bart from the film Blazing Saddles, whose elegant attire and speech (he sports a Gucci saddle bag) contrasts sharply with the ridiculed racists that fumble and curse around him. 100 being “like a sick tyrant overawing a crowd of abject but untrustworthy slaves” (30).

Wait’s voice, too, is repeatedly characterized as “sonorous,” in distinction to the animalized vocals of many white characters on the ship. As will become evident through an analysis of the question of dialect in the work, the foil to Jimmy’s sophistication is found in the destitute and grotesque Donkin, a white Englishman whom Jimmy calls

“East-end trash46” (38). The most remarkable facet of Messenger’s misrepresentation of the novel is that the characteristics he attributes to Jimmy in building his case for racist stereotyping are precisely those features I find attached to Donkin, in contrast to James

Wait.

When Conrad’s Afro-Caribbean protagonist calls Donkin “East-End trash” he employs a white racial slur, which effectively inverts and destabilizes the racist logic of the West. The site of the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, London’s East-End had a large immigrant population in the late-nineteenth century and was a symbol of fin-de-siècle urban decadence. If Jimmy is right that he is “East-End trash,” than Donkin has come from a lower-class London immigrant neighborhood famous for dire poverty, crime, and public protests and uprisings that included the “Bloody Sunday” revolt of 1887. A ridiculous agitator for the people, the ragged Donkin in Narcissus makes multiple complaints of labor exploitation that he has faced throughout his life in the British empire. Donkin is probably an Irish immigrant, and, along with another character’s use of the term “squarehead” to refer to a Scandinavian sailor, he is an example of racist

46 Another important element of Conrad’s novel is the fact that Jimmy talks back against racial prejudice, asserting his superiority to Donkin at various points in the novel. He is not subservient and is quite self- assured. 101 denigration of whites that characterized much of the West in the late-nineteenth century, including Britain and Brazil. Latin America and Europe have historically held a far more nuanced conception of racial ontology than the largely binary racial ideology now associated with the United States, and it is important to remember that even in America whiteness was a heavily contested category in the nineteenth century, which often excluded ethnicities like the Irish and Italians as not quite white. The sophisticated Afro-

Caribbean Wait dismisses Donkin for being from a white ghetto, even if in London—the miserable spawn of a naturalistic space of urban and racial degeneration that swarms with vice, crime, and filth. Like Equiano’s aversion to whiteness, “Narcissus” associates whiteness with the abject and undermines white superiority, which racist discourse often posited as ontological or natural.

The first conversation between Donkin and Jimmy immediately establishes the fundamental inequality between the two subaltern characters of the novel by exposing their great linguistic difference. Though his verbal distinction separates him from the crew more generally—the (white) first-mate Baker for example “grunt[s] ferociously,” inserting “Ough!” in between his sentences, like a gorilla—Wait’s eloquence is most effectively highlighted by the hilarious and almost incomprehensible dialect of Donkin

(20). The first interaction between the two chiasmic characters perhaps best illustrates the point, as Donkin begins in his usual mode of complaint:

There’s a blooming supper for a man…My dorg at ‘ome wouldn’t ‘ave it. It’s fit

enouf for you an; me. “Ere’s a big ship’s fo’c’sle!... Not a blooming scrap of

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meat in the kids I’ve looked in all the lockers…” The nigger stared like man

addressed unexpectedly in a foreign language. Donkin changed his tone: “Giv’ us

a bit of ‘baccy, mate,” he breathed out confidentially, I ‘aven’t ‘ad smoke or chew

for the last month. I am rampin’ mad for it. Come on, old man!” “Don’t be

familiar,” said the nigger. Donkin started and sat down on a chest nearby, out of

sheer surprise, “We haven’t kept pigs together,” continued James Wait in a deep

undertone. “Here’s your tobacco. (21)

Indeed, Jimmy’s elevation in this passage stands as a particular instance of the central linguistic dichotomy of the novel between “the nigger’s” proper elegance and the white crew’s broken and ridiculous dialect. With unfortunate irony, Michael North’s chapter on “Narcissus” in The Dialect of Modernism misses this most revealing difference of speech dialect, found in the fact that James speaks the most eloquent English on the boat.

Conspicuously, Wait is the only character besides Captain Allistoun that is not represented in dialect. He is linguistically (and, excluding his illness, physically) superior to the ignorant “children of the sea” that surround him on the Narcissus. In spite of being marked through racism both in the absence of his name on the crew list and his designation as “the nigger,” Wait’s persona subverts the expectations imposed by the word nigger that is ironically used to represent him in the title of the novel and in the discourse of the crew and narrator.

In addition to inversion of racial hierarchy between Jimmy and the crew, the novel illuminates the humanity of its Afro-Caribbean protagonist through his revelation

103 as a complex subject involved in existential questions. The humanity of James Wait presents itself most poignantly in his struggle with death, which Conrad later connects to personhood in a letter I examine in detail in chapter two (“[the African] shares with us the consciousness of the universe in which we live—no small burden”). Throughout most of the novel, Wait plays with the crew’s perception of his illness, but ultimately comes to deny the fact of its existence in a denial of death. Yet, there is one moment—one of the finest in Conrad’s fiction—where he glimpses the horror of his own mortality. After

Donkin taunts Jimmy that he will be dead any day now, Jimmy ends his artful illusion and confronts the terrible truth:

His eyes were terrified as though he had been looking at unspeakable horrors; and

by his face one could see that he was thinking of abominable things. Suddenly

with an incredibly strong and heartbreaking voice he sobbed out: Overboard!...

I!... My God!" (103).

Like Pip thrown into immensity in Moby Dick, or the disbelief of Crane’s correspondent in “The Open Boat,” James Wait’s encounter with the infinite abyss of death and sea stands as one of the most stirring examples of the sublime trope of oceanic annihilation.

Further, in all the works of Conrad’s classical period from “Narcissus” to Nostromo, the moment of Jimmy’s uncanny glimpse of death probably holds the most potential for empathy47. It is an unusually powerful moment of empathy for Conrad’s typically

47 Conrad’s fiction, certainly Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, rarely inspires empathy in the reader. Of course the evaluation of empathy in fiction is to a point extremely subjective, but the other character who I really feel is Mrs. Gould from Nostromo, and the combination of James Wait and Mrs. Gould seems rather significant in an author who tends to focus on white men. 104 detached writing, and one he repeats in the insuperable account of the storm in Typhoon.

The representation of Jimmy’s sensibility to mortality in “Narcissus” constitutes a powerful form of the humanity that critics like Ellison have rightly called for in the literary representation of blackness.

While critics like Messenger attribute the dualities in Conrad’s fiction to the

“contradictions and confusions of the time,” part of the ambiguity derives from Conrad’s duplicitous technique which demands that all elements of the text be scrutinized. It is undeniable that Conrad himself was immersed in these contradictions—that he is both a product and an enemy of racist thinking. Yet, the precise inversion of racist representation in “Narcissus,” coupled with the foregrounding of racist discourse both on the cover and in the pages of the novel, suggests that Conrad quite deliberately engaged his formal energies in subverting racist thinking through conflicts of heteroglossia that mix masks of racist rhetoric perspectivist critiques of racism. Such a project is also consistent with the deconstruction of whiteness and physiognomic thinking found in Lord

Jim. “Narcissus” contains easily quotable moments of racist description but spends far more lines subverting stereotypes and exposing the construction of racism in white supremacist society.

The import of Conrad’s writing in “Narcissus” and other novels is that by being immersed in this discord the reader is required to untangle the diverse elements and emerge with his or her own conclusions regarding race and racism and the mysteries of human behavior more generally. In both explicit dialogue and symbolism, a fundamental

105 indeterminacy surrounds James Wait for much of the novel. Wait’s self, like Jim’s is ultimately inscrutable, and the crew’s attempts to sound his essence are likewise futile.

The performativity and psychological opacity of Jimmy precludes the attempts to decipher his essence and fix his character. As the reader must encounter the protagonist through the reflections of other subjects, the central figure must be interpreted through shifting and sometimes contradictory perspectives. Conrad’s dialogic technique combines antagonistic attitudes that the reader must weigh and discriminate in order to establish his or her own conception of the theme. The result is often a dramatic juxtaposition, as seen here in what is the most remarkable sentence in the novel: “The nigger was towering, calm, cool, superb” (17). The latter is the most acute moment of the larger ambivalence that Conrad creates with the novel: the contrast between the derogatory word nigger and the flattering narrative depiction of the character James Wait.

The preceding quote may serve as a kind of synecdoche for the entire effect of reading the “Narcissus,” and it is this same passage that scholar Tom Henthorne highlights in order to support his notion of the Trojan horse, through which he explains

Conrad’s stylistic strategy in composing “Narcissus” and other texts. Henthorne’s book,

Conrad’s Trojan Horses: Imperialism, Hybridity, & the Postcolonial Aesthetic (2008), proposes a reading of “Narcissus” that concurs with my own view of the underlying redemption of blackness found in the novel. For instance, Henthorne uses the quote above as evidence that James Wait “is represented as being quite the opposite of [a] racist stereotype” (84). Henthorne’s analysis further coincides with my reading by asserting

106 that James is “extremely articulate” and that Donkin stands as his lowly antithesis (ibid).

Additionally, Henthorne implicitly engages with the criterion of the representation of blackness that I have borrowed from Ellison by asserting that “Wait, with all of his fear, pride, and anger, is represented as being very human” (88).

Henthorne offers a fascinating rationale for the critical misinterpretations of

Conrad by suggesting that Conrad intentionally misled superficial readers. In his introduction, Henthorne explains that “Narcissus” constitutes Conrad’s first fully-formed implementation of the narrative strategy he refers to as the Trojan horse: “a story whose deceptive surface enables it to reach readers who would reject overtly anti-imperialist works” (13). Henthorne’s argument is bolstered by a historicist examination of Conrad’s engagement with the art of publishing and W.E. Henley, as well as the author’s desire to attain a numerous readership. According to Henthorne’s research, sales of Conrad’s first two novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, suffered from the public’s ideological aversion to the explicit critiques of imperialism contained in those works.

The innovation of “Narcissus” and the Trojan horse strategy allowed Conrad “to cloak his radical, anti-imperialist politics,” or, in other words, to seduce conservative readers into a complicated and therefore instructive reading of race (11). Henthorne describes this narrative technique as employing dialogism and “intentional hybridity48” of

48 I obtained a copy of Henthorne’s work after preparing much of the present essay, and the discovery of a reading of “Narcissus” so attuned to my own—down to the citing of identical passages in the novel—had much to do with my emphasis on a chronological analysis of commentary and my conclusions as to the historical contingency of the critical process. Though I was already employing more well-known terms such as dialogism and heteroglossia, I do owe the use of Bakhtin’s formulation “linguistic/intentional hybridity” to Henthorne’s insightful work. 107 the kind theorized by Bakhtin (9,20). This form of narrative hybridity allows for the simultaneous voicing of different ideological perspectives, a perfect example of which lies in the quote “The nigger was towering, calm, cool, superb.” The formal property of narrative hybridity—inaugurated in “Narcissus”—generates the complexity and significance of the work. Its difficulty becomes its potential to stimulate thought in the reader and challenge the functioning of ideology upon which social problems like racism depend. In “Narcissus,” the reader must wade through the racialist thinking and racist terminology uttered by the title, the shifting narrator, and the secondary white characters.

Moving amongst these disparagements of blackness are flattering representations of the black protagonist and satirical subversions of racist viewpoints in the community around him. As in the racism of the novel, the history of its reception has been determined by prejudice, so that the theme of “Narcissus” has foreshadowed its critical fate, endowing the reading experience with a kind of performativity. Studying “Narcissus” with its reception history leads the reader to confront the origins and force of prejudice in the novel and in its criticism, which may be utilized to dismantle racism and superficial, uncritical thinking.

The Dangers of Blackness in Bom-crioulo

Like “Narcissus,” Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo (1895) is another novel of complicated heteroglossia that places opposing concepts and social attitudes in confrontation, providing a potentially powerful experience of reading that provokes

108 thought and reveals the contradictions of Brazilian ideologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Since Amaro is both black and homosexual, the novel contains a complex discourse of identity by placing at the center a subject with marginalized race and sexuality. However, because of its explicit connection to criminality in the novel, sexuality in Caminha’s novel will be examined in a later chapter and the theme of race discussed here.

Ellison’s complaint with regards to the absence of complexity in the representation of identity of color is not peculiar to the United States, rather, it is true of western literature more generally and especially of late-nineteenth century Brazil. The omission and simplification of blackness in the foundational literature of Brazil would become the focal point of early twentieth century Brazilian writers like Lima Barreto and

Jorge de Lima. If Brazilian Naturalism along with the often-racist Abolitionist literature brought the presence of blackness into national letters, the complexity of the Afro-

Brazilian subject remained absent in favor of (usually negative) stereotypes. While in some ways reproducing these racial reductions, Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo escapes the mire of naturalist stereotyping through the introduction of the “complex ambiguity of the human” into its black protagonist, Amaro. Though the society surrounding Amaro— the various human and institutional entities of power and social relation which gave him the nickname (“Good Negro/Good Nigger”)—forces his being into the stereotypical categories that suit their claims to power, the narrative offers a full (and fully human) character whose interpretation remains ambiguous both to the reader and to Amaro

109 himself. Crucially, the narrative provides the reader with extended glimpses into the thoughts of the black subject, devoting many pages to descriptions of Amaro’s emotional suffering and reasoning during the later chapters in which he is separated from his beloved and trapped in the asylum. With so many biographical factors—many of them stereotypes—surrounding his downfall, the reader cannot construct a simplistic causality to explain Amaro’s behavior. His self is not definite; it evolves and resists full account, emerging through its sustained psychological exploration by the narrator.

Racialist ontologies largely serve to reinforce order as affirmations of fixed, natural relationships in the world that in turn authorize material hierarchies, but racialist discourse operates through a semantic mobility that facilitates flexible categorization.

Ontological fixity serves to justify the position of hegemonic power, and to this end travels between a few different instrumental signs—stereotypes—so that the subaltern subject may fit the role of difference that the hegemonic subject requires at a particular moment in time. To this end, Bhabha’s account of the construction and treatment of the colonial other speaks to “the wide range of the stereotype… a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial power” (113). This phenomenon fills Caminha’s novel as the white characters reconstitute the identity of Amaro through variations of love and hate. It is this shifting, this instrumental repositioning of the signifier that allows the black subject to embody contradiction—representing both threat and simplicity, natural innocence and evil; or as Bhabha offers in a useful example: “both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants” (118). In the novel, Amaro occupies the

110 role of both “the good nigger” and the murderous degenerate. These manichean fixations are widespread in Brazilian literature—including some abolitionist texts—yet Caminha’s novel breaks from such a tradition in its representation of Amaro’s complexity and existential self-searching. The reader is privy to his habitation and (arguably unsuccessful) struggle to carve out an autonomous identity in the space between the extremes of good and evil.

On the surface, Bom-crioulo is indeed a racist work, especially since Amaro begins the novel as the noble savage and concludes it as the enraged murderer, thereby inhabiting both sides of the stereotype. However, there is an entire story in-between which reveals his subjection to a variety of social powers, his complex reactions to these forces, and his deep emotional being. Amaro’s confrontations with racism and his subjection as a black subject have not been given full account in critical evaluations of the novel, and it is the inattention to these details that allows for the overly simplistic critical statements that characterize Caminha scholarship. Unfortunately, the common placement of Bom-Crioulo within the Naturalist school further contributes to the abundance of deterministic readings that hide the novel’s complexity.

Precisely such an attempt to square Caminha’s novel with a genre narrative results in an extremely flawed reading by in David Brookshaw’s Race and Color in Brazilian

Literature (1986), which employs a quick account of the novel in order to describe

Brazilian Naturalism. To this end, he cites the trope of animalization, indeed a convention of Naturalism, yet only connects zoopomorphism to Amaro (not Carolina),

111 and does so with a quote that refers to the inhumaneness of captivity rather than any characteristic of Amaro himself (41). Brookshaw’s misreading stems from a desire to seamlessly locate the novel within his narrative of Brazilian Naturalism as a racist application of positivist (particularly Herbert Spencer’s) theories of biological hierarchy, which had continued the literary tropes of racism established in the previous generation of abolitionist literature. Race and Color in Brazilian Literature exemplifies the problematic of partial readings and their tendency to serve critical narratives.49

In the novel’s depiction of racism, oppressive power is made available to white society through the flexibility of values available for the interpellation of the person of color, which can be seen in Dona Carolina’s shifting relation to Amaro in the novel. He remains the good negro until he represents an obstacle to her volition, whereupon his virtues are turned to faults on the venomous tongue of Carolina. Through its romantic drama, Bom-crioulo demonstrates the way in which desire, or a will to power drives racialist ontologies. The master’s ontological designations of the subaltern subjects are revealed to be instrumentalist mythologizing. The shifting perspectives of judgment surrounding Amaro as black subject demonstrate, as well as any fiction, the power- serving production of morals and valuations that Nietzsche theorizes in his explication of

49 In addition to the naturalist bent, a baffling distortion of the novel arises from Brookshaw’s attempt to interpret Amaro’s sexuality through an abolitionist technique, claiming that Caminha “attributes Amaro’s homosexuality to slavery and the perversions and immortality of slave life” (39). Such a statement is mystifying since the novel contains no depiction of Amaro’s life as a slave or sexuality before joining the navy, merely giving a brief account of the fact that Amaro had escaped slavery “nobody knows from where [ninguém sabe donde]” (Bom-crioulo 38). One could, on the other hand, effectively argue that the Navy is responsible for Amaro’s “crimes.”

112 master and slave morality in On the Genealogy of Morals. In a particularly revealing parenthesis, Nietzsche illustrates the historical importance of the connection between power and naming:

The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to

conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the

rulers: they say “this is this and this,” they seal every thing and event with a sound

and, as it were take possession of it. (26)

Nietzsche’s insight into the power-function of naming provides an excellent explanatory tool for understanding the continuous micro-exercises of power through the production of racist (or any supremacist position, sexist, homophobic, etc,.) language. In both

“Narcissus” and Bom-crioulo naming serves the local accumulation of power of the secondary characters. Both novels contain invaluable interpretive potential for post- colonial and anti-racist theorization in their illustration of the way white subjects manipulate racist language in order to increase their power. Thus, in each novel we follow a noble (in the Nietzschean sense) black protagonist (that fact alone generated controversy surrounding the two novels when published in the mid-1890’s) who encounters divergent and contradictory signification by the white subjects around him.

Thus, when Amaro comes to be an obstacle to the desires of his friend Carolina, her words for him become “dyed in another color, interpreted in another fashion, seen in another way by the venomous eye” (Nietzsche 40).

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In a full and direct inversion of her previous signification of her black friend,

Carolina’s sexual interest displaces her estimation of Amaro, who has become a threat to her out of which her antipathy grows: her racism is purely a manifestation of interest or personal desire. Her lack of racial prejudice-prior to the love triangle—is established when she is introduced into the novel, both in her platonic love for Amaro and her lack of discrimination with regard to her tenants. After greeting Amaro with repeated embraces, the reader learns that Dona Carolina lived by renting rooms, and “paid no attention to color, nor class or profession [Não fazia questão de côr e tampouco se importava com a classe ou profissão do sujeito],” and, specifically, she rents to a black family from

Angola. (86-87). Yet, in spite of her early lack of prejudice and admiration of Amaro, her desire easily attaches itself to racist stereotypes through which she can condemn her old friend and invalidate his feelings. Once Amaro has been reassigned to another ship and she has begun her relationship with Aleixo, Carolina intercepts Amaro’s love letter to

Aleixo and is astounded that homosexual passion could be long-lasting: “especially from a black man, good God, especially an immoral and repugnant nigger like that! [E logo um negro, Senhor Bom-Jesus, logo um crioulo imoral e repugnante daquele!]” (173). It is at this moment that Carolina exhibits a full reversal and Caminha’s novel reveals the awful combinatory force of personal desire and racist ideology. For it was precisely the moral integrity and loyalty of Amaro—“her protector”—that she extolled earlier in the novel:

She had esteemed Good-Nigger since the day that he, disinterestedly, by the luck

of providence, saved her from dying at knife point…it was worth almost kissing

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the sailor’s feet, because she had never seen so much courage and

disinterestedness! [Estimava Bom-Crioulo desde o dia em que êle,

desinteressadamente, por um acaso providencial, livrou-a de morrer na ponta de

uma faca... Era caso até para beijar os pés ao marinheiro, porque nunca vira

tanta coragem e tanto desinterêsse!] (89).

In her need to discredit her sexual rival, Carolina adopts the facile claims of racist ideology, willfully forgetting her previous beliefs and personal experiences. Furthermore, it is important to note that in order to cling to her ideology she refers to him through his generic nickname—he must be a type for the hierarchical categorization of race and sex to match his being— and does not refer to him as Amaro even though they are old and dear friends. This process in which power and racism symbiotically grow in the individuals of the social body constitutes the fundamental critique of racism available to those readers who wish to find it in Caminha’s novel.

The flexibility of racist metonymy becomes further revealed as Carolina grows tortured by her fear that Amaro will return and discover her own morally dubious romance with Aleixo. She is able to impute racial inferiority to those same (now twisted and vilified) characteristics that a short time earlier she thought remarkable and laudable:

“blacks are the race of the devil, a damned race that doesn’t know how to forgive, that doesn’t know how to forget…his letter was a triviality not worth thinking about: —black nonsense [negro é raça do diabo, raça maldita, que não sabe perdoar, que não sabe esquecer… o caso do bilhete era uma tolice em que ninguém devia pensar: —cousas de

115 negro]” (176). In order to convince herself that she is on the side of good, rather than being a traitor and perhaps even a pedophile, Carolina demonizes and denigrates Amaro’s constancy and sense of loyalty, resignifying him under the signs of racism in order to justify her personal desires. His love letter is belittled because Carolina must negate his desires in order to attain her own. There emerges here a model of colonialist thinking: the subjectivity of the black subject is negated in order to serve the interest of the white subject, the two of which are in conflict as long as the white seeks ownership over the black’s life and property.

Though in the moment of her desire’s potential frustration Carolina wishes to relegate her old friend to ontological alterity, the narrator reinforces Amaro’s humanity through copious passages portraying his psychological depths. Indeed, upon removing the prejudice against homosexuality, Bom-crioulo becomes a sentimental story of lost love set against the strictures of racism and legal-medicine in nineteenth-century Brazil.

A significant portion of the second half of the novel focuses on revealing Amaro’s interior, emotional sufferings. As a man of color (and especially a former slave) in nineteenth century Brazilian society, Amaro is fundamentally the subject of natal alienation—he has no surname and his first name is hardly spoken by the characters of his world who deny his subjectivity and value as a human being. Yet, the attentive reader receives a different experience of Amaro: his name in Portuguese means “love him,” and he is shown to be every bit a sympathetic man in love throughout most of the novel. The best hypothesis of his downfall is not racial degeneracy, immorality essentially bound to

116 his race or sexuality, or alcoholic derangement: he is heartbroken. The depth of Amaro’s humanity constitutes the novel’s greatest challenge to the reductive categories of identity safeguarded by stereotype and strict ontologies.

A fundamental way in which Bom-crioulo departs from Naturalist literature emerges in these full and subjective representation of Amaro`s character. At various points in the novel the reader is given a window into the protagonist’s reflections—

Amaro’s interior monologue and emotional struggles are provided in psychological detail adequate to a realist hero or heroine. “Memories populated his brain…what memories my God! [quê de recordações povoavam-lhe o cérebro… Quê de recordações, meu

Deus!],” and it is Amaro’s memories, his thoughts, desires, and bouts of sadness— through which the reader comes to know intimately the eponymous protagonist (156).

Indeed, a significant portion of the book exposes the interior state of mind of the Afro-

Brazilian protagonist. Amaro is deeply humanized through the repeated emotional depiction, often discussing the state of his “spirit [espírito]” and his “soul [alma]”

(158;159).

Amaro’s broken heart is well documented in the narrative, particularly his pining while forced to stay in the naval hospital in the ninth chapter. His time in the infirmary consists of sleepless nights and pained recollection: Aleixo made him suffer entire nights and day after day…He loved very much [Aleixo fazia-o padecer noites inteiras, dias sucessivos…Amava muito]” (158-159). Though there is evidence of illness and alcohol induced rage prior to his internment, Amaro “transforms entirely” through his pained

117 existence in the asylum, marking his existence with unprecedented depression and rage

(159). The loss of his beloved overwhelms him with grief; Amaro is an emotional protagonist who comes to irreparably suffer from unrequited love. Despite the general zoopomorphism of the novel—a quality attached to sex regardless of color, gender, and orientation—Amaro is increasingly represented in the narrative as an extremely sensitive human being. The later chapters of the novel are dominated, almost to a tiring degree, by accounts of the sentimental affect within Amaro. Variations of the word interiority

(“interior” and “interiormente” appear in consecutive paragraphs in chapter nine, for instance) fill the novel with descriptions of Amaro’s heart and mind.

Caminha repeatedly includes poetic figures in order to represent the emotional state of his hero, which further constructs the robust and nuanced character of his Afro-

Brazilian subject. As Amaro languishes in the Asylum, hoping in vain to reclaim his love, his great suffering becomes the object of the narrative and its stylistic language:

“His moral unrest grew, so grew his desperation like a wave that little by little gains strength until it breaks apart into spray and foam against the rocks [Crescia-lhe a inquietação moral, crescia-lhe o desespêro omo uma onda que vai pouco a pouco entumecendo, empolando-se, até se desfazer em espuma, quebrar-se de encontro â rocha]” (163). Perhaps inaccessible to readers at the time of its publication do to prejudices of race and sexuality, Bom-crioulo is capable of stirring tremendous empathy for its tragic hero; it is a touching rendering of heartbreak rather than a sterile Naturalist thesis-novel.

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Not unlike Melville’s dismemberment of colonialist ontology, identity characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality drift across characters over the course of Caminha’s novel. Dislocating and disorienting stereotypes, Bom-crioulo splits the signs of race and reorganizes them so as to deny their essential truth and encourage a revision of racial concepts. This fluid movement of qualities across and between characters (of different races) serves to engage the reader in the complex and interminable task of comprehending the nature of human subjects caught in the self- determining webs of nationalist, racialist, and moral ideologies. In her aggressive seduction of Aleixo, Carolina is called a “woman-man” and is assigned

“hermaphroditism”; she teases Aleixo that she is “tua negra” (XX). Furthermore,

Aleixo’s femininity is admired by the narrator, Amaro, and Carolina. In this way, names and qualifiers attach and fall from major characters in order to reproduce and interrogate the drift of identity concepts that were employed to organize the disorienting Atlantic world. Caminha’s novel shares this heteroglossia of identity with the other Atlantic novels analyzed in this chapter. All explore the constructs of race as a metonymy of the self insofar as Melville, Equiano, Conrad, and Caminha utilize a metonymic play of signifiers in order to reveal the contingency and movement of signs of identity in opposition to fixed ontologies that characterized the western world view.

Perhaps with the exception of Adolfo Caminha, all four authors explored in this chapter are increasingly present in post-colonial scholarship, though often credited with very distinct positions and messages. The work of Conrad and Melville had been studied

119 for many decades before readers were interested in the themes of race and imperialism that now seem to fundamentally characterize their fiction. Equiano’s tale would be relatively unknown without its tremendous appeal to the post-colonial sensibility and the critical narrative of ‘the black Atlantic. Along with the notable parallels between the texts themselves, Bom-crioulo and “Narcissus” share an especially confusing and problematic history of reception and interpretation and have remained poorly understood in academic scholarship. The radically diverse and often opposed readings that scholars have generated of these two novels provides an example of a strong causal relationship between the horizon of expectations50 of academic scholars and the resultant production of interpretive readings. Late-Atlantic texts supply clear evidence of the impact of a turn to the post-colonial attitude because they are usually profound portraits of race relations, written during a period in which debate on that topic was repressed and sublimated.51

With the progress of political consciousness in the West, the meaning of this literature has evolved with the preoccupations of readers and scholars, giving certain elements of these texts new visibility and creating a new role for them in literary studies.

50 Hans Robert Jauss, perhaps the most famous reception theorist, asserts that all readers bring to the text a “horizon of expectations” such as their knowledge of genre, historical period, conventions of form, social norms, and knowledge of the author which determines the understanding they produce of the text. Essentially all of a reader’s knowledge and skills with regards to reading in general and to the specific work and author inflect the act of his or her reading of the text and shape its meaning. Though he explains this idea in other works, I have accessed Jauss’s theory through the commonly anthologized essay “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” 51 The sublimation of the moral dilemma of slavery in the West emerges through the widespread rhetorical Enlightenment paradigm of using slavery as a metaphor for diverse causes of political rights and democratic legislation. A prominent example, Rousseau’s statement that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” does not refer to the millions of people literally kept in bondage through chains and far more brutal methods. 120

The implementation of horizonal masks by these authors has greatly contributed to their resistance to superficial interpretation and power as “Trojan-horse” critiques.

Especially with respect to the physiognomic thinking of racialism, readings of these texts rehearse the readings of bodies in the world. One can draw a significant parallel between racialist thinking and partial readings since both derive from the same epistemological problem of prejudice or preconceito52. What I term partial readings53 are those readings commonly referred to as misinterpretations or erroneous readings—interpretations which do not do justice to the entirety of the text. They are partial in both the sense of representing only portions of the text (parts rather than the whole) as well as being biased

(not impartial) in order to support an interpreter’s particular ideological position or thesis.

In both racism and partial reading, there is a metonymic reduction in which a part violently stands for a whole through false association and omission. Conrad’s works, especially Lord Jim and “Narcissus” address this (ultimately insuperable) epistemological challenge directly through inquiries of Marlow and the crew of the

Narcissus to sound the essence of the two Jims. In the same way, Benito Cereno dramatizes the connection between a misreading of the human being and racialism. These efforts to understand the essence of a human being, like literary interpretation which amounts to an analogous epistemological function, are ultimately “inconclusive” as there

52 The Portuguese term offers valuable insight into the nature of the problem. The term mos t frequently used to describe prejudice of race, class, or gender is preconceito; a racist person would be preconceituoso. The interpreting subject (of the racial other and the text) arrives with pre-established concepts of the object they are interpreting, be it a human individual or a piece of literature. 53 Of course, all readings are partial in that no interpretive account can represent a work in its entirety. The problem, then, must be viewed as one of degree. 121 can be no end to the text: no way to accurately reduce the living being (Cruz e Sousa’s

“living page”) or the living literary work to a stable concept. With people and works, the tendency to ignore complexity leads to greater error which becomes prejudice or partial readings.

This connection between reading books and reading human beings points to a significant social utility that these authors attempt to impart in order to shape the public imaginary that governs their culture. One of the great contributions of reader-response theory is the endeavor to understand and explain the mutual impact between socio- political concerns and literature. In Hans Robert-Jauss’s essay “Literary History as a

Challenge to Literary Theory,” perhaps the clearest exposition of this theory, Jauss utilizes this equivalency between understanding literature and reality to argue for the wider “social function of literature.” The analogy in forms of preconception that I have been describing confirms Jauss’s statement that this function arises “where the literary experience of the reader enters into the horizon of expectations of his lived praxis, preforms his understanding of the world, and thereby also has an effect on his social behavior” (179). Studying literature that demands critical thinking in order to conceptualize the characters prepares students of all levels for reading as well as life.

“The experience of reading,” Jauss submits later in the essay, “can liberate one from adaptations, prejudices, and predicaments of a lived praxis in that it compels one to a new perception of things” (180). Bom-crioulo, for instance, reveals the venal motivations behind most acts of racism and the inconsistency of thought required to maintain racist

122 positions. Reading literature with an eye toward the examination of perception (within ourselves as critics and amongst fictional characters) offers continuing insights into both our capacity for understanding discourse as well as the daily construction of chauvinism in society. In this way, the texts become acts of experience which should improve the readers of the world through the reading of books—as Conrad says, to make the reader see. If, like observation, reading is a kind of writing in the cognitive constitution of the text, the constant psycho-social process of writing identity was essential to the formation of the body-politic in Atlantic nation-states, especially following abolition. In this way, literary authors cultivate public perception in order to affect attitudes, actions, and laws.

Because of the Enlightenment’s economic basis in slavery, the (typically) racial question of differential human identity drove the ascension of democracy and liberal rights theory in correspondence with the colonial exploitation and absorption of people of non-white nations. In other words, the exploração of foreign peoples stimulated the production of humanist philosophy and jurisprudence of human rights. Considered in this way, modernity may be understood as the labored forging of true humanist politics fomented by the development of coloniality, a long dialectical process. Gorgio

Agamben’s writing on sovereignty’s dependence on exercising control of “bare life”— dividing bodies into persons and non-persons—asserts a related process in western political development. Agamben’s study of Homo Sacer, the human excluded from the law and the civil community, locates the solidification of state sovereignty in the right to determine the limits of the law, and in particular, which bodies are subjects of the state.

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The rhetorical conflicts over the constitution of human identity were fought in literature and in daily speech during throughout the final epoch of the maritime-trade system, and, on top of this, western jurisprudence developed in close and polemical relation to this contested writing of identity. As an exemplary document of Liberal

Enlightenment government, the United States Constitution of 1789 exhibits the fragmented juridical treatment of bodies that developed with the political culture of the

West. Human ontology in the foundation of American law is split and uneven; there are fractioned humans. Article One Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution reads,

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States

which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers,

which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,

including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not

taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Not only are they quantified as 60% of a person, slaves are not named; they are “other

Persons,” undesignated in this founding legal document aside from the fraction three fifths. The other-than-free are left ambiguous. The Indians do not count; they do not have a number, a named identity but absolute disownment. The foundational law of the nation did not create a sure or commensurate identity for many subjects, and this uncertainty opened the law to varying actions and raised the question of the legal color line that would be negotiated in the next three centuries. The next chapter charts

124 maritime literature’s focus on the fluidity of law and its framing of modernity through contests of legal order.

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Chapter 2: Navigating the Fluid Force of Law in the Maritime World

“Lei para Inglês ver [Law for the English to see]”54

To introduce my discussion of the force of law, let us consider a remarkable occurrence from the twentieth century United States, which, though not integral to the narrative of nineteenth-century maritime concerns, provides a particularly telling example of the heterogeneous force of law55 in the Atlantic world. The case was the following:

Jack Johnson, the greatest boxer of all-time and a dark-skinned African-American, was arrested for slave trading in 1913. Johnson’s conviction exemplifies the distortion of the force of law facilitated by social customs and values: he was arrested for slave trading in

1913 because he slept with white women. The force of law signifies the actions undertaken through recourse to the law, the manipulations of power born through the law’s interpretation and enforcement. When the Justice Department grew determined to indict Jack Johnson because white people resented him—his “unforgiveable blackness,”

54 Brazilian idiom signifying a law or rule that is meant to be broken or ignored, still in use.

55 What I term here the heterogeneous ‘force of law’ has long been a source of debate amongst legal scholars, most commonly under the term ‘indeterminacy.’ The most famous group of scholars emerged in the 1970’s and became known as “critical legal studies,” whose most distinguished representative is Brazilian jurist and Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Unger’s The Critical Legal Studies Movement (1982) provides the central orienting text of this theoretical grouping. This question of jurisprudence is well-summarized in the opening words of James E. Herget’s article “Unearthing the Origins of a Radical Idea: The Case of Legal Indeterminacy” (1995): “The critical legal scholars are the latest in a long line of jurisprudential thinkers to direct our attention to the judicial process in order to point out that ‘hard’ law is really soft, that legislated rules and precedents do not determine the outcome of cases in court, and that a false perception nevertheless persists that judges are somehow bound by the rules of law laid down elsewhere. Much of twentieth century jurisprudence has been a debate centering around these propositions. For lack of a better term, we can call this view ‘Legal Indeterminacy’” (59).

126 as Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward title their documentary on Johnson—the

Heavyweight Champion of the World was arrested for violating the Mann Act (1910)

(also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act), a statute meant to prohibit the trafficking of

(white) women and children for prostitution. Johnson was primarily demonized for winning the title from Jim Jeffries and for openly having relationships with white women, some of whom were prostitutes. His charges stemmed from a trip to New York taken with his then-girlfriend, a former prostitute; the government called it trafficking and arrested the champ. The result of white resentment of a superior black man resulted in an anti-slavery law being employed for purely racist reasons. The force of law is protean, and machinations of diverse powers generate heterogeneous applications of the law: power runs through it like a faucet, turned off and on at the behest of partisan wills.

The problem of jurisprudence illustrated by Jack Johnson’s story is essential to understanding maritime society and transatlantic modernity, and maritime literature shares a deep preoccupation with the fluidity of law. In an excellent review of the lasting significance of the problem of the force of law, Georgetown Law Professor John Hasnas argues:

For the past three-quarters of a century, cases such as these have been used to

argue that Anglo-American law is indeterminate; that the rules of law do not

compel judges to decide cases one way rather than another. This "indeterminacy

argument," which was originally developed by the legal realists in the 1920s and

30s, was famously revived and updated in the 1980s by the adherents of the

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Critical Legal Studies movement (hereinafter "Crits") to serve as the spearhead of

their crusade against legal liberalism. The Crits employed this argument to claim

that the liberal concept of the rule of law was a myth designed to maintain the

illegitimate domination of society by the economically and politically powerful.

(Back to the Future 85)

Instead of ‘indeterminacy’ I will use the term ‘force of law’ primarily because of its immediate invocation of the power dynamics that drive all legal indeterminacy. Rather than a specific allusion, the phrase is a cipher for various related notions and specific theoretical statements with regards to the fluidity of law.56 Sidney Chalhoub’s history of the malleability and suspiciousness of law in nineteenth-century slavocratic Brazil, entitled The Force of Slavery: Illegality and Custom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil [A força da escravidão: illegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista] (2012). In his first chapter, Chalhoub explains how the widespread authorization of the illegal Brazilian slave trade from 1831-1851 created widespread mistrust of the government among free

Brazilians of color who revolted against a census they suspected might lead to their enlistment in slavery. More generally, ‘force of law’ most readily conjures the word

‘enforcement,’ which is the single most important factor in the conflicts of heterogeneous and asymmetrical law studied in the texts of this chapter.

56 Derrida published an essay on the gap between justice and law entitled “The Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority,” but other than its general agreement with my analysis of natural law as meta - legal discourse of justice in chapter three, his paper has little influence over mine beyond the phrase “force of law.” 128

The literary assessment of justice in western law has served as an important counter-discourse to legal philosophy and jurisprudence throughout the modern period, particularly as a vehicle of the critique of legal formalism.57 As a site of critical social mimesis, literature examines the social realities conditioned but only partly determined by the structures and discourses of law. Through its potential to exhibit uncertainty and its prerogative of dialogic over monologic expression, literature has been able to challenge the presumptions of objectivity characterizing disciplines of positivist orientation, political philosophy, and jurisprudence. As expostulations of enlightenment and modern legality, many of these maritime texts highlight the politics of reason inherent in social debate—the instrumentalist and value-laden contingency of rational argument, or fact that reason is always (politically) motivated—in order to question the objectivity of the law and philosophical discourse.58 The difficult decisions of Captains

Vere (Billy Budd) and MacWhirr (Typhoon), for instance, are presented through rational logic but other elements in the narrative intimate their political inspiration. The heightened fluidity of law at sea creates an environment where force and desire determine conduct at the expense of the (force of the) law. Additionally, the greater potential for simultaneous conflicting laws in the mobile, international space led maritime writers to

57 In “Back to the Future: From Critical Legal Studies Forward to Legal Realism, Or How Not to Miss the Point of the Indeterminacy argument” (1995), John Hasnas explains that the “formalistic approach viewed the judge as one who objectively and impersonally decides cases by logically deducing the correct resolution from a definite and consistent body of legal rules” (87).

58 Noting the difficulty in categorizing the movement, James Boyle’s “The Politics of Reason: Critical Legal Theory and Local Social Thought” identifies Critical Legal Studies with a fundamental attention to the politics of reason, or “the social power of apparently rational discourse” (688). 129 emphasize the inevitable presence of subjective interpretation in the processes of law and enforcement, a heterogeneity of law that pervades all modernity and is especially salient at sea.

Although it was a protracted (begun in the late eighteenth century and

“concluded” in the late nineteenth) and only partial victory (slave trading has never ceased), the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade directly established many enduring questions and precedents in international law and socio-political relations.

Emerging concurrently with imperialism and democratization in the West, the long controversy over Atlantic slave trading precipitated the need to adapt and articulate the political organization of an increasingly mobile but also juridical world. The nineteenth century transnational cold war between slavers and abolitionists stimulated the flourishing of international law of human rights that would come to constitute the most important political achievement of late-modernity. This point is superbly stated in Jenny

Martinez’s argument for the legal significance of the slave trade:

The abolition of the slave trade lies at a critical juncture in the history of

international law and exemplifies a series of dichotomies and tensions between

concepts of natural and universal law and law based solely on the positive

enactments of a particular sovereign state; between religious and secular ideas of

law and society; between European and non-European societies and cultures;

between written treaties and unwritten customary law as the most important

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source of international legal norms; between national and territorial conceptions

of jurisdiction and supranational or even universal jurisdiction. (14)

Martinez’s book, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

(2012), gives a compelling account of how diplomatic and legal contests surrounding the

New World slave trade founded essential statutes and concepts of international law, particularly with respect to human rights and crimes against humanity. The latter idea stands at the center of the following chapter of this dissertation, whereas here my focus concentrates on the fluid political59 law of the Atlantic world and the manner through which literary texts and authors explored the relationship between human subjects and the laws around them.

During the abolitionary period that stretched from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, counterfeit identity was frequently adopted by slavers in order to avoid search and seizure by the British, and this strategy proved most useful for ships destined for Brazil and Cuba, the largest importers of slaves at the time (Bethell 189-

190). To illustrate the high degree of concern regarding this practice, Leslie Bethell’s landmark history The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade; Britain, Brazil and the

Slave Trade Question (1970) cites President Tyler’s 1841 Message to Congress, in which

Tyler lamented that the United States flag had become “grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations,” notably the Spanish and Portuguese and their colonies

(Bethell 190). With ramifications well beyond the sea and international law, the question

59 I will use the terms positive law, sovereign law, and political law interchangeably to denote the de jure enactments and judgments of nation-states; what we commonly or less-metaphorically think of as the law. 131 of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery stimulated nineteenth century debates over the nature of civil identity, legal jurisdictions, and sovereignty. These tensions and dichotomies drive many literary narratives of the nineteenth century, which seek to expose and dramatize these challenges in the cultural imaginary.

Because de facto hegemonic white supremacy developed alongside the West’s rule of law (and de jure white supremacy), people of color were most frequently exploited offshore in legal and illegal ways, as was the case with the disembarkation of

African-born Mahomma Baquaqua in Brazil, the sale of Afro-Brazilian abolitionist Luiz

Gama in Bahía, and the detention of James Somerset in an English harbor—all of whom will be discussed in this chapter’s examination of the functioning of western law on the waters. Conversely, the sea was not only the medium of oppression: it also furnished the space for new liberties unavailable on national territory. For instance, Martin Delany’s novel Blake, or the Huts of America (as well as Equiano’s narrative) depicts an interracial marriage conducted just off shore (Captains could marry subjects on their ships), and many slaves became free-working men either through reterritorialization or the refuge of multiracial maritime employment. Throughout the period of maritime colonialism, the ceaseless mobility of the ocean greatly impeded the application and enforcement of the law. As a site of relative international and national lawlessness, the sea facilitated human activities of widespread abuse and successful transcendence/transgression of the law.

The literary analysis of this chapter begins with two Brazilian authors from various locations, times, and social classes, each representing provocative portraits of the

132 function of law in the maritime world and in Brazilian society. A short story collection from a forgotten author of the southern state of Santa Catarina, Virgílio Várzea’s Seas and Countrysides [Mares e campos] (1895) depicts the permeation of slave trading in mainstream Brazilian society, which he represents in deceptive bucolic nostalgia. While part of the literary elite of his day, Várzea has received very little examination by twentieth and twenty-first century scholars; he has been almost completely forgotten and is unlikely to be revitalized unless it is through his collaboration and friendship with

Afro-Brazilian poet João da Cruz e Sousa (1861-1898). A writer of symbolist prose reminiscent of José Pereira da Graça Aranha (1868-1931), a superficial reading of Várzea gives little impression of theme or message, but the stories of Seas and Countrysides repeatedly return to the slave trade. Evidence of the lack of force of the ‘laws for the

English to see [lei para Inglês ver],’ Várzea’s text is especially thought-provoking as it steadily humanizes a society built on slaving, neither overtly criticizing nor downplaying the presence of the traffic in bodies that sustains many of the men, women, and children of the community. Like his friend and collaborator Cruz e Sousa’s work which has almost always been discussed in terms of its aesthetic achievement without reference to social or political commentary, the far-less studied Várzea has also been explicated primarily through aestheticist criticism.60 Although Seas and Countrysides provide

60 See LeonardoMendes and Alexandre Amaral, “Virgílio Várzea, escritor naturalista” (2014) which situates Várzea as part of an often overlooked regional literary group from Santa Catarina whose most notable member was Cruz e Sousa. Mendes and Amaral also lament the relative inattention to Várzea that characterizes Brazilian literary criticism. They also note that Várzea and Caminha shared the same publisher, further evidence of Várzea’s place in the literary establishment of the day. The most substantial treatment of Várzea is probably found in Nereu Corrêa’s The Song of the Black Swan, and Other Studies [O 133 successive vignettes of Brazilian slavers battling the tempests of the sea and the British

Navy, his participation in the literary conversation on the slave trade remains to be established. In order to recuperate the value of Várzea’s writing, I argue that his juxtaposition of quiet littoral beauty with the international conflict of the Brazilian slave trade generates a unique force of social consciousness in his storytelling.

Turning sharply to a prolific, renowned dramaturge of the mid-century Brazilian bourgeoisie, Martins Pena’s comedy The Two, or the Mechanical Englishman (1842) drily satirizes the supersession of custom over international law in the Brazilian southeast and the consequent proliferation of the illegal Brazilian slave trade. While its sardonic tone is characteristic of the playwright, his treatment of the Brazilian slave trade in The

Two, or the Mechanical Englishman is unique to his career and represents and unusually daring political statement—even for Martins Pena who was the preeminent political jester of his time. Published at the zenith of the illegal traffic and a quarter of a century prior to the abolitionist movements61 in Brazilian literature, Martins Pena’s slave trade comedy both precedes literary discourse on slavery in Brazil and remains one of the most direct and offensive statements against slavery in all of Brazilian literature. Reading The Two canto do sisne negro, e outros estudos] (1964), which examines Várzea in two essays alongside Luís Delfino, the eponymous Cruz e Sousa (the black swan), and other Catarinense writers. Neither of these works discuss the theme of slavery in Várzea’s fiction, including analyses of stories in Mares e Campos. 61 Abolition becomes a mainstream focus of Brazilian literature immediately following the U.S. Civil War, especially José de Alencar letters to Emperor Dom Pedro II known as Letters of Erasmus (1865-1868) and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s Vítimas-algozes (1869), and Castro Alves’ “The Slave Ship” (1869). In addition, Ursula, by Maria Firmina dos Reis (1869).: the first female abolitionist novelist, and the first novel to include the view point (testimony) of a woman slave. These texts represent very different viewpoints: Alencar’s letters argue against abolition through political and economic argument, Macedo’s text advocates abolition by demonizing slaves and asserting the need for white Brazilians to distance themselves from these dangerous victims-turned-executioners, and finally Alves attempts to speak for the slaves and demand emancipation for reasons of justice and humanity. See Haberly & Raiz do Nascimento. 134 or the Mechanical Englishman allows for a repositioning of Martins Pena through his engagement with the slave trade and new dimensions for understanding this theme in

Brazilian literature.

While apparent in several other literary and editorial texts from the period,

African American Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859) insightfully reflects the mid-nineteenth century politics of the sea and the related heterogeneity of the law singularly present in maritime activities. Written in a climate of national disintegration, Blake discloses maritime fraud and illegal trafficking from the perspective of a liberated American slave on a quest of rebellious black cosmopolitanism. A text whose constant mobility resembles the picaresque novel, protagonist Henry (whose fluid identity later falls under the name Blake) bears witness to the differing laws and forces of law that subjects of color encounter around the Atlantic world. Additionally, Delany’s novel exposes the ways in which the complicated and unstable set of international agreements allowed for slavers to safely hide behind whichever nation’s flag that the

British navy was not authorized to search. Delany’s novel affords an especially compelling representation of the fraud with respect to nationality that supported illicit maritime commerce for much of the nineteenth century as well as the maritime play of identities that contextualized and complicated the efforts of people of color to negotiate their cultural identity.

Also presenting the way that western citizens learned to circumvent the law and morality, Conrad’s tales of exploração repeatedly portray individuals, companies, and

135 nations seeking wealth at the expense of (usually racial) others, often in spite of progressive legal protections. Conrad’s writing is devoted to illustrating the counter-limit that maritime enterprises impose on humanist jurisprudence and philosophy of the nineteenth century: the internal and conflictive heterogeneity of morality and law in any culture. To this end, Heart of Darkness illuminates the new but familiar terrors of the

New Imperialism of the 1880’s, which brutalizes black bodies in the same way as slavery under a new, legal name. Begun while he was writing Heart of Darkness, the Pacific story Typhoon (1902) complements and contextualizes the more renowned works of the period like Heart of Darkness and especially Lord Jim by exposing another post- abolitionary renewal of exploitation of labor in the transport of Chinese “coolies” working in “various tropical colonies” of less visibility than the Americas. In interdisciplinary intertextuality that returns to Britain’s abolitionary past, Conrad’s tale alludes to Turner’s monumental painting The Slave Ship (1840), whose original title (and extant subtitle) was Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying; Typhoon Coming

On. By forging this connection with the single most powerful image of slaving of British abolitionism, Conrad signals the return of the slave ship in the British transport of coolies occurring throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Before proceeding to my analysis of

Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America and Conrad’s Typhoon and Heart of Darkness, I now turn to a close analysis of Brazilian literature’s exploration of the clash between

Brazil’s domestic and transatlantic coloniality and the imperial humanitarianism of

Britain’s campaign to abolish the slave trade.

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“Laws for the English to See” in Brazilian Literature

Brazilian independence in 1822 destroyed the delicate edifice of international jurisprudence that Britain had been building in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and, together with newly independent Hispanic republics of the Americas, gave the politics of the Atlantic world a new configuration. As was the case with Luso-Anglo relations during the Napoleonic wars (Portugal received British protection in exchange for conceding steps toward abolition), the transatlantic superpower of Great Britain had powers that they could employ in order to bargain with Brazil in exchange for cooperation in their efforts toward universal abolition of the trade. The new South

American leviathan needed international recognition and acceptance into international commerce, both of which could be guaranteed by the establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations with the British Empire (See Bethell 29-61). It was the newly demonstrated maritime power—the transatlantic dominance—of the British that allowed them to dictate the terms of their recognition of Brazil as a sovereign nation-state, a sovereignty that they would ultimately feel they were justified in (or at least capable of) breaching.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, British foreign diplomats were poised to exchange their services for promises to end the trade that brought African slaves to the Americas and especially Brazil, the territory that, after the revolution of

Saint-Domingue at the turn of the nineteenth century, would remain the West’s most

137 significant slave colony and importer of slaves during the nineteenth century. Leslie

Bethell’s chapter on this period highlights several public statements made by Foreign

Secretary George Canning as well as some of his letters to the Duke of Wellington in which Canning reiterates that British recognition of the new American republics (several

Hispanic nations were also newly independent) depended first and foremost upon the willingness of those nations to work towards the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade

(short title 29-39). Canning viewed the Brazilian trade as the centerpiece required for universal abolition of the trade, and therefore negotiations with the nascent nation of

Brazil were the first priority for British foreign politics in the first half of the nineteenth century (35). After almost four years of complicated negotiations involving Britain,

Brazil, and also Portugal, an Anglo-Brazilian treaty was signed and ratified specifying that the slave trade would be considered piracy in the territory and for the subjects of the

Brazilian empire, to enter into effect in 1830 (Bethell 60, R. Conrad 617). Though it required more time than Foreign Secretary Canning and British abolitionists had hoped,

Britain had succeeded in establishing favorable commercial relations with the new continental nation and had seemingly enacted the most important single restriction possible on the Atlantic slave trade.

Yet in spite of tremendous efforts toward the international criminalization of slavery and the enactment of laws in Britain, Brazil, and the United States prohibiting the slave trade, the importation of slaves to Brazil between 1830 and 1851 increased to unprecedented levels. While illegal under national law, the trafficking of Africans grew

138 along with the coffee boom that Brazil experienced during this period. The minimal force of law with regards to the illegalization of the slave trade grew in response both to the internal influence of slave power and in reaction to the breach of sovereignty in

Anglo-Brazilian negotiations that hastened the legal prohibition of the trafficking of

Africans to Brazil. This tension was acutely felt in the nineteenth century coexistence of

Brazilian slavery and ideologies of progress, and this antagonism conditioned the ambivalent legality of Brazilian slavery and related instability of legal order. In

“Misplaced Ideas,” Roberto Schwarz argues that the socio-economic paradigm of favor operated in a superior position to the law and thereby stretched the law in order to accommodate the interests of the planter class while identifying with ideals of progress and liberalism.

Furthermore, many Brazilians disdained the new prohibition for being an imposition from the British empire: a further, juridical act of colonization. Due to both private interests and public pressures that surrounded them, local officials generally allowed the trade to continue and prosper in spite of its illegality. Since the national government was not equipped to police the coasts with the Brazilian navy, the trade proceeded uninterrupted and actually increased during the two decades following the

1831 abolition (Bethell 85). With the new law, the juridical difficulties surrounding the traffic only increased in complexity during the 1830’s: once in effect, Brazilian and

British officials were challenged by the plurality of interpretations possible in regards to the treaties. Specifically, the question of the applicability of the criminal category of

139 piracy62, and which powers were legally capable of enforcing that crime had tremendous consequences on the fate of Brazilian slavers (Bethell 89-92). British officials were never quite confident that they were legally able to enforce the treaties and to capture and judge Brazilian slavers as piratical offenders. Though there was a modest initiative to prevent importation, and even the capture of several ships off the coast of Rio de Janeiro province, the national navy was too preoccupied with defending the integrity of the young nation from internal revolts and could not properly patrol the coast for slavers

(Bethell 77). As a result, the November 1831 law of abolition of the trade (The national law passed to enforce the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty of 1826) did not equate to the abolition of the trade, but instead exemplified the discord between the official discourse of law and the empirical reality of practice.

Discussing this period following the first Brazilian legislation prohibiting the trade, Bethell references the common phrase “lei para ingIês ver” in order to describe the common expectation amongst the Brazilian elite that the new anti-slave trade laws would not be strictly enforced (70). This expression—“law for the English to see”—attained rather widespread and long-standing use—a fact which demonstrates the pervasiveness of

British hegemony in the south Atlantic and the precarious standing of law in nineteenth century Brazilian society. The phrase and the growth of the international slave trade after

62 The designation of slave trading as piracy was a recurring strategy of British foreign policy in th e nineteenth century. Not only was this category written into the 1826 Treaty with Brazil, Britain unsuccessfully negotiated with the United States towards a bilateral recognition of slave traders as pirates, which would have allowed mutual jurisdiction over slave traders between the two nations. Following this failure, the British considered manifesting the expanded definition of piracy through the law of nations, but decided that the (indefinite) majority of nations required was unattainable. The criminal category of pirates will be directly analyzed in the following chapter. 140 abolitionary legislation points to a culture of contempt for law born impart through imperialist jurisprudence that was both deeply embedded in Brazilian society and spread around the oceans. In quiet exposition of the disavowal of anti-slave trade laws, Virgílio

Várzea’s stories recall that Brazilian political law in the illicit period of 1831-1851 was often ignored in the daily lives of all those who lived under it, save for the imperialist

Royal Navy who persecuted the Brazilian merchant.

While many Brazilian abolitionists created art to expose the terror and immorality of slavery and the trade, other Brazilian authors like Várzea produced realist portraits of Brazilian life during the operation of the traffic, with less clear intentions.

Rather than explicit denunciation, Várzea’s fiction presents a social order inhabited by slavery and requires the reader (often with play of narrative perspective) to make judgments regarding the culture at hand, which is not overtly critiqued. The people of

Várzea’s quiet Santa Catarina coastal life are represented through an insider and realist lens: their quotidian sorrows and joys, their fortunes and tragic fates unfold against the back drop of piracy and police. The tales in Mares e Campos testify to the localized and pervasive defiance of legal agreements between Brazil and Britain and the conflicting humanity of the populations that lived from the illegal trade. In the maritime stories, the people of Santa Catarina do not follow the “law for the English to see,” and in doing so are at once resisting imperialism and multiplying torture. While flesh trafficking ebbs and flows in the nearby sea, the people on land live their lives: falling in love, seeking prosperity, mourning their loved ones, eating and drinking.

141

Whereas there has been scant academic writing concerned with Várzea in the last century, in the 1890’s he was considered an important member of the naturalist literary vanguard (Mendes 246). Though not to the extent of his friend and collaborator Cruz e

Sousa, Várzea’s prose (he preferred the form of the short story) contains a symbolist structure imbued with the rhythms of the sea. Both Cruz e Sousa and Várzea engage in the symbolist attempt at transcendence by infusing their poetic rhythm with the movements of nature they describe. An 1894 review published in the periodical Correio da Tarde highlights the marine structure of Mares e Campos, explaining, “The descriptions are profoundly experienced; in them beat the waves and the winds, along with the cares of the souls of the people of Santa Catarina [As descrições são profundamente experimentadas; palpitam nelas as ondas, as brisas e também os anseios das almas catarinenses] (Mendes 247). Through a hypnotic display of nature, Várzea’s stories in Seas and Fields [Mares e campos] exhibit the connection between the two writers from Santa Catarina and reveal a form of “Naturalism” not related to the conventional narrative of the literary school.

It is a strange combination for an author like Várzea to be both naturalist and symbolist, and, like Adolfo Caminha, Várzea defended his ideological identity as a naturalist in the papers of the day, but his fiction does not neatly fit that school as it came to be understood. In spite of his reputation, Várzea’s stories are only naturalist in their attention to nature (which one could argue is not actually characteristic of Brazilian

Naturalism with its attention to the urban poor) and their inclusion of the quotidian

142 experiences of the lower class. In the context of this naturalist ethos of exploring the repressed spheres of society, Várzea’s repeated portrayal of the slave trade acquires new significance for understanding his literary project. While his stories do not include representations of the brutality of slavery in the way that works like Castro Alves’ “O

Navio Negreiro” do, Várzea’s work was rare in that it openly recognized the centrality of the slave trade in Brazilian life. Várzea’s stories seem apolitical in their attitude and lack of commentary, but thematically they are boldly political since multiple stories directly involve the illegal slave trade to Brazil and position this crime at the center of Brazilian society.

At first glance, the slave trade seems to be a casual piece of Várzea’s realist portrait of life on the southern Brazil coast, yet as more and more stories assume this retrospective narrative setting—published in 1895, at least half of the maritime tales occur during the illicit period—it becomes clear that the illegal Brazilian trade stands as the focus of the collection. There is no narrator commentary or overtly critical message to be found in any of the stories with allusions to the slave trade. It is precisely this silence which enriches the overall effect of the work, seducing readers into acceptance of a culture of torture by creating familiarized and sympathetic pictures of the people.

Because of the narrator’s impartial voice, Várzea’s fiction effectively establishes the ethical tension of people caught between Brazil’s dependency on slave trading and

Britain’s imperialistic humanitarianism. The stories of Mares e Campos captures a local way of life and in doing so creates a humanized portrait of a society deeply ensconced in

143 human trafficking. In spite of the perverse morality it sought to correct, complaints of

British violation of Brazilian sovereignty were well-justified, and Várzea’s characters certainly begrudge British naval activities around the Atlantic. In “O Velho Sumares,” a story which features a British brig’s chase of a slave ship piloted by Sumares, the narrator catalogues the sailors’ contempt for the British navy. Veteran participants of the traffic recalled the “cruel inhumanity of the English mariners [cruel deshumanidade da maruja ingleza]” that captured Brazilian slavers and confiscated their ships and goods. This phrase may be a ray of Várzea’s critical irony shining through the neutral narrative, or it may suggest the ubiquitous brutality accompanying all sides of maritime conflicts, both on the slave ship and the British war ship. It may be the recognition of another example of the savagery of the civilized: the West’s inescapable narrative of the brutal violence waged by its own armed forces of liberation and enlightenment, a critique running through works like Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now and seen in wars from the

Crusades to the War on Terror.

In works like “Na Ilhota” and “O Velho Sumares,” Várzea witnesses the local celebration of many slavers and the moral acceptance of slavery in nineteenth century

Brazil. In his stories slavers attain to high status in Brazilian society, and a perverse nostalgia for the slave trade runs through his work. Famous for their daring evasions of

British anti-slave patrols and Atlantic tempests, the “esteemed” mariners of “heroic episodes” are turned into national mythology (54). In Várzea ‘s southern coast of Brazil, slave traders are analogous to cowboys in the United States. Like the cowboy, the slave

144 trader operated at the limit of the law and was often portrayed as courageous in their criminality—a last revolt against the inevitable domination of the political (and in this case imperial) state. The legends of Manuel Lemos and Captain Sumares are told with pride in Brazilian homes, integrated into the love of Brazilian families. The cowboy and the slave trader physically challenge (with weapons) the force of the law at odds with their seeking of fortunes. They tear holes in the law and in doing so attack its force over the marginalized citizen.

Although written in the 1890’s, most of the sea stories are set during the time of the slave trade, and in this nostalgia Várzea’s stories attribute a great deal of ambivalence to the attitudes of Brazilians with respect to the British. The British are both vilified and adored; they are imperialist violators of Brazilian sovereignty and objects of desire.

British men persecute Brazilian merchants; whereas British women in “Miss Sarah” and

“A Vela dos Naufragos” embody the trope of the sickly but seductive woman of the north in the tropics, imagery which dates to foundational Indianist Romantic works of Brazilian literature. British vessels pursue and frustrate local heroes like Manuel Lemos and

Captain Sumares. The young Miss Sarah is adored but unattainable to her Brazilian suitor. Desired and resented, the British presence haunts most of Várzea’s maritime stories. Though the position changes to the United States in the twentieth century, during the nineteenth century Britain exercised the greatest foreign influence on Brazilian life, mostly through maritime policies.

145

A large portion of the Brazilian political elite was in favor of eventual abolition of the trade and the institution of slavery in Brazil, yet they objected to the timeline imposed by Britain and the manner in which the more powerful empire had dictated the laws of another (almost) sovereign nation. Many British also opposed the aggressive imperialism of Britain’s humanitarian foreign policy. In their study Joaquim Nabuco, British

Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil (2009), Leslie Bethell and José Murilho do

Carvalho demonstrate that the Anti-Slavery Society opposed British naval enforcement of foreign slave trading, recognizing the significant violation of sovereignty that would culminate in the Royal Navy’s blockade of Rio de Janeiro in 1851 (9). In most of the maritime texts from Brazil and the United States, the British are unwelcomed guests, and

Brazilians and Americans scan the horizon nervously for the Union Jack.

Along with the subterfuge and resource failures hindering the policing of the

Atlantic slave trade, Historian Marika Sherwood’s article [short title] highlights the shortcomings of the judicial apparatus designed to decide criminal cases of human trafficking. Citing herself, Leslie Bethell, and an anonymous 1831 British pamphlet titled Present State of the Foreign Slave Trade, Sherwood (in concordance with

Martinez) explains that the Mixed Commission Courts at Freetown, Sierra Leone were subject to bureaucratic failures such as inadequate management and corruption which ultimately decreased convictions and, in some cases, resulted in the re-enslavement of the rescued captives (28;100). Protagonist Negreiro (in English “Slaver,” as in boat or person) , from The Two, or the Mechanical Englishman [Os dois ou o Inglês maquinista],

146 confidently refers to this system of favor in which captured slaves are redistributed to

Brazilians after their liberation by a judge (3). Courts such as those established in Rio de

Janeiro and Havana were undermined by various stages of the legal process and were considered to have been limited in their efficacy. According to Martinez’s research, the greatest obstacle facing the courts was “the reluctance of Spain, Portugal, and Brazil to enforce strictly the ban on the slave trade” (93). Problems notwithstanding, many slavers were successfully convicted by these courts and Sherwood’s estimate suggests that the court at Freetown alone liberated more than 65,000 Africans while Martinez accounts for more than 80,000 in all the courts (29;99). Yet these considerable successes were not sufficient to deter slavers from the lucrative trade.

Unlike Várzea’s realist depiction, the portrait of slavocratic Brazilian society

Martins Pena’s play The Two or the Mechanical Englishman [Os Dois ou o Inglês

Maquinista] directly satirizes Brazilian elite’s participation in the trade, principally through the character Negreiro, and his acceptance in polite society. Probably the most popular dramatist of nineteenth-century Brazil, Pena’s numerous dramas ridiculed the values, tastes, and pretensions of the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro’s) elite, establishing a precedent that would continue in the realist fiction of Machado de Assis later in the century. Like Machado’s characters, greed and the desire for status underlie the actions in Pena’s plays that would ordinarily be associated with human ideals like love, duty, and faith. While Pena was the foremost dramatic and critical voice of his contemporary society, Leon F. Lyday’s “Satire in the Comedies of Martins Pena” (1968) explains that

147 he faced considerable censorship, a fact which makes The Two or the Mechanical

Englishman especially remarkable within his body of work since it challenged both the government and the elite planter class (68).63 The themes of race and slavery, Nola

Kortner Aeix relates in “Martins Pena: Parodist” (1981), “appear in only two of Martin’s

Pena’s plays, Os Ciúmes de um Pedestre and Os Dous ou O Inglês Machinista” (158).64

It is generally true that this date precedes any significant abolitionist currents in public discourse, including literature; however, the contemporary popularity of this play contradicts that notion with regard to the Brazilian imaginary of the 1840's.

To illustrate the centrality of the trade and its abolition to the play, Os Dois opens with a long discussion of the traffic, its policing in Rio by the British, and the bureaucracy that depends on it. The central character “Negreiro]” enlightens his interlocutors as to the regular circumventions of the law and ambiguous moralities upon which the trade functions everyday on the Brazilian coast. He operates a thriving business that depends on his ability to adapt to the complex international politics of the

Atlantic World and capitalize on the extremely weak force of the Brazilian prohibition of slave trading. In his boasts, he expresses assuredness that local judges will support his claims and not jeopardize the Brazilian trade in spite of their official duty of honoring the

Anglo-Brazilian treaty and the domestic law of 7 November 1831. Between the

63Lyday also suggests that Pena’s use of farce—central to The Two or the Mechanical Englishman— emerged as a strategy to evade censorship.

64 On the other hand, Pena shares with Várzea a recurring attention to British imperialism in the Atlantic and British imperialists in Brazilian society. See Aeix p. 65. 148 legislature and the citizen, there stands a litany of officials and procedures which disrupt and distort the letter of the law and its more obscure spirit.

The play begins as Clemência is complaining to Negreiro about the high expenses of living in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1840’s; from the beginning there is a greedy alliance between religion and slave-trading. Wine, which the decadent Negreiro classifies as a necessity [primeira necessidade] and fashionable clothing are the first targets of their pecuniary laments. Throughout the play all behavior is motivated by wealth, and all cultural institutions and mores function towards the end of acquiring money. In this way Pena links the survival of slavery in with a fundamental immorality in Brazilian society, reminiscent [precursor?] of the socio-economic critique underlying much of the writing of Machado de Assis. The political satire of the play develops through farce, evident in the name “Slaver” and in elite society’s transparent avarice.65

The play generates its force as social commentary from the way its form and discourse mockingly mirrors the unsympathetic rationale that the planter class and many intellectuals used to advocate for slavery. A reverse-mask, Pena over-exposes the slave trader in order to deride the unabashed practice of his craft.

The third character to enter into dialogue, Felício, inquires to Negreiro regarding a ship, Veloz Estandarte [Swift Swordfish], that was captured off the Brazilian coast by a

British warship while carrying three hundred slaves. The British received little assistance

65 The absurd hedonism of Pena’s play establishes the motifs of corruption and fatuity that would continue to characterize literary critiques of Brazilian society in Machado’s realist writing and would reemerge in Brazilian drama with the modernist plays of Oswald de Andrade such as The Candle King (1933).

149 in persecuting and prosecuting violators of the international law prohibiting the slave trade. Sherwood’s statement that British vessels policing the American coasts “had too large an area to cover” once again raises the importance of the sheer size of the Atlantic and the continental coasts (28). Negreiro’s character from Martins Pena’s play confidently voices the slaver’s disdain for the trade’s persecutors and boasts of the ease in circumventing the laws in maritime trade. Negreiro laughs at the foolishness of the captured ship, highlighting the extensive littoral options for bringing slaves onto

Brazilian soil: “Há por aí além uma costa tão longa e algumas autoridades tão condescendentes![The coast out there is so long, and the authorities so tolerant]” (3). He explains the corruption and profits gained by the local governments in both bribes and slaves. Clemência, the matriarch figure of the play, then proceeds to explain the bureaucratic path—passing through the hands of magistrate, deputy, then minister— through which she received an illegally imported slave (meia-cara) the night before. In particular, nations that remained heavily invested in the trade such as Spain, Portugal, and

Brazil simply ignored the agreements they had made with Britain and established little or no enforcement. As Martinez argues, this was the primary factor which allowed the trade to continue and grow beyond 1807, for the Brazilian government made no attempts to prevent the landing of slave ships or the sale of slaves and did little to prosecute Brazilian slavers (94).

The satirical criticism of Martins Pena’s play reaches beyond the exposition of the slave-trader’s status in Brazilian society and connects this organized crime to the larger

150 forces of economic power and social favor operating in nineteenth century Brazil. Upon the exit of Negreiro and Clemência, Felício sarcastically denounces the possibility of a marriage between Negreiro and his cousin Mariquinha: “It’s an advantageous marriage.

He’s immensely rich…trampling over the laws, it’s true; but so what?” (3). However, if

Felício is to succeed in marrying Mariquinha he must fend off Negreiro the slave trader and Mr. Gainer the English capitalist [“um negociante de meia-cara e um especulador”].

Pena has inserted his romantic hero in between two of the major figures of colonialist power in the Atlantic world who recur as characters throughout maritime fiction. The

English imperialist capitalist is especially common in nineteenth century Brazilian fiction

(a trend which shifts to the American capitalist in the twentieth century). Felício generates enmity between the slaver and the English capitalist by falsely warning

Negreiro that Mr. Gainer intends to expose him to the local judge and commander of the

British battleship stationed offshore. In the international political symbolism of Pena’s play, Brazilian happiness is caught between two forms of coloniality: Brazilian slave trading and British imperialism.

Beyond the British Empire’s antagonism of Brazilian slave trading, the presence of Mr. Gainer as a potential “investor” in Brazilian society highlights the ambivalent role of the British with respect to Brazilian slavery and international exploitation of labor.

Discussing the pervasiveness of the traffic, Marika Sherwood addresses the perpetuation of slavery enabled by the emergent system of transnational capitalism, spurred largely by

British and American investment but reaching into nations like Brazil. Before and after

151 the 1833 abolition in the West-Indies, British capital was deeply involved in the slave- based Brazilian economy as well as in the internal trade, which persisted beyond 1851 and consisted slaves from the Northeast to the booming coffee plantations in the South

(mostly in the provinces of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). Sherwood cites the 1879 report from the US Consul in Rio de Janeiro that the internal Brazilian trade was supported by “English capital, English goods, English subsidized steamship lines and

English influence” (31). As in Baltimore and other ports in the United States, the building of slave ships was a profitable industry in England throughout the nineteenth century. Beyond the trade itself, British industrial cities such as Manchester and

Liverpool thrived on the industrial use of slave grown cotton66 (32). A typical example of the archetype of the British capitalist in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, Mr.

Gainer attempts to sew himself into the fabric of Brazilian society through the continuity of money and family.

As Raiz do Nascimento notes, Martins Pena’s Os Dous examines slavery through the lens of the Brazilian family, and in this way it anticipates later abolitionist texts such as Jose de Alencar’s The Family Demon (1857) and Macedo’s Victims-Executioners

(1869) (short title 162). The latter two texts, however, assert the pernicious influence of the childish (Jose de Alencar) and violent (Joaquim Manuel de Macedo) slaves on the

Brazilian household, while The Two depicts only the degrading forces of the white

66 The issue of foreign exploitation of forced labor will return in the conclusion of the dissertation. There is a clear parallel between the British use of products like slave grown cotton or sugar and the mass consumption of goods produced in the sweat-shops of late-capitalism. In both cases, the “out of sight, out of mind” principle bolsters the colonialist exploitation of labor. 152

Brazilian elite. In its emphasis on social and family life Pena’s comedy also resembles

Várzea’s treatment of the trade and its juxtaposition of white affective bonds that are fed by the bondage of Africans. The play censures family and social relations of Brazilian bourgeois morality, which strictly uphold propriety while trafficking in people and only valuing wealth. The entire system and the primary venal motivation of the people facilitate the continuation of slavery. Negreiro is the play’s villain, but he seems no worse than Clemência (the Brazilian matriarch) and other characters who accept his gifts of flesh and conduct much of their lives supported by the labor of illegally imported slaves.

As Pena’s play testifies, ‘slave power’ (a popular term during U.S. abolition) exercised considerable control over legislation and more importantly legal procedure, the result of which contributed greatly to a culture of government corruption, popular suspicion, and social inequity in mid-nineteenth century Brazil. The fluidity of Brazilian status with respect to the law and the possibility of abolition generated an urgent need for the assertion of the rights of non-white Brazilians and greatly undermined faith in the force of law among Brazilians of color. Known today as the Revolta do Ronco da Abelha

(Revolt of the Bee’s Buzz) in reference to its origin in rumor, the historical event chronicled by Sidney Chalhoub in the introduction to A Força da Escravidão (2012) demonstrated that a large portion of the Brazilian populace trusted neither Brazilian law

153 nor Brazilian officials following the period of illegal traffic67. Begun in January 1852, the uprising came in response to rumors that the new national census was specifically designed to facilitate civil enslavement and conscription of the people of color in order to fulfill the need for labor. While Chalhoub describes a “pandemonium” stretching across several northeast Brazilian states, he also notes that the rebels acted on reasonable fears given the recent history of their nation. The widespread participation in the uprising in spite of the lack of organization or communication between the many different groups suggests that the impetus for the rebellion came from an extensive and justifiable popular distrust of Brazilian law. In the first place, illegal (re)enslavement of free people of color was common throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century, as was the fate of men like Luiz Gama, Solomon Northrup (the American author of 12 Years a Slave), and countless others as the force of law varied according to status and skin color.

Furthermore, the census decree came only a year after the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil was finally brought to end by British naval threats to bombard Rio de Janeiro and the passing of the Eusébio de Queiróz Law.

A prominent historian of the end of the slave trade to the Americas, Dale T.

Graden analyzes contemporary legal texts in “An Act ‘Even of Public Security’: Slave

Resistance, Social Tensions, and the End of the International Slave Trade to Brazil, 1835-

1856” in order to elaborate the fragility of the rule of law in mid-nineteenth-century

67 From 1831-1851, the importation of slaves was officially illegal under Brazilian law, but custom allowed the trade to thrive more than ever, and during those two decades 750,000 slaves were brought into Brazil, almost twice as many as the total number of African slaves brought into the United States in the entire history of the trade (Chalhoub 30; Gates TheRoot Online). 154

Brazil, both in terms of the popular imagination and the functioning of the adolescent federal government. Graden begins with a citation from the Brazilian Minister of Justice in 1852, José Ildefonso de Sousa Ramos, whose declaration lauds the government’s wise and efficacious prohibition of the traffic:

the imperial government helped to bring about the complete extinction of the

traffic as a measure of social convenience, of civilization, of national honor and

even of public security…[such initiatives] show to be true a fact of great

importance—that the government of Brazil has enough force to carry out its

searches and to execute effectively its laws. (Graden’s italics 249-250)

As his title and italicization foreground, Graden builds his article around a close reading of the notion of “public security” in Sousa Ramos’ self-congratulatory statement.

Specifically, during the period of the illegal Brazilian trade (1830-1851) Brazilian public security was threatened both from without by the British Navy and from within by the steady presence of slave revolts, particularly in but hardly limited to African-led revolts in Bahia in the 1830’s. Thus, without even considering internal political discord between conservatives and liberals, Brazilian civil order was deeply threatened by its continued participation in the slave trade, which left the national leaders no choice but to relinquish the transatlantic “alchemy” that produced much of the nation’s wealth.

By 1852, the principle source of manual labor around which the imperial economy was organized had been abruptly cut off against the will of the Brazilian government, which had unlawfully protected the trade for the past two decades. At that

155 moment politicians and national economic interests were extremely concerned with the crisis of labor emerging from the abolition of the trade, and the government and the planters began at this time to solicit workers from Europe in order to continue developing

Brazilian agriculture. Historically, the force of Brazilian law had always protected the interests of the planter class, so the new civil register could have been a continuation of this pattern. For many Brazilians and especially people of color, registering their identity within the law was viewed as a danger to personal liberty since legal institutions operated directly against their interests.

A free Afro-Brazilian of ten years—the future poet, lawyer, journalist, and orator—Luiz Gama was sold into slavery by his white father aboard a ship engaged in the internal Brazilian slave trade, bound from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro. That Gama’s father brought him aboard a ship in order to sell him demonstrates the protection the sea offered for moral and legal transgressions. Like the free Yankee Solomon Northrup,

Gama was illegally enslaved under a de facto legal system which permitted this form of kidnapping. The pervasive threat of moving from freedom to slavery extended throughout the Atlantic world and was especially strong in the maritime environment.

The line between free and slave was thin and fluid; legal identity was fragile and vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, particularly in regards to people of color.

While the instability of identity with respect to the law made possible his illegal enslavement, Gama would utilize the same volatility of legal identity to regain his freedom. A brilliant autodidact who learned the law so well he liberated over 500 slaves

156 during his lifetime, Gama’s first case was his own, in which he clandestinely acquired or generated himself the documents needed in order to prove his free personage.68 With deep personal knowledge of the absurdity of Brazilian law, Gama employs satire to turn aesthetic and political law on their heads and. In addition to its revolutionary aesthetics of negritude, Luiz Gama’s poetic commentary on the construction of identity and the processes of law in slavocratic Brazil developed from his remarkable personal history in moving back and forth across the legal-identity line of free person and slave. The combination of documentation of freedom and escape points to the malleable force of law that governed the social lives of Afro-Brazilians, sometimes creating but usually negating their rights within the law.

While the pliable force of law in nineteenth century Brazil had widespread effects on national culture, subjects circum-ambulating the Atlantic often experienced extreme variations of the law or operated as the site of jurisdictional oppositions. For people of color forcibly absorbed into western civilization, the inconsistency, or heterogeneity, of the law exerted tremendous force over individual lives and community customs. In the transnational maritime context, nationality is still essential to the application of the law, and this importance coupled with the fluidity of identity in that context made national identity the foremost object of legal manipulation and juridical debate. As with Brazilian authors, Anglophone writers from around the Atlantic captured the maritime play of legal identity that enslaved, liberated, and facilitated commerce during the nineteenth century.

68 Gama recalls in a biographical letter that he obtained his free papers “duplicitously and secretly [ardilosamente e secretamente”] before fleeing his master and joining the Army (Carta a Mendonça). 157

Despite the absurd humor of Pena’s Os Dois ou o Ingles Machinista, Negreiro’s boasts of the success of the illegal trade accurately reflected a social reality of the 1840’s that stretched across Brazil’s immense coastal area. While Várzea and Pena treat two distinct areas of southern Brazil, Mahomma Baquaqua’s Biography (1854) testifies to the illicit trade’s operation in the Brazilian Northeast. Since the slave narrative genre did not exist in Brazil as it did in the United States, Baquaqua’s narrative69 imparts a rare glimpse of illegal slave importation in Brazil from the perspective of a slave, more specifically from an African reduced in captivity. While many of the slave voyage narratives published in London (like Equiano’s) emerged close to the turn of the nineteenth century as abolitionists built their case for British abolition of the trade,

Baquaqua’s story first appeared in 1854. Since he estimates his age at thirty in the introduction and was kidnapped and taken from Africa as a young adult, Baquaqua was certainly disembarked in Brazil between 1831 and 1851 when the trade was prohibited but thriving. Upon reaching Brazil, evidence of the criminality of the voyage emerges as the slave ship waits in the off-shore waters of Pernambuco until nightfall so as not to risk being discovered unloading the human contraband.

In their slave narratives and critiques of transatlantic slavery, African writers like

Baquaqua, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano profess their admiration of both Christianity and the western rule of law, which increases their frustration at the failure of these moral ideologies to govern behavior in the West. Liberated African

69 Originally written in English as part of the British Abolitionist literary industry, Baquaqua’s narrative was published in Portuguese for the first time in 2015. 158 intellectuals writing within western discourse focused their critique on the divide between natural law and political law, and between political law and acts. Dedicated students of the West, these writers rightly understood the West as a culture of law—in both its religious and secular foundations—and expostulated the impotence of the primary cultural value. Cugoano emphasizes this cultural inheritance by choosing a passage from

Numbers as the epigraph to his narrative: “One law, and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you” (9). The abuse of the heterogeneous and capricious force of the law facilitated the organized oppression that monetized people of color in spite of a religious ethos of charity and love. As newly converted members of

Western culture, these writers especially objected to a culture that did not follow their own principles, and, like Marlow and Kurtz, they deplored the mask of the rhetoric of civility.

As the center of transatlantic abolitionism, Britain became the point of congress for abolitionist intellectuals, activists, and writers from around the Atlantic; as a result, a tremendous amount of abolitionist literature by authors from all four continents was published in London and destined for British readers. Black and white intellectuals were also prolific and effective writers in the American abolitionist campaign based in New

England, but British abolitionists were more intently focused on the slave trade and its transnational effects. Many of the most widely influential texts came from African authors that had lived the entire cycle from enslavement in Africa to freedom in England or elsewhere, the writing and publication of which often involved the participation of

159 white British activists in varying degrees. Unlike the narratives of Equiano and Cugoano, for example, Baquaqua does not author his text—it is a biography, not an autobiography, but slips between first and third person narration—Samuel Moore relays the story he learned first-hand from the former slave. The text of Moore and Baquaqua shows considerable British ethnocentrism—far more than Equiano’s—and calls the philanthropists of Britain to bring knowledge to an Africa of mental darkness. Questions of authorship notwithstanding, the British abolitionist efforts brought together a community of black intellectuals like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, who, working with white abolitionists, waged a thorough censure of transatlantic commerce and the function of law in western nations.

Unlike his colleague Cugoano, who focused on the whole transnational slave trade’s deviation from divine natural law, Equiano foregoes a systemic invalidation of slavery and concentrates on the commonplace manipulations of the law in the Atlantic world. As his critique of the West focused more on practice than the basic principles and institutions of western societies, Equiano was particularly dismayed by the moments in which the force of white interests superseded the law. Even in times when there existed hardly any black rights, these few rights were often violated for white profit, and people of color were not allowed to complain of their violation. Equiano maintained a strong sense of his “right,” and felt acute outrage when he did not receive it. Indeed, Equiano’s narrative calls most attention, through its moments of greatest exasperation, to the breaches of the contemporary laws, rather than waging a general indictment against the

160 legality of slavery in general. Equiano holds Western civilization to its presumption of the rule of law, and objects most forcefully to its failure to embody its own law and philosophy that results from the conflicting desires within the West.

Heterogeneity of Law and Maritime Fraud in Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America

Both within the nations—on plantations and in cities—and on the sea, modern

Atlantic societies struggle over the rule of law and the ways in which the new theories of individual rights and citizenship that came out of the Enlightenment ought to be interpreted and applied. Delany’s novel provides one of the richest fictional representations of a major transatlantic controversy of the period: the fragile construction of international law with respect to the slave trade. It was not the national law (the

United States abolished the trade only months after Britain, entering into effect in January

1808), but the complexities of maritime international law that allowed for the exploitation of false nationality towards the end of importing human beings illegally into the

Americas. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness

(1993) generated recent interest in Martin Delany’s career as an advocate of black nationalism and author of the relatively-unknown but foundational African American novel Blake, or the Huts of America (1859). Typical of the black Atlantic critical paradigm that his work helped to coalesce, Gilroy highlights Delany’s attention to mobility which weighs “roots” vs “routes” in investigations of black identity, and the fact that the novel “makes African-American experience visible within a hemispheric order

161 of racial domination” (27). As Gilroy’s project underscores the need to forge a

“coalitional politics” of liberation that transcends ethnicity, he primarily adopts Delany’s work as the American origin of a politics/poetics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism that transcends cultural identity. Because Blake’s protagonist migrates across cultures and rejects traditional forms of unity like ethnicity and religion, Delany’s writing provides a fruitful ur-text for Gilroy’s vision of non-essentialist anti-racist solidarity. Instead of placing Blake in my chapters on identity or revolt, which, like Melville’s Benito Cereno, would be perfectly suitable, I will emphasize the illustrations of the heterogeneity of law around the Atlantic that drive the maritime sections of Blake, or the Huts of America.

Delany’s protagonist, Henry/Blake, traverses the United States, Caribbean, and Atlantic pursuing the organization of revolt in response to the racist force of law. My goal is to further elaborate the utility of Delany’s novel for understanding the racialist force of law in the nineteenth century and the ways that the fluid law constituted the negotiation of identity and the desire for revolt in the black Atlantic.

In fictional mobility that exceeds even Equiano’s narrative, the protagonist of

Blake, or the Huts of America travels across the continental United States and the

Atlantic, and thereby engages in the play of identity through which many Atlantic subjects responded to the diversity of law that drifted across racial and geographical lines.

Delany’s novel recreates the thinly-occulted trafficking of African subjects to the New

World, including a portrait of the African’s middle passage and conversely the paid labor of a black man aboard a slave ship. Like Frederick Douglass, Delany was a prominent

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African-American intellectual in the mid-nineteenth century, writing fiction and non- fiction focused on the liberation of African-Americans. Delany’s life shared in the same picaresque heroism as his protagonist, Henry Holland: born in Virginia with a grandfather name Shango, Delany attended Harvard Medical School, worked for a time with Douglass on the paper The North Star and with William Lloyd Garrison on The

Liberator, convinced Lincoln to authorize an all-black regiment which he lead during the civil war, became the first black major in the United States, and worked on plans for a mass return of American blacks to a “black Israel” in Liberia and Nicaragua. Delany is often referred to as one of the fathers of black nationalism, and the novel Blake, or the

Huts of America (1859) explores the possibility of transnational revolutionary black politics in the slave societies of the United States and Cuba.

In response to the cultural and legal fragmentation of the displaced subject of color, Delany’s novel attempts to reconstruct a network of cultural and legal identity that, as Gilroy points out, would constitute a “middle passage in reverse” (short title 27).

Henry does this physically and psychologically as he traverses North America and the

Atlantic (including Cuba, Canada, transatlantic slave route, and travel throughout the

United States), and, as Gilroy highlights, Delany’s novel also constructs a network of intertextuality by alluding to other abolitionist voices of the Atlantic world such as

Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Blake, and Turner’s The Slave Ship (ibid). As Delany’s

African-American picaresque protagonist travels across the United States and Cuba, he confronts the particularly volatile functioning of the law and its enforcement with respect

163 to subjects of color. Delany’s novel faces the legal fluidity that situates people of color in the West, who are subjected to caprice and manipulation by economic powers and therefore lack a stable political identity. Before proceeding to Blake, Paul Gilroy’s discussion of Delany in The Black Atlantic (1993) emphasizes Delany’s attempt to articulate a unified black politics and identity that would overcome both ethnic difference and asymmetries of law and power that separated blacks in the Americas. Reading

Delany’s non-fiction texts such as The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered (1852), Gilroy charts

Delany’s efforts to work through problems of legal and cultural identity generated by the

African Diaspora (19-26).

As Henry (Blake by the end of the novel) moves through new territories, he encounters new relations of freedom and bondage, and as a result his identity shifts for his own strategic purposes and because of imposed restrictions on his personhood. In a liberating exploitation of the vagaries of maritime identity, Henry Holland adopts the culture of protean identity in order to oppose racial oppression. Most notably, the protagonist changes his name from Henry to Blake in the course of the narrative. Blake’s goal throughout the novel is to foment revolt in the American South and in the Caribbean, and he hides his own identity in order to safeguard these ambitions. When the officers of the Vulture realize that Blake (a man of color) has assumed a false identity they are neither surprised nor alarmed: “‘No matter; I suppose he wants to conceal his identity in the business!’ suggested Paul. ‘Yes, yes!’ replied Castello ‘I noticed he had a good deal

164 of feeling about the thing,’” (202). Their very “business” functions through secrecy and subterfuge; Blake’s self-concealment appears to them as it should be—a matter of course in the Atlantic.

In Atlantic nations and on their ships, the position of persons before the law balanced on the delicate and fluid socio-economics generated by the slave trade, the slave system of labor, and the social hierarchies implemented to protect interests private and public. As the legal status of persons of color remained precarious throughout the

Atlantic World, there were significant differences in the ways that different the empires of the West legislated and thereby restricted personhood and color. In Delany’s antebellum novel, Henry/Blake directly laments the difference in personhood across the

Atlantic world. Towards the end of the novel, he distinguishes sharply between the

British and American legal systems, declaring it an unhappy thought

to contrast the difference between British and American jurisprudence. How

sublime the spectacle of the colossal stature (compared with the puppet figure of

the Judge of the American Supreme Court), of the Lord Chief Justice when

standing up declaring to the effect: that by the force of magnanimity, and aegis of

the Magna Charta, the moment the foot of a slave touched British soil, he stood

erect, disenthralled in the dignity of a freeman, by the irresistible genius of

universal emancipation. (263)

As Miller’s editor’s note documents, Blake’s conceit refers to Judge William Murray’s

(Lord Mansfield) 1772 ruling in the Somerset case, which earned renown as the first

165 juridical (or legislative) invalidation of modern chattel slavery. Probably the most famous successful use of the writ of Habeas Corpus, the 1772 case of Somerset vs. Stewart was also the first legal decision of abolition in the Atlantic World.70 The effect of this case was that any slave reaching British soil would be considered free thereafter, and it was the first major success toward the progress of abolition that would grow over the next century.

Still, as Delany’s passage above reminds his readers, the decisions of one court did not extend everywhere in the Atlantic world. In the international imperialist context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though the writ of habeas corpus was meant to apply to any dominion of the King including colonies, it was negated by various colonial laws and administrations, so that, as Halliday summarizes, “in the end, the experience of empire would fracture law even as it carried the writ outward” (35). The law functioned in diverse and changing ways across the British empire, and habeas corpus was both upheld and denied in various parts of the globe. Though some slaves did obtain their freedom through use of the writ of habeas corpus, judges from the American south frequently dismissed the petition, as they were not obligated to decide cases. In England too, even after the Somerset decision, judges commonly ignored and did not issue the writ (Wise 114-115).

70 The particulars of this case involved the slave James Somerset, who, after leaving his American master during their stay in England, had been caught by slave hunters and reintroduced into slavery. Somerset was kidnapped in Guinea and removed from Africa on a British ship from Liverpool. His African name and familial relations were unknown. The writ is used to demand judicial justification for detentio n (the right to appear before a judge), and, when Granville Sharp brought the motion to Lord Mansfield, Somerset was detained onboard a slave ship readying to sail to the British West Indies.

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In addition to identifying the true dictates of the law, Mansfield’s decision was predicated on the recognition of Somerset’s right, regardless of race or civil status, to seek legal recourse as a person in the community of law. This expanded definition of personhood furnished a great opening through which other black subjects could hold the legal system accountable for their human rights, and, conversely, it was by refusing this legal ontology that the U.S. Supreme Court denied Dred Scott liberty in 1859. Eighty- five years after Somerset the United States Supreme Court heard a famous habeas corpus case which was interpreted in terms of the ontological concept of personhood: they denied the rights of Dred Scott. In the introductory syllabus (a kind of abstract of the opinion of the case) to the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the court quickly reveals the essential meaning of the decision: “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States” (I:4). Blake, or the Huts of America departs from this wide separation of legal personhood between British and American society that reflects the variability of law and its susceptibility to the influences of power, and the mobility of Delany’s protagonist mirrors the space of the Atlantic which divided colonizer from colonized, a great distance of perspective which provided protective means for exploração.

The Dred Scott decision is widely believed to be the worst ruling in U.S. Supreme

Court history and its failure as jurisprudence attests to the malleability of the law when confronting powerful interests and political turmoil (Rodriguez 265). It categorically

167 stripped rights from African Americans—whereas only slaves, not blacks were restricted from citizenship in the Constitution—and established the right to own slaves as property as an inviolable federal protection, effectively stripping rights from blacks in the North and South. Coupled with the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Scott v. Sandford (1857) persuaded abolitionists that compromise or an equilibrium between free and slave states could not last. Lincoln’s political career grew around this question. After Scott. V.

Sandford, Lincoln gave his “House Divided” (1858) speech during his campaign for

Illinois Senator (also Obama’s route to the presidency), in which he declares that the nation must become all free or all slave.71 Like the violence leading up to and including the Civil War, Delany’s novel of black cosmopolitan revolt rises from the utter exasperation of the law’s failure to act as guardian of political stability and social equality.

Containing remarkable accounts of the heterogeneous force of law in different spaces, Equiano’s text testifies to the geographical variations to the laws found in different locations, particularly the maritime colonies distant from London or the

Northern United States. An example he recalls having “often seen,” he relates an instance of the illegal enslavement of a free man in Jamaica who, although he had papers and was known to his community as a free man, was kidnapped and sold by traders

71 “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.” 168 without appeal (128). Legal status of freedom was not a guarantee of freedom against the social norm that allowed white persons to deny black rights for profit. Around the

Atlantic World, legal identity depended on race, and Equiano laments,

Hitherto I had thought only slavery dreadful; but the state of a free negro appeared

to me now equally so at least, and in some respects even worse; for they live in

constant alarm for their liberty, which is but nominal; and they are universally

insulted and plundered without the possibility of redress; such being the equity of

the West-Indian laws, that no free negro’s evidence will be admitted in their

course of justice. In this situation is it surprising that slaves, when mildly treated,

should prefer even the misery of slavery to such a mockery of freedom? I was

now completely disgusted with the West-Indies, and thought I never should be

entirely free till I had left them. (128-129)

The liminal legality of the black subject vexes Equiano, and his commentary on the condition of free blacks illustrates their truly alien status within the national body.

Equiano himself lived under the constant threat of captivity, and as a free man he narrowly escapes kidnapping and illegal enslavement on several occasions. Each return to the West Indies brings this threat to his person; liberty is foremost a question of place and race, and its meaning moves with the flows of power.

These differences/deferrals of the law across space and time both hindered and inspired efforts to construct international law that would transcend these differences in the transatlantic world. The first constructive attempts to forge effective international

169 law developed in order to eradicate the foundation of Atlantic commerce: the slave trade.

Because it required coherence between national law, international law, and local practice, the abolition of the slave trade proceeded through diplomatic complexities and various steps backwards and forwards during the sixty years (1807-1867) in which the abolition of the trade was in process. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Royal Navy was forced to relinquish the wartime right to search ships suspected of criminal activity, and

Lord Castlereagh and the British Foreign Office realized that the universal accession to search agreements would be required to prevent the continuance of the trade through the falsification and concealment of identity that was easily achieved in the maritime environment. Though the trade remained illegal under U.S. law since 1808, for instance, the British navy continued to be prohibited from searching American ships which allowed the trade to go on with slavers disguised as Americans.72 Bethell succinctly depicts the many ways that crews altered their identity: “Slave traders were already in the habit of employing fictitious bills of sale,, double sets of papers, alternative flags, fraudulent logbooks etc., to protect where necessary their illegal activities” (25). The

72 An important example is the Anglo-American Convention of 1824: Britain and the United States agreed to treat the traffic as piracy between themselves (it was not considered piracy by international law), thus enabling each other to search one another’s ships for slaves or slaving equipment. Such an agreement would have been greatly effective since it would have ended the practice of slavers hiding under the American flag when approached by a British cruiser. Unfortunately, as Bethell explains, “the question of an anti-slave trade treaty became entangled with the issue of domestic slavery and the Convention of 1824 was never ratified” (25). 170 ubiquity of maritime fraud constituted one of the central factors that allowed the slave trade to continue in spite its various prohibitions in law both national and international.73

The narrative technique of Blake, or the Huts of America performs this culture of piracy in plain sight by alluding in detail to the operations of a slaver without explicit mention of the illegal status of this business. This section of the novel resembles

Várzea’s ‘nostalgic’ tales of the slave trade by revealing the functioning of the traffic through obscure description and meaning below the surface of the text. Delany’s text— at least until the full descriptions of the middle passage—demands a close analysis of the details in order to grasp the strong presence of American participation in the slave trade that continued until the Civil War. Delany’s chapter “Coastward Bound” demonstrates

73 The need to manage the coincidence of the various authorities of law often effected national jurisprudence. In the United States, the tremendous difficulty in deciding national identity of ships and sailors became the focus of the 1822 Massachusetts Circuit case The United States vs. La Jeune Eugenie. This case centered around the issue of international jurisdiction arose when an American vessel captured a slaving vessel off the coast of Africa which carried French papers and flag but had been built in the United States. While the defendants claimed that the USS Alligator had not had the authority to seize a French ship, part of the Americans case involved the widely recognized practice of disguised identity among slavers. As the French Consul had filed a claim to the ship, the incident engendered serious diplomatic concerns between the two nations. In his opinion, Justice Story (who also decided the Amistad case) challenged the supposed French identity of the ship because of the fraudulent “network which covers up unlawful enterprises” (Martinez 56). Yet, Story’s decision did more than officially recognize the peculiar nature of maritime identity. As Ninth Circuit Appeals Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain explains, Justice Story was a firm believer in natural law and declared that the law of nations was guided by this univers al natural law and superior to any positive national laws (4). For Story, no man-made law could authorize the African slave trade (distinct from other forms of slavery) since it violated principles of justice and humanity that were eternally and universally true. While the ship was ultimately given to the French government, Story had recognized a significant role for the law of nations and the appeal to natural law in real disputes of international law. However, the heterogeneity of the law would quickly emerge, and shortly after the case of the La Jeune Eugenie another appeals court and John Marshall’s Supreme Court denied the existence of a prohibition of the trade within the law of nations and therefore deny the ability for U.S. captains to seize foreign ships under the law of nations.

171 the euphemistic rhetoric through which trade in human beings is legitimized as maritime commerce:

The old ship “Merchantman” fitted up at Baltimore and brought to Matanzas

[Cuba], had been changed in name to “Vulture,” and a slight alternation from the

original intention had been made in the arrangements…Captains Paul and Garcia,

and Royer and Castello, were to be respectively commanders and mates in the

order of the list, to represent their national character, as occasion required them to

sail under either American or Spanish colors. (201)

A clue enters symbolically through the name-change to “Vulture,” but it is the need to represent the ship with flexible nationality as either American or Spanish that signifies its participation in the illicit trade. Should a British vessel be sighted they would raise the

American flag, and the appearance of the American navy would call for the Spanish flag.

In this way, through the play of identity the vessel could avoid the reach of the laws and the British enforcement that restricted the slave trade. The description continues to reveal further the method of the slavers:

there were thirty other whites, many of whom were Americans, all shipped as

common seamen, but in reality were supernumeraries retained to meet a

contingency and check an emergency such as might ensue, as the real working

hands of the vessel were blacks. (201-202)

The accumulation of bodies according to race and nationality determines the politics of international order and local labor aboard the slave ship, and, by manipulating markers of

172 identity like flags and bodies, the organized crime of slaving continued to define the dynamics of life at sea. As in Moby Dick, the labor of the maritime economy is labor of color, headed by white figures. The inclusion of thirty sailors, with no duties, illustrates the extreme efforts of subterfuge utilized in the illicit trade, allowing it to flourish in its final years.

Delany’s novel does much to expose the American participation in transnational aspects of the slave trade, in spite of the comprehensive 1808 Act prohibiting any involvement by U.S. citizens. As with the British, American involvement in the slave trade extended to its every aspect even in the nineteenth century, a fact which greatly dissipated the force of progressive national laws of thorough restriction of the trade.

Along with the use of the flag, American industry was deeply involved in sustaining the trade through the production of ships. As Graden notes in Disease, Resistance, and Lies

(2014), many ships transporting slaves to Cuba and Brazil were built in the United States during the nineteenth century as the shipbuilding industry grew through profits from the slave trade (12). Baltimore, in whose shipyards Frederick Douglass worked for a time, was famous for producing swift ships capable of evading British pursuers. Martinez also notes this proliferation of American ships (many from Northern ports like Providence) in the slave trade and remarks that “slave traders favored fast ships, like the light Baltimore clippers” (4). Vessels might be built in one country, based in another, and destined to unload in a third. The Vulture, its crew members boast, succeeds in escaping the British cruiser “by the speed of a superior Baltimore-built slaver, rigged and fitted out in New

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York for the trade” (231). In addition to the ships themselves, British and American merchants also provided guns and ammunition that were essential to the business of smuggling bodies around the Atlantic (28). Blake’s slaver is an illustration of the complex interrelation of the circum-Atlantic world at the time, and of the ambiguous role played by those nations that had abolished the trade according to their official law, including the Northern and Southern United States.

The transnational fluidity of identity in the world of sea commerce coupled with the complexity and lack of force of the law at sea made international and especially

British efforts at policing the trade tremendously difficult. The chapter following the introduction of the operations of the Vulture, “Trans-Atlantic,” further exposes the masking procedures of Atlantic slavers in the latter half of the century:

Scarcely had the “Vulture” reached the outside of the harbor before Paul appeared

with glass in hand, aside of Captain Garcia, at whose orders the Spanish colors

were run down and the American hoisted in their stead. Paul was an able and

experienced officer, who according to usage in the trade, had taken this position

as protection against the British West India cruisers, it being a disputed point that

they have a right to search American vessels for slaves, however suspicious the

vessel. (203)

Providing an invaluable depiction of American slavery and the Atlantic traffic on the eve of the Civil War, Delany’s novel effectively recreates the de facto system of subterfuge and clandestineness that continued to kidnap, transport, and sell men and women despite

174 of the growing moral opposition to the traffic around the Atlantic world. Symptomatic of the duplicity and dichotomous extremes of freedom and bondage found at sea, the word anxiety and intimations of revolt recur throughout Blake, or the Huts of America and reflect the emotional climate of maritime life. Like the anxiety of Várzea’s littoral society of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil which operates under the constant shadow of

British vigilance, Delany’s protagonist traverses a world filled with apprehension of revolt and discipline.

Probably the most poignant example of Delany’s portrayal of Atlantic anxiety occurs aboard the Vulture when the slaves of the crew begin to communally sing a series of revolt songs. The songs are explicitly anti-slavery cries of freedom, and the Captain and mates debate whether or not the songs constitute a true threat. Blake assures the

Captain that the slaves are merely singing work-songs for the sake of enjoyment, and that their music harbors no other, more-sinister intention. The Americans and the Spanish are left to interpret the slave music and the underlying desires and capabilities of their cargo, and, as in Benito Cereno, they are unable to comprehend.74 George Royer, the American mate, can only reduce the situation to one of personal uneasiness and a desire to return to the land of the United States “where a white man was safe and a Negro taught to know his place” (210). The vertigo of dissolvable hierarchies found at sea repels the American

74 As in Melville’s story of slave revolt, the tension of the situation derives from the white subject’s inability to comprehend the performativity of the black subjects. The racist mind necessarily fails to engage with the irony of the black performance, at least in part because the racist perspective denies the black subjects the depths and subtleties required for irony. There is no recognition of the complexities of double-consciousness nor the cultural aesthetics that black subjects have developed in the context of the transatlantic order. 175 slave merchant. Royer takes great discomfort when facing fluid and unstable power relations that are perpetually threatened by the tempests of violence that haunt the ship out at sea. Royer’s apprehension is not resolved; it is merely cut short and replaced when the crew perceives a greater threat on the horizon: “‘A sail!’ cried out Gascar, interrupting the sentence, when every eye was again strained over the ocean, and anxiety once more arresting their attention” (210-211). Like the Brazilian naval officers in

Caminha’s novel and Várzea’s stories, the preoccupations of the crew of the Vulture must return to the British Royal Navy and their policing of the African coast. Delany’s novel depicts the multinational slave trade precariously close to the two principle forces of anti- slavery: the slave revolt and British abolitionism.

Later in the narrative, in a chapter called “Middle Passage—Chase Continued,”75 a sail is once again descried on the horizon, and here the narrative enters into acute dialogue with the Transatlantic crisis. A few short lines encapsulate the polemical milieu of the Atlantic space in the last century of the slave trade:

‘What flag?’

‘Red ensign.’

‘British then, as sure as the world!’ exclaimed Garcia.

‘Run up the Stars and Stripes,’ commanded Royer.

‘Off with the hatches there, you black devils! Bring out the dead and dying;

heave them overboard!’ ordered the heartless Portuguese. (228)

75 This title seems to be a direct allusion to Moby Dick, or at the very least resembles the some of the later chapter titles from Melville’s novel. 176

Most of the major imperial actors enter this scene: the Spanish, American, British, and

Portuguese; and the mask of the American flag is utilized as a matter of course. Finally, the Portuguese’s order directly invokes J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (1840), whose original title was Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on. In this moment of the narrative, Delany’s novel becomes a linchpin for the artistic formulation of the great Transatlantic problematic surrounding the slave trade.

His depiction of Atlantic commerce in the 1850’s, as well as any fiction of the period, illustrates the far-reaching and complex system of subterfuge that facilitated colonialist oppression in spite of the triumph of the ideology of rights and rule of law.

The Law and the Lie: Two Faces of Imperialism in Conrad’s Typhoon

With a narrative subtlety that reproduces the aura of clandestineness sustaining maritime fraud, many of these texts allude to the play of national identity through obscure imagery of flags and conversions of legal identity through the changing of flags.

Currently known by the phrase ‘flags of convenience’ and usually traced to the creation of ‘open registries’ during World War II, the practice of strategically registering or faking a ship’s nationality to avoid regulation became commonplace during the nineteenth century as a result of the criminalization of the slave trade. This issue of a vessel’s ‘flag state’ appears in the writing of Melville, Delany, Alves, Várzea, Conrad, and Caminha— and usually marks or symbolizes the dynamic encounters of sovereignty and law that occur on the open waters. Conrad’s Typhoon (1902) holds a few seemingly insignificant

177 indications that the ship’s flag had been recently changed from the British to the Siamese, signs of power’s discrete manipulations of identity and law. And just as Delany’s novel alludes to Turner’s painting, Conrad’s story of the transport of Chinese indentured servants links itself to the legacy of slavery through its invocation of The Slave Ship.

Early in Typhoon, the reader learns that the Nan-Sham sails from its construction yard on the River Clyde in Scotland, that it is piloted by Northern Irish (from Belfast)

Captain MacWhirr for the firm Sigg & Son, probably a Swiss family, based in Siam

(Thailand), and that the vessel “had come out on a British register, but after some time

Messrs. Sigg judged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag” (165). The ship sails under Siamese law despite having no Siamese officers on board. The specifics of the

‘expediency’ gained by this transfer of national identity are not disclosed in the story, but the seas surrounding the Malay peninsula were undergoing complicated shifts of power and alliances as Britain and France sought colonial territory while China and Siam struggled against each other to establish their own imperial extents. The most likely implication of the change in the ship’s official/superficial identity (its flag state) is that as a Siamese ship they would not be subject to British regulations, presumably related to their usage of the Chinese “passengers.”

Typhoon subtly reveals Conrad’s mastery of international politics and his unique sensitivity to the complexity residing below the surface of broad political histories and imperial narratives. Britain’s failure to support the Kingdom of Siam in the Franco-

Siamese War of 1893 (Britain encouraged Siam to resist French incursions but did not

178 fight against the French) had resulted in the reduction of Siamese imperial territory in

Southeast Asia and the increasing establishment of French and British control throughout the region. During the final years of the nineteenth century, Britain guarded Siam as a buffer between its colonial possessions of India and the Malay region and French

Indochina. Somewhat like Berlin and other territories disputed in the Cold War, Siam constituted the boundary point of imperial expansions. The writing of Typhoon coincides with what historian Minton F. Goldman refers to as the “Franco-British Rivalry over

Siam, 1896-1904,” in which the French and British empires maneuvered to gain control of Southeast Asian territory and maritime routes—a conflict which Conrad saw firsthand as a sailor before turning to literature. Relations between Siam, Britain, and France were extremely delicate and volatile, and a story that seems merely a tale of particular men at sea conceals a complicated political tapestry.

Although its meaning is not stated in the narrative, the posture of the Siamese flag suggests multiple implicit political commentaries found in “Typhoon.” Firstly, Conrad’s employment of the flag of Siam situates this voyage of the Nan-shan within the maritime culture of legal and ethical circumvention as the ship evades the regulations of the British and French empires. The crew from the United Kingdom avoids the regulatory eye of the

British Navy or the possible ire of the French who resent British commerce and expansion in the region. Perhaps a mere coincidence, the vessel’s flag of convenience also disguises the merchants through a symbolic allusion to slave trading, hiding in plain sight under a symbol of blood and power. The flag of Siam from 1855-1916 featured a

179 white elephant over a red backdrop, which closely resembles (large white elephant at center with white backdrop and red border) the flag that represented the Kingdom of

Dahomey—a major participant and victim of the African slave trade—from 1818-1858.

The text holds another, more obscure, implication for the flag of convenience flying above the Nan-Shan: while part of the British empire, the crew from Northern Ireland and

Scotland point to the center’s constitution by the periphery, or the demographic fact that colonizing forces are often composed of the formerly colonized, carving rifts and heterogeneity into the fabric of the nation.76 The story suggests an anti-imperialist kinship—one which Conrad’s family belonged to—between the Siamese ship and the not-quite-British crew, both of which have been marginalized by the march of the British empire. What is certain is that the Siggs Company’s circumnavigation of sovereignty constitutes a repetition of the custom of fraud developed by slavers earlier in the nineteenth century in order to avoid British maritime vigilance, and Conrad’s story highlights the techniques employed and tolerated by westerners to circumvent their own laws and morals.

Though he cannot articulate his disquiet, Jukes reacts “bitterly” to the change from British to Siamese flag: “‘Well, it looks queer to me,’ burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated” (199). Incapable of understanding irony, MacWhirr compares their ensign to the one in his International Signal Code Book and sees “nothing amiss with that flag;”

Jukes alone perceives a problem with their ship identifying as Siamese. Jukes’ first

76 Melville also highlights this imperial fragmentation in White-Jacket through the discussion of Americans impressed into the British Navy who are then forced to battle against their own nation. 180 unrest with regards to the new flag state comes immediately before the captain’s negotiation with a Chinese labor company to transport two hundred indentured servants back to their homes in China. Small details in the narrative reveal the truth of their experience, seen, for instance, in the twenty-five bags of rice shipped to sustain the entire group and the cramped cargo hold where they are stored. Indeed, the Nan-Shan’s transport of coolies would have been illegal under British legislation from 1855 and 1874 regulating and restricting the trade in Chinese laborers.77 While he does not say (or perhaps know) why, Jukes intuits the ethical problem inherent in the ship registering as

Siamese, and the ensuing tempest provides clear evidence that his reservations are warranted.

Typhoon addresses the insidious duplicity of western imperialism that frames itself as the purveyor of civilized institutions of law and freedom while functioning through the active evasion of these same principles. The British empire sustains its expansion by breaking its own rules, proclaiming and ignoring its own concepts of positive and natural law. An outsider-turned-insider like Conrad, Equiano focuses on this same fundamental incongruity in his critique of western modernity. As the Royal Navy represents the greatest potency of law at sea, the Nan-shan acquires the right to lawlessness by—as Rose George titles her 2012 article on contemporary flags of convenience—“Flying the Flag [and] Fleeing the State.” Assuming the mantle of Siam,

77For an account of British regulations of the coolie trade see Philip A. Kuhn’s Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (2009). 181 the vessel is not subject to British regulation or taxes and less likely to incur French interference.

While maritime law struggled to engage with the fluid and hybrid commerce of the legal and illegal slave trade of the nineteenth century, international business and politics continued the progress of western exploração through ‘methods’ almost identical to those employed in New World slavery. While western governments had united in abolishing slavery by the time Conrad began to write in the 1890’s—Brazil being the final nation to do so in 1888—the western custom of economic exploitation of the foreign expanded to new territories and assumed new forms in the post-abolitionary period. The depictions of the languishing land and people in Heart of Darkness suggest a decaying version of New World slavery that is perhaps as brutal and certainly more aimless. A

“black comedy” short story and prototype for Heart of Darkness, “An Outpost of

Progress” (1897) plainly asserts that the New Imperialism proves to be a regression, a move further into savage darkness for the colonizers. As testimony of western imperialism, Conrad’s writing illuminates the horrifying truth of modern transnational capitalism in the western world with particular focus on the divide between ideals and reality.

In Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech of 1852, he assigns the term

“sacrilegious irony” to the national double-consciousness that celebrates liberty and holds slaves. His phrase sacrilegious irony well-encapsulates the discourse of the colonial lie, noting both its maintenance of the ironic difference between language and reality and its

182 violation of its own sacred principles of western religion and political philosophy.

Douglass’ accusation reassigns mimicry to white American elites who fail to embody their own ‘adorning’ ideas. He directly scorns the audience, in a supreme moment of antebellum boldness:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to

him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which

he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty,

an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of

rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted

impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and

hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and

solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a

thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is

not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the

people of the United States, at this very hour.

In denouncing a society that celebrates itself as the triumph of liberty while holding slaves and sanctioning mass torture, Douglass highlights an irony of grand scale, a genocidal irony that signifies destruction as salvation. It is precisely this genocidal irony of colonial discourse that Conrad targets in Heart of Darkness: an entire transnational culture operating through a global misrepresentation that confuses missionaries and murderers in order to build a profitable and sanctimonious empire. Conrad’s writing

183 responds to (usually by reproducing/representing) this duplicity found in the coincidence of the West’s liberal humanism with its colonial exploitation, a duplicity which became especially acute after the abolition of the slave trade and institutional slavery in the

Americas. Were Marlow to articulate the dark sentiment that binds him to Kurtz, his outcry would echo Douglass’s, without such eloquence.

In the case of his adoptive nation78, Conrad highlights the inconsistency of

Britain’s humanitarian and civilizing ethos in comparison to the New Imperialism outlined in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.79 His writing laments the fact that

British foreign policy had spent the first half of the nineteenth century working assiduously with other nations to eradicate the moral evil of the slave trade only to reinstitute a comparably brutal system of economic exploitation on the African continent towards the century’s close. In reality rather than law, as critic Marika Sherwood’s revisionist history After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (2007) argues,

Britain did not abolish slavery but instead reterritorialized and renamed it in order to conserve the economic model of forced labor after abolition. In other words, British powers waged a long campaign to end slavery and its trade, and (different) British

78 Conrad the man’s own sense of national identity is a fascinating topic though out of the scope of this essay. However, it is worth noting that his fluid literary positions of colonizer and colonized are consistent with his personal history. Conrad’s Polish parents died in political exile when Conrad was a boy. He was born a Russian subject to a family which opposed the Russian empire, and whose homeland had been repossessed by imperial expansion. 79 The Berlin Conference was the official treaty of the New Imperialism, an effort to prevent European conflict during the “scramble for Africa.” In this congress, Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium divided the territories of Africa into colonial possessions. Shortly after the Conference in 184 powers circumvented that campaign and perpetuated the colonial exploitation of human labor through the end of the nineteenth century.

As Conrad’s fictions connect present and past forms of exploitation, he joins other maritime artists like Caminha and Melville in constructing a layering of time whose correlations point to the enduring and protean nature of modern coloniality. This plural temporality highlights the vagaries of progress that characterize abolition and social justice more generally, suggesting that moral victories are not the immediate result of proclamations or the enactment of laws. As Leo Costello points out with regards to

Turner’s painting’s own double time, The Slave Ship alludes to both the 1781 case of the slaver Zong (in which the captain famously jettisoned his slaves before a storm in order to ensure the insurance money for lost slaves) as well as the presence of slave trading in

1840, long after the British abolition of the traffic in 1807. Costello asserts that Turner’s

“historical dialectic painting” conveys that there are no “decisive moments” in the long,

“complex process” of the removal of slavery (217). Thus repeating Turner’s representation of two periods, Conrad’s Typhoon brings 1902 and 1840 into dialectic relation in order to renew and expand the critique of abolitionist progress and British humanitarianism begun in previous generations. Alluding to the humanitarian struggle over the trade, the ship’s log marks the story’s relation to slavery: “every appearance of a typhoon coming on” (215).

While the consistent treatment found in Conrad’s fiction offers the best evidence of his literary focus on continuing coloniality, it is worth noting a particularly direct

185 exposition of Conrad’s views on European colonialism found in a letter submitted to his acquaintance, the anti-colonial activist Sir Roger Casement.80 One year after the publication of Typhoon, Conrad drafted the letter for publication on behalf of Casement’s efforts to persuade the British government to condemn the human rights abuses of the

Belgian Congo:

It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago

has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State

today. It is as if the moral clock had been put back many hours. And yet

nowadays, if I were to overwork my horse so as to destroy its happiness of

physical well-being I should be hauled before a magistrate. It seems to me that the

black man—say of Upoto—is deserving of as much humanitarian regard as any

animal, since he has nerves, feels pain, can be made physically miserable. But as a

matter of fact, his happiness and misery are much more complex than the misery

or happiness of animals, and deserving of greater regard. He shares with us the

consciousness of the universe in which we live—no small burden.81

Barbarism per se is no crime deserving of a heavy visitation, and the Belgians are

worse than the seven plagues of Egypt ... What makes it more remarkable is this:

The slave trade was an old established form of commercial activity; it was not the

80 Conrad had met Casement in his trip through the Congo in 1890. While Marlow is certainly not equivalent to Conrad, most of the facts concerning Marlow’s employment as a steamer captain for the Belgian colonial company are accurate representations of Conrad’s own trip. Casement, for his part, would work as an anti-colonial activist around the world, including Africa, Brazil, and Ireland. 81 Implicitly, Conrad defines the human here as beings with a kind of existential knowledge or sensitivity. In the previous chapter I noted an instance of this existential sensitivity in the black protagonist James Wait in highlighting the humanity of “the nigger.” 186

monopoly of one small country, established to the disadvantage of the rest of the

civilised world in defiance of international treaties and in brazen disregard of

humanitarian declarations. But the Congo State, created yesterday, is all that, and

yet it exists. It is very mysterious ....The fact remains that in 1903, seventy years

or so after the abolition of the slave trade (because it was cruel), there exists in

Africa a Congo State, created by the act of European Powers, where ruthless,

systematic cruelty towards the blacks is the basis of administration, and bad faith

towards all the other states the basis of commercial policy.' (Letter to Sir Roger

Casement 1903)

The letter principally asserts the incongruence history of the nineteenth century’s abolition of the slave trade and subsequent commencement of the New Imperialism in

Africa. Here Conrad denies the moral progress of Europe, the idea which for so long has been used to justify acts of barbarism committed by Europeans. Conrad was deeply distrustful of the notion of the progress-centered narrative of western enlightenment, and undermines this specific rhetorical embodiment of coloniality in the title and pages of

Heart of Darkness.

Conrad’s theory of his own writing proposes to counter this myopia by endeavoring “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see,” presumably referring to his readers in Europe and the United States who do not bear witness to the growth of their wealth through the work of callused, foreign hands. While this iconic statement is typically interpreted in purely aesthetic terms, Conrad’s aesthetics

187 and his socio-political commentary should be understood as part of a unified literary endeavor. Early in the preface Conrad defines (his) art as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth” a phrasing which confirms his primary goal of highlighting international injustice that stems from the heart of the West. Through a coherence of symbolism and plot, Conrad’s fictions respond to the invisibility and silence protecting colonial exploitation, furnishing an aesthetic attempt to realize justice by making his readers hear the truth hidden in what

Aimé Césaire calls a “silence as deep as a safe” (Discourse on Colonialism 54).

Conrad’s literary project fills the silences and blind spots of western coloniality and ethnocentrism, casting a spotlight on the remote brutality facilitating western capitalism. Evident in all four Conrad works discussed here and most prominently in

Typhoon, Conrad’s fiction comprises what might be termed colonial Naturalism, a style both opposed to and reminiscent of the naturalist school that enjoyed its brief prominence

(especially in Brazil) during the same period as Conrad’s writing.82 Heart of Darkness,

Lord Jim, and Typhoon share attributes with the naturalist model of literature in their attention to squalor, abject poverty, immorality, and the representation of humans as animals or other elements of nature. In Typhoon, Captain MacWhirr’s statement that he has “never heard of a lot of coolies spoken of as passengers before” recalls the German

82 Naturalism, the literary sibling of biological Positivism, developed as the pinnacle of the white supremacist structure of knowledge that is ‘the West.’ Born in France, it took root in the Americas as a messenger of coloniality and a reinforcement of elite hierarchy. Positivism (among other ideas) is the West, which might better be known as Occidentalism: a worldview or system of values developed through the influence of corpuses of knowledge like scientism, enlightenment, Christianity, Cartesian philosophy, white supremacy, etc.)

188 mate’s phrase “Look at all dese cattle,” referring to the Muslim pilgrims in Lord Jim

(181; 23). As with the Indian Muslims transported by Jim and the crew of the Patna, the non-white cargo of the Nan-shan in Typhoon are grossly misused and demonstrate the continuation of exploração among the subjects of the humanitarian empire that waged war against the slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. As in Heart of

Darkness and Lord Jim, the dehumanization of the non-white subjects in Typhoon stems from the greed and carelessness of white Europeans. Stuffed and locked in the hold during a violent tempest, the Chinese are described as “coolies swarming on [the ladder] like bees…crawling” (204). Insofar as dehumanizing racism appears in all four of

Conrad’s works of maritime coloniality studied in this project—and this inhumane representation became the primary target of Chinua Achebe’s complaint in “An Image of

Africa”—his fiction approaches naturalist technique. In contradistinction, however, in each text the dehumanization has its counterpoint in a sophisticated, eloquent, or favorable description of the subaltern subject and a path (taken or not) for the white westerner to recognize his or her complicity in such dehumanization or to glimpse the humanity of people of color.

Unlike notable examples of the genre such as American Stephen Crane’s Maggie:

A Girl of the Streets (1893) or Brazilian Aluísio Azevedo’s O Cortiço (1890) which turned inward to reveal the decadence of poor urban areas within the nation, Conrad turns his gaze outward beyond the national territory in order to expose the horrific byproducts of industrial modernity generated by the West in distant lands and ships. Rather than the

189 city slum of London, Rio de Janeiro, or New York, the ship and the colony are the subjects of Conrad’s studies; he highlights the foreign misery born in the gloom of offices in London or Brussels and raised in colonies in India and Africa. His writing brings the reality of colonialism home to the people it supports because, as Kipling’s poem “The

English Flag” recalls, “what should they know of England who only England know?”.

To extend the sight of the British population, Conrad’s fiction casts a light (though sometimes very obscure) on the colonized and the colonizer in action. The statement in the preface to “Narcissus” that his objective is to make his reader see is a naturalist impulse with a transoceanic focus, and, while often plagued by stereotype, misogyny, racism, and immature science, Naturalism did much to introduce the subaltern character into literature. Still, as will be shown in the following chapter’s discussion of nature within Conrad’s writing, he differed greatly from most naturalist writers in his critique of biological positivism and its explanatory authority with regards to human behavior.

A short story depicting dehumanization in the South China Seas, Typhoon resembles the setting of Lord Jim and the plot and style of “Narcissus” as it features a crew from the British Isles transporting a large group of Chinese laborers that is overtaken by a great storm. The “black bunker,” or hold of the ship, which suggests the continuance of the slave ship, is overcrowded with “coolies” who, in the rocking of the storm, are thrown “here and there, from side to side, in a whirl of smashed wood, torn clothing, rolling dollars…It was a disaster” (211). The tempest and the chaos resulting from the inhumane treatment of the Chinese are intertwined in the novel, confused like

190 sea and sky—the title signifies the literal storm and the moral storm of colonialist usage.

This symbolic union emerges in a remarkable passage of naturalist technique that expresses human characters as forces of nature: “bodies whirling in the dust…a tempestuous tumult…gusts of screams dying away, and the tramping of feet mingling with the blows of the sea” (214). Also reminiscent of Turner’s painting, humans and the force of the storm fuse and become indistinguishable, soliciting a reimagination of the human and the humane. As in Lord Jim, nature courses through the narrative as a sublime force, an unknowable fountain of truth that is only glimpsed by looking into the darkness. Repeating the desperate rush to find Jimmy in “Narcissus,” it is only through the typhoon’s forceful crisis that one of the western characters (Jukes the mate) is able shift his perception and open a new perspective on coloniality.

The fusion of storm and tragic crime is a very common trope in anti-colonialist art, and Conrad’s tale sets the moral confusion and perceptive gaps of the text upon the backdrop of barometric chaos. My next chapter explores how these images of disorientation at sea intimate an alienation from natural law and its moral dictates, and

Conrad’s collage of ethical and natural turmoil dialogues with the central symbols nineteenth-century British maritime art founded by Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient

Mariner and in addition to Turner’s painting. As in “Narcissus,” the literal tempest swirls around the colonizer’s disoriented perception of the colonized in which white characters—primarily Captain MacWhirr and first mate Jukes—fail to understand their social relation to characters of color. Highlighting this sense of disruption in the

191 narrative structure, Susan Jones’ discussion of the interdisciplinary influence of Typhoon in “Conrad on the Borderlands of Modernism” (2005) emphasizes the story’s skillful weaving of the disorientation of the storm with the narrative “gaps” that require the reader to “glean the story by piecing together narratorial hints” (200). Jones’ essay associates the disorder of plot and dialogue with the “distinction between MacWhirr’s and Jukes’s perspectives on a moment of human crisis,” but it does not link that crisis to the dehumanized Chinese laborers trapped violently in the hold.83 Yet like Jim’s ineffable crime in Lord Jim, the breakdown of perception and communication among the main characters MacWhirr and Jukes constitutes the focal-point of Conrad’s tale of maritime chaos, all of which stems from the exploitation of labor that underlies the entire plot.

Like Jim’s individual dereliction that serving as metonymy for “us,” the central question of Typhoon comes to be Captain MacWhirr’s obtuse view of the world and bizarre lack of moral feeling, a personal quality that facilitates participation in large-scale colonialist exploitation. At the beginning of Typhoon, the narrator describes Captain

MacWhirr through his lack of imagination, yet ironically states that as a result of this myopia “he was not in the least conceited” so that “every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace” (193). The irony stems from juxtaposition of this statement from the narrator and the ensuing scenes of “disaster” that

83 Similarly, Hugh Epstein’s “"The Fitness of Things": Conrad's English Irony in Typhoon and "The Secret Agent" (2008) analyzes the development of Conrad’s ironic technique in Typhoon without emphasizing the political implications of these ironies.

192 unfold below deck, from which we can infer that only a lack of perspective that ignores the fate of the Chinese could see harmony in the voyage of the Nan-Shan. After repeated references by Jukes and the narrator to MacWhirr’s stupidity, the reader learns the reason for his appointment as commander of the Nan-Shan: “Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words, and one that ‘you could be sure would not try to improve upon his instructions’”

(198). The captain will follow orders without innovation or conscience, without imagining the experience of his human cargo. While the other officers enjoy the captain’s simplicity, Jukes remarks that “sometimes you would think he hadn’t sense enough to see anything wrong” (206). Placed randomly into a digression, this is another statement that may be applied elsewhere in the story in order to construct its meaning:

MacWhirr’s lack of vision is what allows him to permit the abuses of colonialist trade and to profit from human suffering. After Jukes’ description of his superior, the narrator offers an explanation for MacWhirr’s “innocence” that forges the connection between the natural force of the sea and the human experience of oppression, foreboding a stormy revelation of coloniality:

Dirty weather he had known, of course. He had been made wet, uncomfortable,

tired in the usual way, felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the

whole he had been justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never

been given a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the

wrath that passes exhausted but never appeased—the wrath and fury of the

passionate sea. He knew it existed, as we know that crime and abominations

193

exist; he had heard of it as a peaceable citizen in a town that hears of battles,

famines, and floods, and yet knows nothing of what these things mean—though,

indeed, he may have been mixed up in a street row, have gone without his dinner

once, or been soaked to the skin in a shower. Captain MacWhirr had sailed over

the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to

sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having

been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There

are on sea and land such men thus fortunate—or thus disdained by destiny or by

the sea. (207-208)

Here Conrad’s story returns to his core project of presenting the real horror of modern economy to the modern subject isolated by convenience and distance from colonialist production. MacWhirr’s lack of feeling and imagination are linked to obedience and ultimately inhumane commerce. Though the captain cannot see such forces, the “wrath and fury” of the oppressed screams through the typhoon, glimpsed instead by Jukes, whose racist disdain begins to sink under his dire sympathy. MacWhirr, driven only by rational duty to the profits of the voyage, does not, as Jukes does, see any reason for

“getting out of the way of that dirt” in order to “make the Chinamen comfortable,” doubling referring to the storm and trade which hurls the confined Chinese laborers to and fro. The example of Captain MacWhirr warns that without imagination and feeling one has no empathy, and, “ignorant of life to the last,” constitutes a danger to the welfare of the world by serving ignoble pursuits. Conrad’s analogy between the wrath of the sea

194 and the oppressed Chinese laborers recalls abolitionist texts like Melville’s Benito

Cereno, Delany’s Blake, and Castro Alves’ poem “Bandido negro [Black Bandit]” that warn of the growing forces of rage cultivated in the hearts of slaves. In this way,

Conrad’s Typhoon continues the tropes and message of abolitionist literature through writing that parallels the continuation of forced labor in the not-so-new imperialism of western empires operating at sea and in distant lands.

As in Conrad’s other maritime works from this period, in Typhoon the dominant pattern of colonialist thinking is interrupted by flashes of new perspectives that recognize the faults of western thinking and action. As he and some of the crew descend to collect the scattered money and goods of the Chinese for the purpose of establishing order, first mate Jukes experiences a rare lapse in his ethnocentrism and briefly assumes the perspective of the Chinese, realizing that “those confounded Chinamen couldn’t tell we weren’t a desperate kind of robbers” (229). Throughout the narrative Jukes is xenophobic and unsympathetic to the Chinese, but in this moment he becomes conscious of the violations of western hegemony and echoes Marlow’s hypothesis that colonization may be nothing more than “robbery [and] murder on a grand scale” (70). Thus, in the midst of regular white supremacist discrimination, Conrad inserts into Typhoon a gateway to decolonized thinking which recognizes the unlawful approach of western coloniality.

195

Like Heart of Darkness, Typhoon is a journey to the colonial outcry, a transformative encounter with natural and social horrors that lead the colonizer84 to speak out against colonial operations. A sublime and terrifying account of humanity struggling against nature, the eponymous storm rages for many hours, causing the boat to disintegrate in total darkness and utterly exhausting the sailors. the tempest coincides with Jukes’ sudden perception of the dehumanizing confinement of the Chinese below him, a climax of white consciousness that fails to realize any change. Reminiscent of

Kurtz confronting the decapitated heads and Marlow seeing the truth of the horror, the moment when Jukes faces the disaster by opening the battened hatch that had been confining the Chinese workers brings the story to its climax, in which the white man seems to glimpse the immoral abuse of white supremacist hegemony. As Jukes reaches his breaking point upon seeing the human cargo, he reports to the captain and unexpectedly laments the treatment of the Chinese. Jukes, who has lived the entire story assured of his racial superiority, suddenly desires to pour out (another voice) his complaint through the screaming wind and rain:

Jukes was ready to talk: it was only time that seemed to be wanting. It was easy

enough to account for everything. He could perfectly imagine the coolies

battened down in the reeking ‘tween-deck, lying sick and scared between the rows

of chests. Then one of these chests—or perhaps several at once—breaking loose

in a roll, knocking out others, sides splitting, lids flying open, and all these clumsy

84 Marlow represents himself as an outsider, like Ismael, but, like Kurtz and Jukes, he too works for the Company. Kurtz has his statements “the horror” and “exterminate the brutes!”; Marlow has his narrative of savagery and irony. 196

Chinamen rising up in a body to save their property. Afterwards every fling of

the ship would hurl that tramping, yelling mob here and there, from side to side,

in a whirl of smashed wood, torn clothing, rolling dollars. A struggle once

started, they would be unable to stop themselves. Nothing could stop them now

except main force. It was a disaster. He had seen it, and that was all he could

say. Some of them must be dead, he believed. The rest would go on fighting….

He sent up his words, tripping over each other, crowding the narrow tube. They

mounted as if into a silence of an enlightened comprehension dwelling alone up

there with a storm. And Jukes wanted to be dismissed from the face of that

odious trouble intruding on the great need of the ship. (211)

Jukes faces a truth that accuses and revolts him, dominating his thoughts and tangling his words. It troubles him, which is a hallmark of many of Conrad’s European characters: they learn about themselves, “us” colonizers, which drives them to anger, suicide, obsession, and lies. Like Melville’s,85 Conrad’s tales are typically fatalist in that the step between awareness and change is not taken. Jukes faces “it” on the ship but keeps the affair quiet afterwards. Conrad’s lament flows through Jukes at this moment: he has seen the horror and needs to talk about it—but Jukes, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, cannot say too much. Perhaps the same colonial immorality that exploits human suffering will always supersede the better liberationist impulses of the colonial society;

85 Moby Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Bud all foreground the contest between the just action and the dictates of colonialist power and law. Captain Vere’s dilemma between natural law and naval law will be examined in the next chapter and the fourth chapter will discuss the failed revolts that recur in Melville’s fiction. 197 perhaps shame and confusion binds their tongues. What Césaire (sounding like

Nietzsche and Conrad) calls “the Forgetting Machine” of civilization proves too powerful86.

Just as Marlow cannot repeat “the horror” to Kurtz’s intended, the final lines of

Typhoon intimate the failure of western writing to recognize or represent the dark and often contradictory realities of modern international law and commerce. Typical of

Conrad’s narrative shifts, the text closes with Jukes’ epistolary description87 (the rest of the text is related by an unnamed third-person narrator) of the event, causing the reader to manage another perspective of the story, another subjective piece of the tale: the haze of

“truth” surrounding the incident. After the storm subsides, Captain MacWhirr devises a plan to return the found money to the Chinese and to avoid appealing to any European ship before unloading the workers. Serving the proprietors, the captain “wanted to keep the matter quiet…He wanted as little fuss made as possible, for the sake the ship’s name and for the sake of the owners—‘for the sake of all concerned’” (283). Yet Jukes too follows orders if somewhat sardonically, and the final paragraph of Jukes’ letter (and the novella) assures his pen pal of his discretion: “This certainly is coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all concerned” (287). The crime against humanity will be concealed, guarded by the deep silence of the sea. Jukes then recalls that during the storm Captain MacWhirr had told him that “there are things you find

86 The Forgetting Machine, or strategic silencing which is built into the heart of colonization, may be seriously threatened by the internet, a giant public memory. The invisibility of social issues has certainly decreased in the twenty-first century. 87 This or a similar change from narrator to document at the end of the story also occurs in Lord Jim, Benito Cereno, and Billy Bud. 198 nothing about in books,” and, in the next and final line of the story, the mate reflects, “I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man” (ibid). These final statements are obscure, but surprisingly MacWhirr did restore order after the storm in a way that benefitted everyone present, even the Chinese laborers that he did not think of as passengers. Along with the Siamese (as opposed to British) flag, the Captain’s discretion allowed the ship to avoid the “inquiries and bother” of British regulation, and his equal dispersal of the scattered money ensured that the workers’ pay was not stolen by a

Chinese official or company representative (285). While a more empathetic and imaginative thinker than his Captain, Jukes shows less regard for the Chinese after the storm, and the tale finishes with the dramatic irony of Juke’s failure to recognize the ironic significance in the hidden significance of MacWhirr’s statement.

The British (Irish) command of the legally Siamese ship demonstrates the fractured ideology functioning within and sometimes against the heterogeneous law of the maritime world. Furthermore, this complex encounter of ideas, identity, and law occurs in the obscure, mobile, and heterotopic space of the Nan-Shan as the West negotiates its values in the China Seas. Although the Captain had been speaking of weather, the things not found in books are also atrocities and errors, terrible truths that never see the light of written discourse so as not to undermine powerful interests. The story dramatizes the silencing forces of coloniality that, although beneficial to those involved, fail to bring justice to the world. Like Marlow capitulating to the Intended, the lie helped locally and harmed the whole world. In a strange reflection of the author’s

199 consciousness and his reasoning unconsciousness, MacWhirr voices the impetus behind

Conrad’s literary project through the recognition that much writing censors the truth and that the wide world needs a witness; meeting this need, Typhoon expands the literary field and British national imaginary to include colonialist exploitation in the distant China

Seas. Reaching beyond the narrative of Typhoon, MacWhirr’s declaration highlights the empty space in writing and knowledge that Conrad’s literary career endeavors to fill.

Towards this end, his stories are designed to make western readers feel the injustice and conflict of the remote and obscure spaces of transnational coloniality that supports their civilization and daily lives.

Conrad’s exposure of the old horrors within the new imperialisms of the fin-de- siècle pays particular attention to the masquerade of colonialist rhetoric. The slippery movement of language—the medium of the law but not its enforcement—contributed to the complicated realities of exploited labor by allowing it to escape the criminality and censure assigned to fixed signifiers like ‘slavery.’ For instance, forced labor was renewed after the abolitions in the British West Indies in the 1830’s and in Saint

Domingue after the revolution in 1804. Throughout the world, oppressive forced labor comparable to slavery persisted under different terminology such as “coolie,”

“apprentice,” or “indentured servant,” and continues to do so today. These semantic movements are especially significant in Typhoon and Lord Jim, and these works unite with Heart of Darkness in their exhibition of the sliding signifiers of western coloniality.

Rhetoric constituted a crucial battleground in the cold war over forced labor: language,

200 the keeper of identity, determined the socio-economic realities of the Atlantic world. It is this arena of the written word where nineteenth century authors intervened to reveal the reality of the maritime world to readers on land. Conrad ironically appropriates the idea of bringing light to the darkness so that, rather than western enlightenment being spread to the nations of savage darkness, Conrad’s narratives expose the barbarous acts of colonizers that are hidden in the darkness of distance and rhetoric.

With its setting and premise of Europeans returning to Africa to extract resources at the end of the nineteenth century, Heart of Darkness probably represents Conrad’s most poignant allusion to the ongoing shadow of slavery. As the ship proceeds along the slaver’s route down the African coast, Marlow reports stopping by colonial outposts where “the merry dance of trade and death goes on” (79). Later, Marlow identifies the employees of the imperial “Company” as “lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men,” recalling the depiction of slave drivers as described by Douglass and other abolitionist writers. More so than in Lord Jim, in Heart of Darkness Marlow remains attentive to the manipulation of language found throughout the colonial enterprise and reacts against this sophistry through occasional explicit criticism and constant sarcastic mockery of the elevated language of the colonizers. Marlow’s journey inward on the

Congo River certainly moves toward the revelation of the lie (embodied by Kurtz), and as he moves deeper into the “conspiracy” he becomes increasingly conscious of the manipulation of the rhetoric of the law that supports the Company’s bloody enrichment.

Early on there are a few instances when Marlow remarks the absurdity of labels such as

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“criminals” and “enemies” that he hears being applied to the Africans. In the final part of the narrative when Kurtz’s Russian sycophant informs Marlow that the human heads on posts surrounding Kurtz’s house belong to rebels, the narrator finally reaches utter exasperation: “I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks” (134). As

Marlow moves deeper into the “glorious affair” of the new colonial project in Africa, he grows increasingly sarcastic in the face of the systematic rhetorical legerdemain that sustains the brutal truth by covering it with the beautiful lie of philanthropy. The skepticism of rhetoric underlying Heart of Darkness contributes to Conrad’s larger project of questioning the evolution of colonialist terminology as the maritime treatment of the criminals in Heart of Darkness, pilgrims in Lord Jim, and coolies in “Typhoon all resemble the slaves transported by the British a century before.

Written just after Heart of Darkness and before Typhoon, Lord Jim transports

Conrad’s critique beyond the Atlantic and targets the fact that Great Britain proclaimed the abolishment of slavery while constructing a new empire of forced labor further east in

India, capitalizing on the fact that distance grants further license. As late as 1883 one estimate suggested that there were 9 million indentured servants (slaves by contract) in

British India (Sherwood 30). Not surprisingly, the first Indian forced laborers were brought to the Americas in 1836 during the 1833-1838 period of abolition in the British

West Indies (National Archives Online). Different ethnic groups and terminology came

202 to replace the use of black slaves in territories controlled by Britain and the United

States—ostensibly the most devoted opponents of forced labor. Conrad, whose ships often dramatize the Western trafficking of the non-Western subject, attacks these new forms of colonial subjugation through the treatment of the natives in Heart of Darkness and the transport of Chinese coolies in “Typhoon.”

Viewed together, Conrad’s fictions generate a geographically comprehensive critique of British Imperialism as it reformed and spread across the globe at the end of the nineteenth century: cataloguing British exploração in Africa (Heart of Darkness), East

Asia (Typhoon), Latin America (Nostromo), and India (Lord Jim)88. As with the slave trade, after abolition the immense space and mobility of the seas persisted in facilitating the flourishing of brutal commerce as the sites of coloniality were moved to Africa and

India because these distant lands were more invisible. While significant coloniality in

Latin America89 still serves the United States and other powers, the late nineteenth century reconfiguration of global coloniality remains in place in the twenty-first as the colonial powers continue to generate a large percentage of their wealth in the far-away and therefore “inscrutable” (under less humanitarian scrutiny) lands of Asia and Africa.

88 While the name India never appears in Lord Jim, A. Michael Matin’s editor’s notes clarify that Bombay would be the setting of the court for Jim’s trial as well as the departure point of the Patna. Primarily through Marlow’s occasional use of Hindi vocabulary, Conrad leaves sufficient clues to unequivocally locate Jim’s initial position in a major port of British India. 89 The transition from international mercantilism to the globalized capitalism of the twentieth and twenty - first century became the focus of the next great Conrad novel after the Marlow narratives. Nostromo, set in a fictional South American republic, relates the story of a British owned (with a silent, unknown American backer) silver mine and its entanglement in South American society and politics. Written firmly in the twentieth century, Conrad’s progression from the Marlow novels to Nostromo remarkably anticipates the change in world orders from imperialism to Empire as theorized by Hardt and Negri. 203

Written by authors from four continents, all the texts considered in this chapter demonstrate the internal conflict of the West over its laws, acts, values, and its relation to the outside world: the very relation that constitutes the plurality of its self. Progress in the eradication of global slavery and exploitive labor has always been reversed by the numerous participants that are able to operate outside of the limits of the law or in profitable and oppressive obscurity. For much of the nineteenth century the extent and efficacy of the law were constantly questioned, undermined, and also generated by the debates, acts, rulings, and crimes related to attempts to profit from the enslavement of people or to prevent such enslavement. Jenny Martinez’s overarching thesis extolls the campaign to abolish the slave trade as the most impactful example of international law in human history. She states that in spite of its relative absence in studies of international law,

the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade remains the most successful episode

ever in the history of international human rights law. Slavery and the slave trade

are among the few universally acknowledged crimes under international law. (13)

The issue of human trafficking was not only a site of origin for international judiciary institutions, for Martinez, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade constitutes a unique example of efficacy in international law.

Still, this accomplishment is relative insofar as it is understood through the difference between law and practice. In support of the preceding quote, Martinez points to the contemporary universal criminality of slavery, and offers the comparison that while

204 some countries claim the sovereign right to torture, none defend slavery as acceptable practice. Yet while slavery has been universally prohibited in law, the organization Walk

Free’s The Global Slavery Index reports that there were twice as many slaves in the world in 2014 than were imported during the entire history of Atlantic chattel slavery, the majority of which are in India (Gallup.com; Slave Trade Database).

In the abolitionary period of the slave trade (1772-1867), Western nations faced the tangled philosophical and geographical questions of the coincidence of national

(sovereign) law, international law (the law of nations), and natural (divine) law: the bellum lege contra legem. Geographically and symbolically, the maritime space was the locus where law butted against law, and where consequently, different laws were harnessed in order to serve individual purposes. In addition to conceptual distinctions, political reality demanded the tremendously difficult spatial contest between the laws of the nation state (land), of international law (the sea), and the omnipresent but obscure natural law. How were international laws to be applied by sovereign nations and in what space? Where does the national law reach? Which laws were to be applied, and which to be ignored? When may natural law be invoked to break or change political law? In the next chapter, my study of nineteenth century maritime literature examines the functioning of the idea of natural law as a source of justice in Melville’s Billy Bud and Castro Alves’s

“The Slave Ship” before turning to an illustration of the fallacies and pitfalls of the metaphorical use of the concepts of nature and criminality in nineteenth century theory as portrayed in the fiction of Conrad and Caminha.

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Chapter 3: Crime and Nature: The Liberations and Judgments of Natural Law in the Maritime Space

Juxtaposed with discourses of natural law, the narrative heterotopias of Melville and Caminha voice sustained critiques of the draconian naval laws that belied imperial claims to progress and liberalist ideals in Brazil, Britain, and the United States. The seas promises of freedom grow dim in light of maritime discipline that restricts the natural liberty of men while swearing to protect it. “Say goodbye to The Rights of Man,” another sailor calls to Melville’s protagonist Billy Budd as he leaves the symbolic ship of

Enlightenment when impressed90 into the British navy. One of the many parallels between Billy Budd and Bom-crioulo, Amaro is captured out of slavery via impressment into the Brazilian navy. Eclipsing natural law, power’s anxiety of disorder looms in the air of Billy Bud in the form of the British Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797, creating a climate of discipline that seems to guide the entire plot.91 The first article of the brief act reads: “Any person who shall attempt to seduce any sailor or soldier from his duty or incite him to mutiny, &c. to suffer death.” Bom-Crioulo opens with an official punishment spectacle, in which the commanding officer (also seen in Melville’s White-

Jacket) reads the articles of naval law dictating corporal punishment for common and

90 Impressment, the forced enrollment in Naval service by “press gangs,” was a major form of recruitment for the British Royal Navy. British impressment was not restricted to British citizens and commonly incorporated American and Portuguese sailors, which was a fundamental conflict in the War of 1812. My unwritten fourth chapter pays special attention to Naval life and specifically examines the issue of impressment in maritime literature.

207 grave crimes alike. Amaro comes to reflect that sailors have no more rights than slaves, that the sea’s promise of freedom and natural rights is a mask for bondage and subjugation. Even as ships mobilized ideas, industries, and militaries in defense of freedom, the flexible (even in its ability to be too rigid, as in Billy Budd) force of law that often denied individual rights came to dominate experience of the ‘free sea’ for colonizers and colonized, white and especially black.

This chapter expands on the previous one’s attention to law in maritime literature and explores how these texts interrogates the meanings of natural law, nature, and crime, and explores the union of these in the extraordinarily impactful idea of the crime against nature. The latter term and its family have evolved fluidly through history, adapted in many directions, as constellations of legal concepts and tools of discrimination. In the twenty-first century, the phrase ‘crime against humanity’ is commonly used in discussions of global politics, but the official definition and actual role of the concept in international law is still very much in question. Due to the myriad of cultural developments in the transition from the Enlightenment to the modernist period and finally the Second World War, the western idea of nature—and its greatest achievement, humanity—underwent dramatic conceptual shifts in the last two centuries.

Notwithstanding this evolution, there are also strong continuities between the majority of theories, most notably that nature constitutes the source of truth and justice.

Consequently, legal debates and political theories were often framed in terms of natural law.

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Natural law also constituted one of the most important philosophical underpinnings of the era of democratic revolutions surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. The formation of the United States is, itself, a primary example of the use of natural law in defying political law.92 A widely influential belief in Europe and the

Americas for centuries, the notion of natural law—part of Enlightenment Natural

Religion or Deism—proposed that divinely instilled laws of nature were operative in the world and, most importantly,constituted the moral laws of the world. Unlike the physical laws of nature, natural law is fundamentally a moral theory, not a material one. In this worldview, the natural is the source of the moral good, an extension or transposition of divine right and justice. If one, as Coleridge’s ancient mariner demonstrates, transgresses against nature and its law—sins by shooting the albatross—this places one against nature and the divine law behind it. The appeal to natural law became the ultimate test of justice and the mark against which political law could be measured. Natural rights and laws offered a position of justice from which radical thinkers could undermine extant political laws: the concept of natural law supported the insertion of the gap between law and justice so essential to the justification of political reform. Nowhere was natural law

92 While less cited than the “We hold these truths to be self-evident” passage that immediately follows, the opening of the Declaration of Independence justifies its principles in accordance with natural/divine law: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them. This founding statement of the United States and the Age of Revolution makes a claim to knowledge of natural law and even allies the divine law of nature with self-rule. Paradoxically, such an ethos is directly at odds with the colonial enterprise of the United States that spanned the next two hundred years, including both the existence of slavery and the Union’s refusal of southern secession. Still, the Declaration’s invocation of natural law established a significant precedent in building political law and organizations under the protection of the divinely established laws of nature. 209 theory more influential than the abolitionist movements of the Atlantic, through which natural law theory was able to expand and take permanent hold in international politics.

In much of the writing of the nineteenth century and earlier modernity, the sea was allied with pure nature and with the forces of the natural world untainted by civilization. While humans populate, civilize, and manipulate the land, the sea remains imagined as largely unchanged, a savage dominion where Nature remains sovereign.

Because of this distinction, the sea often provided the imaginary and real site for the challenging of sovereign law through recourse to the laws of nature. Since the beginning of modernity initiated by the Colombian encounter, the colonialist geographical ideology of the West has imagined the sea as the medium that separates civilized nations from more primitive lands closer to the state of nature. The sea transported civilized man to these states of nature and away from the laws of his civilization: as a space relatively free of sovereignty, the sea came to represent the world unrestrained by the jurisprudence of civilization, a place where the truths of nature might be free to emerge without the impediments of custom and law. Because of the complexity and weakness of maritime jurisdictions, the waters served as a testing ground for justice, a space where natural law may emerge from the strictures of positive and de facto law. Embodying motion, the sea both sustained and symbolized the movement between justice and law, manifested in the conflictive relations between natural and political law.

Depicting a special and prevalent example of the heterogeneity of law reviewed in the previous chapter, the conflict between natural and sovereign law emerges at the center

210 of the maritime novels I analyze in this chapter, such as Herman Melville’s posthumous novel Billy Bud (1891), in which the force of imperial politics triumphs over the moral precepts of natural law. The tragedy of justice found in Billy Bud derives from the direct opposition between the natural law according to which Billy is innocent and the political law that condemns his act of murder as criminal. A fatalist denouement typical of

Melville’s fiction, Captain Vere executes Billy’s sentence under the dominion of despotic

British naval law, which, as the narrator explains, had been revised with increased control and discipline in response to maritime mutinies at the end of the eighteenth century.

Though the episode leads to the Captain’s remorse on his deathbed, Vere self-consciously and openly acts against natural law in favor of the self-preservation of the empire that employs him. The Captain’s decision constitutes a crime against nature, which he willingly commits to avoid a crime against the crown. In this result, Melville paints the limits of natural law philosophy before the powerful force of modern imperial politics, building outrage over the law’s disassociation with justice that becomes especially egregious at sea.

The connection between morality and laws of nature were invoked by pro and anti-slavery advocates, and this chapter supplements analysis of literary texts with reference to abolitionist writings, namely: titles of works analyzed in this chapter With the rise of abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic and the Equator, anti-slave trade activists frequently argued that the trafficking of slaves constituted a crime against the laws of nature and a crime against humanity, giving the latter term new applications and a

211 growing presence in discourse on international jurisprudence. Established in the international discourse of human rights following World War II and the trials at

Nuremburg, the concept of a crime against humanity emerged through a conflation of two aspects of the movement to end the slave trade: the recognition of slave trading as a human rights abuse in violation of the laws of nature, and the maritime mobility of traders that, like pirates before, aggrieved the whole of humanity by transcending sovereign jurisdictions. For the abolitionist effort, the designation of slave trading as a crime against humanity played an important role in raising awareness of the immorality of the traffic and also offered a meta-legal basis for challenging the political legality of human captivity. Yet the invocation of natural law that bolstered international abolitionism suffered from significant philosophical weaknesses and even came to facilitate widespread discrimination and confinement.

Essential but not limited to the question of slavery, as the nineteenth century progressed theories of natural law were incorporated into diverse and sometimes contradictory ideologies. In the second half of the century, moral appeals to natural law multiplied under the scientific authority of biological positivism, which generated dangerous opportunities for the marginalization of identity types that were devalued in the hegemonic social theory of the West. When natural law theory (primarily a moral and metaphysical theory) fused and interacted with late-nineteenth century scientism, evolutionary biology became the most common hermeneutic for articulating laws of human behavior. In most cases, positivist theories of the laws of nature retained the truth

212 and moral value of nature found in natural theology but shifted the authority from the theological to the scientific. In the process, ecological theories of anthropology, race, and sexuality were able to make moral (natural law) evaluations and rhetorically connect them to the scientific certainty of laws of nature. In reaction to the new positivist dominion over nature, Conrad, on the other hand, positions nature away from rational knowledge and human mastery. Particularly in the two novels featuring Marlow, much of Conrad’s writing challenges these ideas and instead configures nature as a brutal realm of unknowing. Unfolding in colonial maritime settings, Conrad’s skeptical epistemology undermines key components of the colonialist worldview and western identity. Yet unlike Heart of Darkness, the critique of coloniality built in Lord Jim has not been thoroughly comprehended as an extension of Conrad’s theories of knowledge.

With Marlow’s focus on discovering Jim’s nature in relation to his crime of dereliction, Lord Jim undertakes the impossible feat of revealing the absence of connection between human nature and criminality, rejecting an ontology of human morality. The novel performs an existentialist deconstruction of human nature in the form of race or any other criterion of group identity. In this critique of absolute identity,

Lord Jim investigates the possibility of the human subject’s autonomy, a concept fundamental to the possibility of criminal responsibility, volitional behavior, and selfhood. Autonomy, or self-rule, is the sovereignty of the subject, a matter of the confluence of power and law through which the subject establishes and follows its own laws. Conrad’s fiction questions the motivations and consequences of this conflation of

213 the various and blended concepts under the same signifiers “law” and “nature.” Lord Jim and Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo engage with the positivist project of connecting the nature of the subject to the law and criminality, testing the repercussions of the fact that, as Foucault states “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault Reader 265) .

Many positivist theories sought to explicate the nature of criminality through biological analysis of the criminal organism, and this investigative method undergoes complicating scrutiny in Lord Jim and Bom-crioulo as the novels open the space for the inconclusive against the closures of positivist thinking. The ethos of biological determinism in late-nineteenth-century discourses of science (including literary

Naturalism) restricted the existential freedom of the individual to material laws; Billy

Budd, Lord Jim, and Bom-crioulo all feature maritime subjects struggling against the strictures of laws of empire and nature. In Caminha’s editorial defense of Bom-crioulo,

“A Condemned Book,” he declares the novel to reflect the recent scientific works of

“legal medicine,”93 a telling appellation for the positivist attempt to categorize deviancy and criminality through anatomical analysis (qtd. in Azevedo, short title 123) This scientific genre in which physiognomy assumes the judicial role by assigning character to physical trait further facilitated racist hierarchies when social and moral qualities were

93 Rather than using the current term medicolegal, I have chosen to conserve Caminha’s phrase because it better represents the nineteenth century positivist methodology. Medicolegal refers more to the legislation of medicine, such as malpractice issues, doctor-patient confidentiality, etc. Legal medicine on the other hand, began from the standpoint of the law or morality and from there developed medical theory of the body. It is this starting from the moral precepts that plagued much of biological positivism and is responsible for its status as pseudo-science. 214 assigned to racial traits. While ideologically connected to natural law, legal medicine also shaped the force of law and facilitated the criminalization of race and sexuality in western nations.

Despite its central role in the establishment of human rights, natural law theory also supported discriminatory juridical status and criminalized the non-heteronormative body. Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo illustrates how concepts of ‘the natural’ free but also bind and condemn the subject in the theoretical paradigms of nineteenth century natural-moral philosophy. In other words, during the nineteenth century the powerful concepts of natural law and crimes against nature were used to abolish the slave trade, but also to justify racist ideology and condemn homosexuality under the same laws of nature.

Amaro’s ‘nature’ constitutes the primary question in Bom-crioulo, and is complicated by contrary iterations of both this signifier, representations of sexuality, and theories of criminality. As American nations struggled over the personhood of former, natural law is still used to interrogate the politics of the body but with increased detail and scope and a new sense of modernity. Positivism assumes a position of superiority over the more traditional, theological version of natural law theory and justifies its reach with claims to progress and an unimpeachable scientific methodology. This chapter’s analysis of sexual depravity in Bom-crioulo illustrates how late-nineteenth century homophobia and racism could appeal to both progress and tradition, to novel science and ancient religion.

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Deadly Encounters of Natural and Naval Law in Billy Bud

“That which is not just is not law; and that which is not law, ought not to be in force,” writes William Lloyd Garrison in an 1831 letter to southern critics of his new abolitionist serial The Liberator. A radical thinker in favor of nullifying the Constitution because of its protection of slavery, Garrison upholds the principle that natural law/justice should dictate human behavior and that unjust laws are politically invalid. In doing so, he frames the triangular dilemma of nineteenth-century jurisprudence between natural law, positive law, and social actions.

It’s immense influence notwithstanding, neither the principles (the actual laws) nor the role of natural law theory in international politics could not be definitively established, the result of which kept natural law in constant conflicts of jurisprudence.

Jenny Martinez notes the heterogeneous and often contradictory status of slavery within the law: “jurists in England and the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had sometimes conflicting and incompletely theorized views of the relationship between natural law, statutory law, the common law, and the law of nations” (17).

Slavery was a particularly complicated case, because although originally seen by some philosophers as a natural part of the order of the world (and perhaps even mandated by

God), over time other philosophers came to view it as contrary to natural law. As far back as the classical period, slavery was sanctioned by the Roman predecessor of the law of nations, the jus gentium, but the third century Roman jurist Ulpian pointed out slavery as the sole example of a conflict between the jus natural and the jus gentium” (181).

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Slavery, then, has always represented a conflict in western international law framed in terms of natural law.

The antagonisms between natural law, political law, and actions provide the provocative dilemma of political theory in Billy Budd (1891), Herman Melville’s final maritime fiction that returns to the questions of justice raised by his fictions in the 1850’s.

Herman Melville’s writing exposes the interstitial contests of justice that accompany transnational oceanic commerce. As the site of liminal legality and transnational encounters, Melville employs the sea to stage crises of meta-politics in which his characters must weigh the possibilities of obedience to the law or revolution in an unjust system of authority. Characters like Babo, Starbuck, Jack Chase, and Captain Vere recognize the impasse between positive law and natural law, and, reflecting Melville’s fatalism, remain caught in the injustice engineered by powerful political and economic interests. Billy Budd relates the story of a righteous and “handsome sailor” who, after being impressed (forcibly enlisted) into the British Navy (“Say goodbye to the Rights of

Man”), unthinkingly kills a wicked intriguer and is quickly executed for his crime despite unanimous acknowledgment of his moral innocence.

In Billy Bud, Captain Vere asserts his prerogative as agent of the British Royal

Navy and rejects the appeal of natural law by executing a supremely moral man.

Melville’s last narrative continues to provoke readers and critics because it effectively dramatizes the conflict between natural law and sovereign law by recalling real threats to

217 international order and embodying imperial force in the sympathetic Captain Vere.94 The narrator’s tone affecting confidence in the truth-value of his version of events pushes the reader to conclude that the events of Billy’s trial were just in the imperfect human world, and that a realistic appraisal of the situation would approve Vere’s decision. Once again this a seduction to the apologies of colonial discourse, and Melville scorns the outcome of the story and stirs a longing for justice in his reader. Vere’s logic is detached, and this distance from reality and pain facilitates systematic oppression throughout the world.

Vere executes Billy according the law of vessel and his command, but he gives a dissent speech, one which submits to but subverts the law of the Royal Navy. The captain’s decision admits its own injustice based on the principle that he does not follow natural law; he does not swear his oath to Nature or God but to the crown. Billy’s execution is a crime against nature, but correct under British naval law. According to

Vere’s conception of British naval law, Billy’s moral value and intention are irrelevant, and only the outcome of the criminal event understood through martial law matters. The officers who are positioned to help Vere decide Billy’s judgment remain silent in remorseful hesitation: they feel the injustice of a conviction that ignores circumstance or identity. The sympathy for Billy shared by all four officers quiets them all, until Vere gives the culminating speech of the novel in order to justify the execution of Billy:

94 As if describing Vere’s dilemma, Bhabha describes the fundamental alterity (“mystical foundation” in Derrida’s term) of the law: “the common, conversational distinction between the letter and spirit of the Law displays the otherness of Law itself; the ambiguous grey area between Justice and judicial procedure is, quite literally, a conflict of judgment” (74). 218

But your scruples: do they move as in a dusk? Challenge them. Make them advance and declare themselves. Come now: do they import something like this?

If, mindless of palliating circumstances, we are bound to regard the death of the

Master-at-arms as the prisoner's deed, then does that deed constitute a capital crime whereof the penalty is a mortal one? But in natural justice is nothing but the prisoner's overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow-creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?--Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate

Nature primeval, tho' this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King's officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free-agents. When war is declared are we the commissioned fighters previously consulted? We fight at command. If our judgements approve the war, that is but coincidence. So in other particulars. So now. For suppose condemnation to follow these present proceedings. Would it be so much we ourselves that would condemn as it would be martial law operating through us? For that law and the rigour of it, we are not responsible. Our avowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it. (361-362)

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Vere points to his dress, the marking of the Crown’s buttons, and explains his allegiance to country over God. More specifically, Vere reminds his officers that Naval officials operate under the Mutiny Act of the Articles of War as part of martial law95, rather than the “less arbitrary and more merciful” law found in civil society (363). He is the arm of sovereignty reaching over the sea. It is a remarkable statement of the power of the

British state and its anxiety of order that a man who is represented as thoughtful and righteous through the novel chooses to suspend his sense of justice in order to obey the sovereign. He fully acknowledges the split between law and justice aboard his ship and submits to the power that employs him. Prior to his decision, the narrator articulates the same difference between political and natural, moral law. The “legal view,” under which

Billy should be condemned, clashes with the “essential right and wrong involved in the matter” (354). Melville’s novel is careful to establish a direct opposition between morality and martial law so that, justified as Vere’s decision may appear to be, it stirs the reader’s discontent with the laws of the world.

As we will see in ‘Lord’ Jim’s dereliction of duty and in one of Amaro’s crimes against nature, Billy Bud’s crime occurs in an opaque moment absent of human autonomy—his body acts in spite of himself or his supposed ‘nature.’ In the novel, the righteous Billy reacts to evil Claggart’s libel with a single fatal blow to the head, an unintended murder committed by an irreproachable soul’s body. As to the unresolved

95 Nor is this suspension of rights limited to the Royal Navy, as the Fifth Amendment in the American Bill of Rights, commonly referred to as due process, does not extend its protections to members of the United States military. In both Anglo-empires, the law does not extend to all persons, just as the French Declarations of the Rights of Man and the Citizen claimed only the rights of property owning males. 220 question of Billy’s moral responsibility for his crime, Vere carefully but stoically recognizes this impasse. Yet, Vere casts the question aside as irrelevant: “Ay, there is a mystery; but, to use a scriptural phrase, it is a ‘mystery of iniquity,’ a matter for psychologic theologians to discuss. But what has a military court to do with it? ‘The prisoner’s deed—with that lone we have to do” (359). A name associated with ‘truth’ and ‘seeing,’ Vere resists the pursuit of justice because it lies in opaque truth, in the mysterious realms of the soul and God’s moral law—it is not explicitly written in the

Articles of War. Vere chooses the law of his country in part because it has tangible force and is clear. Natural law is fundamentally uncertain because it can only guide human behavior insofar as humans can discern it—its truth must be seen through the fallible human understanding and be articulated through the ambiguity of human language. It is in this sense that sovereign laws are more, but not perfectly clear—for they too must live in the ambiguity of language. Vere seems sure in this case that he is following British naval law, but he could never know if saving Billy would have been in accordance with natural law, even though he and the narrator believed it so96.

As with other Melville works, the reader is meant to be troubled upon closing

Billy Bud. Reflective of Melville’s tragic position, the ineradicable injustice of human life overtakes the story and the existential freedom we desire is denied by the world forever out of joint. (Like Benito Cereno, Billy Bud plays with the reliability of discourse

96 A similar principle of certainty characterized the relation between sovereign laws and the law of nations, since the latter depended on an unquantifiable consensus of accordance with the laws of nature and humanity. In both cases, we are confronted with the impossibility of realizing justice. This is the blind spot in the world that Melville constantly writes about: the “arch interferer,” Moby Dick, and “the black” that worried Cereno.) 221 and gives ample evidence of the falsity that often accompanies accounts of human events.

Melville’s narratives create an aesthetic counterpoint to official discourse and scientific explanation: he produces meaning that challenges authorized truth. The naval chronicle cited at the very end (much like the legal deposition in Benito Cereno) grossly misrepresents the events, touting Claggart’s innocence and the well-deserved execution of the criminal William Budd. Distance obscures and the writing of history silences the true story.

Even the narrator in his matter-of-fact style does not recognize the moral anguish felt underneath Vere’s dutiful poise: though Vere dies with Billy’s name on his lips, the narrator denies their origin in remorse through a vague reasoning. The nameless sailors who knew Billy aboard the Bellipotent felt Billy’s innocence, and one even composed the mournful ode “Billy in the Darbies” that closes the text. While the official naval account foolishly assures that, having judgment been passed, “Nothing amiss is now apprehended aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent,” the wrong settles heavy in the heart of Vere, Melville, and the reader. Discontent “lurkingly” hides in the silence and violence of history. Typical of his pessimistic and fatalistic fiction, Melville leaves the reader unsatisfied and facing an immoral world. Starbuck does not stop Ahab; Babo does not get away; Bartleby resigns; Billy hangs. The revolution is never realized. Their pain sinks to the silent bottom of the sea.

Scholars have been largely confounded by the question of how to read Vere’s character, especially in relation to the much clearer moral dilemma presented by the

222 novel. When Vere is being introduced in chapter seven, there is an intimation that, though a fair-minded intellectual, Vere lacks feeling and the ability to empathize with the people around him. While Billy’s fault is articulated clearly, Vere’s is not. Perhaps this lack of emotion is Vere’s flaw, and this dispassionateness which makes him well-suited for his post the missing ingredient in his judgment of Billy’s fate. In his interactions with living men (as opposed to biographical subjects), Vere is “disinterested,” “unmindful,” and lacks “considerateness” and “the companionable quality” (312). Care, the novel suggests, is essential to justice. Vere claims that he “too feel[s]” “the full force” of his judgment, but the argument that follows is a rational claim to ignore emotion, and a poor rational argument. Vere proposes their “coats” and “commissions” demand the officer’s allegiance to the draconian laws of the Royal Navy under whose employment they

“ceased to be natural free agents.” Captain and officers included, Vere interprets the sailor as a slave to a greater, earthly power. More subtly than in earlier novels like White

Jacket and Moby Dick (“Who ain’t a slave?”), Melville has embedded Vere in his metaphoric and metonymic use of slavery as a constant evaluation of freedom and discipline at sea.

The most direct description of Vere’s character and reputation closes with an obscure simile typical of Melville that challenges Vere’s rigid ethos of duty and actions as representative of the sovereign. Speaking of “natures” like Vere’s, the narrator comments that “Their honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier” (313).

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This is one of the quiet moments where Melville’s moral philosophy emerges to challenge Vere and the narrator, the implication being that Vere has myopically crossed a line has stepped outside the realm of justice and the law. As in Nietzsche’s critique of morals, Melville implies that categorical imperatives deviate from justice by missing subtle, qualitative differences. Vere does not recognize that Billy’s case reaches beyond the norm and constitutes a special case that must be considered in its individuality, nor does he realize that he has stepped outside the bounds of duty to both natural and naval law.

Captain Vere misunderstands both himself and the law: he does not see the potential self-irony in his statement to the officers at Billy’s trial, and, furthermore, it is intimated that his preemptive application of martial law is not legal. Vere’s monologue, at the beginning of which he urges his fellow judges to “challenge [their scruples],”

(361). This seems to be advice that Vere does not take, and his dying words betray his recognition of this fact and his regret at having enforced the law rather than acting as a

“natural free agent.” Indeed, the latter term constitutes another moment within his speech that invalidates his judgment. The Captain’s absolute submission to the law “however pitilessly that law may operate” is the ultimate source of the tragedy of Billy Bud.

Melville’s irony arises from Vere’s lack of freedom, his submission to the law and alienation from justice, nature, and human sympathy.

Finally, Melville includes a more obscure warning against the assumption of the law’s stone-like consistency in the world by raising the question of its application among

224 human subjects of authority. Much of the narrative works toward endearing Captain

Vere to the reader, as if he is a stoic victim of the imperfect fate of human life, and indeed, such a view is consistent with Melville’s worldview. Yet, there are also subtle and easily missed allusions to the fact that Vere’s actions are not even in accord with military law he purports to embody. Vere’s quick and secretive proceeding from crime to judgment appears questionable to several members of the ship’s elite staff. The surgeon who inspects the murdered body of Claggart leaves wondering if Vere is “unhinged” or

“affected in his mind,” and believes that rather than enacting sentence and execution, the ship’s captain should refer the judicial proceedings to an admiral upon rejoining the fleet as naval procedure dictates (352). Vere’s junior officers agree with the doctor, and the narrator admits that “everyone must determine for himself” whether Vere was the

“sudden victim of any degree of aberration” (353). Well-intentioned and capable, Vere falls short even of duty to the law that he tries to serve. Like that law, he is motivated by anxiety over maritime disobedience that pervaded the Royal Navy, disobedience that stems from the methods of captivity (impressment)97 and discipline (flogging) that led

97 Billy Budd’s hero begins his story by being impressed onto the British Bellipotent. While this fact remains marginal in the narrative, it establishes the foundation for his absolute lack of freedom before the martial law of the British Royal Navy. Early nineteenth century British and American relations principally revolved around two polemical denials of liberty in the maritime world: the slave trade and impressment,97 a pair through which the British empire embodied the maritime dialectic of freedom and bondage. Even though the two nations were united in banning the traffic by 1808, anti-British sentiment was extremely strong in the United States following the War of Independence and the War of 1812 (Martinez 46). The British implementation of the war-time right to search ships during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) was a prerogative that needed to be extended to peacetime in order for the Royal Navy to effectively combat the slave trade. Because it facilitated fraudulent trafficking, one of the most s ignificant failures in international relations at this time was the inability to establish a treaty that would authorize the mutual enforcement of anti-slave trade laws between the United States and Britain. This same right to the encroachment of sovereignty also created the conditions for the illegal but accepted practice of the impressment (forced 225

Billy to his crime. Ultimately, it is not only the wrong law that motivates Vere; it is his anxious desire to keep absolute order of a society that coheres by brute force.

While this aberration is left intentionally vague and uncategorized, context provided by the narrator at the beginning of the novel suggests that Vere’s dubious secrecy and deadly haste derive from anxiety stimulated by the recent Spithead and Nore mutinies in the Royal Navy. Power’s anxiety of disorder looms in the air of Billy Bud in the form of the British Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797, creating a climate of discipline that guides the entire plot and the psychology of both Billy and Captain Vere. The first article of the brief act reads: “Any person who shall attempt to seduce any sailor or soldier from his duty or incite him to mutiny, &c. to suffer death.” With considerably more detail than British maritime law receives in Billy Bud, White Jacket ponders and critiques the American Articles of War that restrict naval life for all sailors but the officers. Both through direct argument and key moments in their plots, Melville and

Caminha emphasize the maritime culture of discipline in multiple works. Like Billy and

Captain Vere, Amaro in Bom-crioulo negotiates his identity against the threat of punishment and restrictions of personal liberty.

Billy Budd raises a crucial question of what undesirable conditions should be allowed in order to serve order and systemic organization. Should torture be permitted in the midst of a war on terror? What about rights to privacy? More broadly, what global

employment) of non-British citizens and in particular Americans. While the British empire began its crusade against the slave trade, the United States would not cooperate because doing so would enable another form of forced labor practiced by the same Navy that persecuted the traffic.

226 working conditions should be suffered in order to support the functioning of capitalism?

Brazil and the United States faced this dilemma with regards to slavery: in those debates it was frequently asserted that, despite the inhumane nature of slavery and the trade, the local or national economy depended on slave labor and that abolition would be too costly.

To what extent must the West sacrifice itself to foster progress? Vere’s deviations from natural and political law—and with them Billy’s fate—may be explained through the

Captain’s desperate desire to maintain order in an era of revolt. To what degree should we suspend justice in favor of the law? If not morality, what does the law serve? Are order and progress merely emblems of the deity of Commerce and its earthly kingdom?

Melville’s final tale of the confrontation between justice and maritime society reflects the ways that U.S. abolitionists often appealed syntheses of natural law and positive law, building their arguments for positive laws through appeals to the authority of natural law. A notable example of this strategy may be seen in the ideology of anti- slavery guerrilla John Brown, who devoted himself in the late 1850`s to combatting what he believed to be the treasonous crime of slavery. In ‘Bleeding Kansas’ and finally

Harper’s Ferry Virginia, Brown led slaves, free men, and his sons in violent skirmishes against pro-slavery forces and was hanged by the law. He was a righteous terrorist that inspired chaos and fear that contributed to the disintegration of the United States and the outbreak of the Civil War. Like Captain Vere, John Brown’s closing address at his trial examines the contradictory coincidence of natural and positive law. Tried and executed

227 in late 1859, Brown constructs his statement to the court by evaluating the relation between these two forms of the law on the eve of the American Civil War:

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a

book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament.

That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I

should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in

bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am

yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to

have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have done—in

behalf of His despised poor was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed

necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice,

and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of

millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and

unjust enactments--I submit; so let it be done!

Brown explicitly defines his pursuit of justice as the attempt to displace “unjust enactments” with the “laws of God,”—to live according to natural law instead of political law and cruel action. Seeking to be the engine of the just realization of natural law,

Brown does what Melville wishes Captain Vere had done. Vere makes the opposite choice and weeps for it as he passes away—ironically shot by the ship the Atheist for turning from the higher law.

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Yet while some like John Brown and Huck Finn were able to defy positive law in order to live and die in accordance with natural law, the need for natural law to be articulated through an ideology meant that pro-slavery forces could also found their political rights to own slaves upon the rock of natural law. Many apologists of Atlantic chattel slavery appealed to natural law in order to justify the institution of bondage.

Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stevens, for instance, gave his famous

“Cornerstone Speech” in 1861 in order to defend the proslavery worldview as the realization of God’s natural law, opposed to the claims of abolitionists:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations

are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to

the white man; that slavery in subordination to the superior race is his natural and

normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the

world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Thus, like religious authorities such as the Bible or the Koran, natural law may be utilized to liberate and condemn, to tolerate and to persecute. Nature may be constructed through laws of equality and laws of inequality, and in this way natural law rhetorically moves as a fickle and powerful tool of political will, a further arena for the contests of justice. The most powerful tools of the abolitionists, Liberalism and Christianity were appropriated by pro-slavery theorists who were able to effectively articulate their economic interests in accord with elements of these broad ideological paradigms.

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At least since the beginning of modernity, natural law theory has functioned as a strategic political tool able to position the natural right according to practical political goals. The transatlantic imperialism inaugurated by Iberian and soon other nascent

European nations stimulated the first major school of modern jurisprudence known as the

“Second Scholastics” in the late sixteenth century. Centered in Salamanca, Spain, legal humanists like Francisco de Vitória, Francisco Suárez, and Domingo de Soto continued to develop Aquinas’ concept of natural law and applied their philosophy of law to the emerging international order, much of which consisted in articulating the relationship of political sovereignty between Europe and New World peoples. In response to the

Scholastic theories which were anchored in the project of justifying Catholic sovereignty, philosophers from Protestant northern Europe like Hugo Grotius of Holland and Hobbes and Locke from England generated a politically-motivated theoretical counterpoint to early-modern Scholastic doctrine. This Protestant natural law theory separated religion from sovereign power in order wrest the interpretive authority of natural law from the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As Ian Hunter and David Saunders elucidate in their introduction to the essay collection Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty (2002), the natural law theory of the early Enlightenment was developed in part to “desacrilise” sovereignty and the law: to remove the theological foundation of natural law and replace it with principles derived from “man’s observable nature,” “the philosophical linking of law and nature variously achieved in the natural law doctrines of Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza”

(4-5). This suggests that Enlightenment natural law theory affirmed humanity’s capacity

230 to interpret nature through reason, at least in part, for pragmatic political reasons of opposing Catholic hegemony in early-modern Europe. Essential to the formation of modernity around the sixteenth century and the development of western liberalism, this political shift in natural law philosophy demonstrates the malleability of concepts of natural law and its capacity for being invoked by conflicting ideologies and powers.

Bolstered by naval force and natural law rhetoric, British abolitionism became increasingly popular and powerful in the years following the Napoleonic Wars and the

War of 1812, garnering support at the highest levels of the British government. The proliferation of natural law philosophy—always founded in theological authority—was an indispensable tool for both white and black proponents of abolition, for Lord

Chancellors and former slaves. African authors like Equiano, Quobna Ottobah

Cugoano,98 and Mahomma Baquaqua absorbed and embraced elements of western philosophy, and particularly identified with the idea of a natural law in opposition to the organized system of bondage that propelled the Atlantic economy. Henry Brougham,

Lord Chancellor at the time of the 1833 abolishment of slavery in the British Empire, composed the following, which became a rallying cry for abolitionists in the future:

98Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787) continuously asserts slavery’s opposition to “Divine Law,” declaring it a “brutal transgression of [the Sovereign of Mankind’s] law” (11,24). In the self-published second addition from 1791, Cugoano employed a subtitle that foregrounded his attention to the subject of natural law: Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery; or, The Nature of Servitude as Admitted by the Law of God, Compared to the Modern Slavery of the Africans in the West - Indies. This edition was dedicated to William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and Judge Mansfield, his white collaborators in the struggle to restore the human perversions of natural law. Cugoano was an extremely prolific and influential abolitionist: part of the group the “Sons of Africa,” he also associated with many members of the progressive London elite, including William Blake. He worked closely with Equiano, who may have advised him in the production of his text, and appealed to Granville Sharp to file a writ of habeaus corpus on behalf of the slave Harry Demane (Carreta’s introduction).

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Tell me not of rights, talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny

the right. I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings of our

common nature, rise in rebellion against it…There is a law above all the

enactments of human codes—the same throughout the world, the same in all

times…It is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that

law, unchangeable and eternal…men shall reject with indignation the wild and

guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man. (cited in Bethell and Carvalho

114)

Brougham supersedes rights with feelings, and is through feeling that humans realize the divine moral right. As a means to access divine natural law, Brougham justifies a positive law of abolition with an appeal to the moral superiority of aesthetics over argument. While typical in its invocation of natural law, Lord Brougham’s statement proffers a remarkable critique of the antagonisms of Enlightenment thought by denouncing the rationale of the liberalist defense of slavery. The British Lord Chancellor attacks what would become the primary pro-slavery ideology in the United States and

Brazil. Secession from the Union would be proclaimed (not illogically) by southern states as a liberalist protection of states’ rights that truly followed the ideals of the

American Revolution,99 and the Brazilian planter class and government disobeyed the slave trade prohibition law of November 7, 1831 as an exercise of freedom against the

99 Because of our affinity for the American Revolution and shame of slavery, our rhetorical understanding of the Civil War does not operate in terms of a Confederate Revolution, but the two revolutions parallel in their foundations of problematic liberalism. Both secession movements contained dangerous contradictions with respect to human freedom and presented themselves as cries of liberty from foreign tyranny. 232 imperialist (and humanitarian) tyranny of Britain. Lord Brougham explicitly recognizes the inherent limits in liberalist political philosophy of right and the need for juridical restriction of rights100 in order to realize a more free society.

Still embroiled in the dispute over slavery by the start of the New Imperialism,

Brazilian progressive101 abolitionist literature expressed its nation’s struggle over slavery through poetics of disorientation that interrogated the confused relationships between natural law, positive law, and custom that filled Brazilian discourse and social imaginary.

Castro Alves’s monumental abolitionist poem, “The Slave Ship [O Navio Negreiro],” illustrates the poetics of natural law and provides an introductory example to the functioning of the trope of natural law in the literary imaginary of the maritime. As it does for nineteenth century writers like Cruz e Sousa, Conrad, Melville, and Douglass; in

“The Slave Ship” the sea serves as the medium for the contact between the political law of civilization and the primal laws of nature embodied in the oceans. In this way, the sea staged the question of justice as sailors, traders, and slavers carried issues of socio- political legality and criminality into contact with the Earth’s greatest fountain of divine law. Thus, in Alves’s great poem the sea and sky are constant forces of divine witness, as

100 Fifteen years later, Marx’s critique of rights linked the marriage of liberalist philosophy and capitalism with the rise of self-interest and alienation, arguing that bourgeois liberalism is precisely the kind of political philosophy that would permit slavery. A famous line from “On the Jewish Question” (1848) suggests this connection: “The practical application of the right of man to freedom is the right of man to private property.” See Betty A. Sichel “Karl Marx and the Rights of Man” (1972) for a discussion of Marx’s preoccupation with the primacy of the right to property over other rights and the consequent social alienation of humanity.

101 As opposed to the conservative variety which advocated abolition to protect white culture rather than to include Afro-Brazilians in personhood and relieve their suffering. 233 if the poet has brought Brazil’s great crime to God, in order to put the two in relief and illuminate slavery and especially the maritime trade as the most terrible sins. In the apostrophe to God, the poet employs a homonym to question the coherence between the divine and the sublime sea sky:

Senhor Deus dos desgraçados! [Lord God of the unfortunate

Dizei-me vós, Senhor Deus! Tell me Lord God

Se é loucura... se é verdade Is it madness or is it truth

Tanto horror perante os céus?! Such horror before your skies?!

The poem accuses God through its pun on skies/céus and yours/seus, questioning how the horror is permitted around God’s divine ocean. The Portuguese desgraçado, literally without grace, also suggests a separation from the divine law. Slavery, as it was in the

West’s beginnings in the East (the Jews in Egypt), becomes the great question of theological morality, which Alves represents in perhaps the most moving poem of

Brazilian abolitionist literature. Walking the line between piety and blasphemy, the poet raises the question God’s place in the infernal world of the slave trade, suggesting alienation from the divine will, which ultimate underlays natural law.

Alves’ ship of Brazilian civilization is lost at sea and unable to properly distinguish the course of moral law. In his political but Romantic poetry, the heavens and the earth reflect one being and interpenetrate, creating a metaphysical condition for the coherence of natural law and morality, which is ruptured by slavery. Reflecting the union of the metaphysical and the moral in the concept of natural law, many of the poems in

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The Slaves [Os Escravos] unite cosmic and moral structure. “The Visionary (O Vidente)” beautifully illustrates the Hermetic correspondences of Alves’s poetic world in the line,

“I hear the singing of stars in the sea of the firmament [Ouço o cantar dos astros no mar do firmamento]” 133)102. After establishing the correspondences of nature, Alves’s poems turn and reveal the incongruity of the law and custom of slavery. Like the arguments made by Equiano and Cugoano, the poems often address the contradiction of slavery with the laws of God as outlined in Christianity, and “The Visionary” ends by imploring that the nation “removes the cross from the shoulders of God [Levanta o madeira dos hombros de Deus]” (97).

Though the opening sections are filled with Romantic beauty and musicality, the arrival of the albatross in the “The Slave Ship” reveals the gruesome reality not glimpsed by the distant perspective of “human vision [olhar humano].” Suddenly the delightful

“orchestra” transforms into rattling chains, cracking whips, and cries; the dancing into staggering and falling. Rather than light and free, the movement of the ship cycles through satanic revolutions as the stanzas take on the form of Ouroboros,103symbolizing the stagnant development of the Brazilian nation. Other symbols in the poem, such as the whip, assumes this satanic shape and further illustrate the diabolical world of the slave

102 This trope of connection between above and below is also prominent in Conrad’s maritime world where “the sea and sky interpenetrate” (“Youth”). 103 The self-devouring Ouroboros and the doctrine of correspondences are both important to Hermetic philosophy, which seems to have thoroughly shaped Alves’s poetry. Linked to Egypt, Hermetic philosophy often serves to reestablish a connection to Africa for the Brazilian artist wishing to counter the alienation of the Atlantic crossing. A particularly successful example, Jorge Ben’s music builds Afro-Brazilian consciousness by reaching into diverse times and places such as ancient Africa (Hermes Trismegistus), colonial Brazil (Zumbi) and the contemporary (1970’s) United States (Black is Beautiful). 235 trade, alienated from God. Parcel of the estrangement from the divine laws of nature, the slave ship transports its passengers out of their reason/judgment. The Portuguese word juízo signifies both mental and criminal judgment, the faculty of reason and judicial or divine sentence. The rampant madness aboard the slave ship exhibits the absence of juízo in a slave society; the laws of sense in the mind break in the midst of carnage that violates natural law. Alves’ vision of the world under slavocracy represents a total deviation from the law, mentally, physically, and spiritually. The world is wholly às avessas104: not as it should be, inside-out, fallen and detached from the proper laws of nature and humanity’s place within them.105

Alves’s long abolitionist poem announces this condition of bewilderment in its famous opening line: “`Stamos em pleno mar…Doudo no espaço” (169). The sea is the site of madness where the boundary between sea and sky dissolves. Disorientation— synesthesia, the inability to discern, the loss of sense and sensibility, characterize the narratives of the slave ship and the ship that is out of joint with the law. This vocabulary of imagery for nineteenth century Atlantic literature largely derives from Coleridge’s

“The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” particularly the scene when the mariner shoots the

104 William Lloyd Garrison’s 1854 abolitionist theater, which involved a live burning of the Fugitive Slave Act, featured a stage with a large American flag turned up-side down. 105Alves’ Bahian and abolitionist compatriot, Luiz Gama represents the world às avessas [up-side-down] in his poem “What World is This? [Que mundo é este?]105, in which the poet describes a social and legal order without sense and orientation, as if lost in the tempest of white supremacist power. In Gama’s vision of Brazil, morality and natural law have been inverted in an absurd system of privilege, a place where “science is sold,” “virtue is fallen,” and “wealth is demented” (128). Morals are up-side-down and the natural order is disturbed. Sold into slavery by his own father at sea and liberated by his own pen, Luiz Gama insisted that moral corruption degraded the ontological foundations of Brazilian society, a perversion of culture he labored to rectify in court and in letters. 236 albatross and commits a crime against nature, thereby disturbing the natural order of the seas and stopping the progress of the ship. Also alluding to the consequences faced by mariner, the starving, disoriented crew and slaves of the San Dominck in Benito Cereno report having “lain tranced without wind; their provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked” (165). In the literary exploration of natural law ideas in Alves and Melville, the metaphoric ship of the nation has lost its moral orientation to divine natural law. More locally, the ability for the thinking subject to make determinations and distinctions suffers under the vertiginous marine conditions, and forms exceed conceptual categories. Like the ancient mariner’s killing of the albatross, the transgression of natural law carried on the slave ship halts the ship’s progress and traps the sailors in a kind of maritime hell. Appropriating much of the imagery of the English poem, Alves’ “The Slave Ship” repositions the crime against nature that occurs when Coleridge’s ancient mariner shoots the albatross and becomes disoriented in the seas of natural law. This aesthetic (creative and sensory) confusion of boundaries found in the environment at the beginning of the poem represents the moral, theological, and political confusion which Alves reveals to be the true cargo of the slave ship bearing the Brazilian flag. The early imagery of the poem leads the reader through an aesthetic rehearsal of disorientation in order to prepare the reader to engage with the feeling of confusion that the poet will voice in order to express the coexistence of slavery with religiosity and modernity.

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As the sea provided the physical and imaginative space for claims of justice to challenge the law, crimes of the maritime environment, most notably slave trading, assumed new importance in the unprecedented consolidation of international law that occurred in the nineteenth century. In a timely conflation of ideas, the discourse in favor of the abolition of the slave trade introduced the category of ‘crimes against humanity’ into modern international law and sparked the rise of an international human rights.

From the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, humanitarian groups and judiciaries increasingly condemned slave trading as a great crime that united the transnational criminality of the seas with the grossest violation of human rights.

Highlighting this pivotal moment in the development of international human rights, Jenny

Martinez notes,

more than a century before Nuremberg, international courts in Sierra Leone,

Cuba, Brazil, and other places around the Atlantic heard cases related to the slave

trade, the original ‘crime against humanity’…these slave trade courts were the

first international human rights courts. (Martinez 6)

The conceit of ‘crimes against humanity’ supposes an ontological structure related to natural law and crimes against nature. The ancient and distinct concepts of crimes against nature and enemies of humanity meet in the idea of crimes against one specific embodiment of nature—the human, a concept which supposes its own natural law and ontological content.

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A long-standing tradition of the law of nations, modern pirates comprised a special class of extra-national criminals whose maritime operations made them a threat to all nations. Since at least the Roman Empire, piracy has specifically denoted crimes at sea, and no persons of any nationality were exempt in the convention of a criminal class that directly offended all humanity. In theory, this category of hostis humani generis

(enemies of humanity) could transcend sovereign limits and immediately establish jurisdiction on behalf of the human race, regardless of origin of the criminal or location of the crime. Pirates are enemies of the state system; they exchange nationality for the non-state of the sea. In other words, pirates challenge the law itself by resisting its dominions, they attack sovereignty and the social contract and therefore are enemies of all modern societies. In their early-nineteenth century attempts to ban the slave trade,

Britain and the United States hoped to overcome their own political disputes by building the international consensus that slavers were hostis humani generis.

Yet this category of criminal does not resemble the twentieth and twenty-first century perpetrators of crimes against humanity, even though the same universal jurisdiction (its current term) applies. While residence on the oceans is the original source for the category, the attempts to introduce slave traders into the class of enemies of humanity shifted the meaning of the category to signify a special level of brutality in crime. The inclusion of slavers evolved the category into encompassing ‘crimes against humanity’ according to the type of crime regardless of its geographical relation to sovereign law. Rather than remaining a designation of criminals of the extra-national

239 sea, the concept attained a new definition pertaining to the violation of rights that are considered fundamental to the nature of humanity as a cosmopolis, or universal moral collective. In this way, the application of crimes against humanity to the slave trade established the tremendously important precedent for later use of the term in the widespread abuse of a particular identity group and other systematic crimes of brutality.

One of the most assiduous and renowned Brazilian abolitionists, Joaquim Nabuco framed the institution of slavery as a national crime and sought to effect policy change through persuasion, both in London and Brazil. Nabuco’s life-long efforts illustrate the intertwined and at times cooperative nature of the connection between Brazil and Britain that concentrated on slavery and the Atlantic trade. Abolitionism (1883), published in

London, and Slavery (1870) constitute Nabuco’s most famous works through which he articulated his anti-slavery vision for Brazil, and it was in the early text that Nabuco established his conceptualization of slavery as the greatest crime. As in many of his letters, here Nabuco is particularly concerned at undermining the pro-slavery liberalist argument of property as a right. For Nabuco, the immersion of western culture in slavery was the cause of the immoral creation of “civil rights contrary to nature [direitos civis contra naturais]” (12). The economic institution of slavery has alienated humanity from natural law and perverted the political and moral philosophy developed for the purpose of ensuring these same laws.

Focused on stopping the spread of slavery into the western territories of the

United States, Charles Sumner’s 1856 speech to the U.S Senate, “The Crime Against

240

Kansas,” alleges the suffering of a singularly enormous crime, “without example in the records of the past.” The Senator’s title clearly endeavored to acquire the special moral force that the idea of ‘crimes against humanity’ had garnered during decades of debate over the slave trade. Toward the close of the speech, Sumner offers the analogy that

Kansas is like a placid, urbane ship threatened by the appearance of pirates and their plundering. In this reference the Senator echoes the period’s familiar connection between slavers and pirates.

His progressive position on slavery notwithstanding, Sumner’s speech also illustrates the ideological complexity inhabited by individuals, so that, for instance, an abolitionist may simultaneously deny the rights of other races. Writers, politicians, and social activists live an ideology in progress constituted by a transitionary and inconclusive philosophy of the world. This ideological fragmentation, which may only be seen as fragmentary in comparison to other ideological perspectives (most often the present analyzing the past), emerges almost immediately in Sumner’s speech to the

Senate. On the first page of his denunciation of slavery, Sumner dismisses a third culture without a thought, glorifying the removal of the “savage” from Kansas, who until very recently “ran wild in its woods and prairies.” In the time when Manifest Destiny blew over the western United States, outrage over the violation of human rights and cultural genocide suffered by the American Indians was generally not conceived106, even by those

106 In Trouillot’s terms it was “unthinkable” (like the Haitian Revolution). I prefer the terms of actuality unconceived or un-thought—admitting the possibility of untimely or unlikely ontological perspectives, which of course existed. 241 groups that fought for the abolition of slavery—the impulse of progress (gold) was far too strong to admit the proliferation of ideologies of descent.

Compounding the ideological irony, Sumner goes on to describe the injustice forced on Kansas—that of it being incorporated into the Union as a slave state—as “a rape of virgin territory.” As with the figurative employment of the word slavery so central to the Enlightenment, the use of rape as trope masks the uncounted literal rapes of the conquest of the American West. Worse still, the arguments of liberal theory and political debate in the modern West often utilized issues such as slavery or rape to metaphorically describe the political constraints to white and often wealthy classes of men while simultaneously ignoring widespread offenses of slavery and rape. This rhetorical phenomenon deserves further consideration, and perhaps the metaphorical use of horrifying ‘crimes’ offered an indirect way to publicly address a cultural anxiety over slavery that most were afraid to voice directly. So, while slavery serves as ready and forceful metaphor in social and political discourse at the end of the Enlightenment, discussions of slavery are in turn couched in metaphors of rape—an issue central to both slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Natural Law Meets Natural Science Part I: Lord Jim and the Indifference Between

Us and the Criminal

Like Billy Bud, Lord Jim directly depicts the adjudication of a great crime of maritime coloniality that occurred away from the domestic territory of Britain, exposing

242 the limits and failures of the criminal system of maritime imperialism. In each trial, the system of laws and courts cannot adequately represent the truth; it cannot know true justice, only administer law through asymmetrical force. Rather than Billy Bud’s interrogation of positive law and its application, Lord Jim’s challenge to the law denies the coherence between positive law and natural law but does so by engaging in a profound deconstruction of the existence of natural law, or any (moral) laws of human nature. The novel challenges the possibility of categorizing human subjects like Jim as

‘enemies of mankind,’ or, conversely, members of the lawful cosmopolis. Beginning with Jim’s trial, the return to land and the court brings the misrepresentations of the law, and Marlow repeatedly dismisses the proceedings as futile and wrongheaded, unable to discover the truth of Jim’s guilt and his ‘nature’ that it depends on. Yet after a more in- depth but ultimately “incomplete” study of his “specimen,” Marlow laments the impossibility of explaining the human soul/psyche through empirical facts or scientific laws. The openness and fluidity of the eastern oceans that hide Jim mimic the endless flow of the self which, like the sea, is not controlled by a “sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct” (50). In this denial of the law of human nature, Conrad unites his critique of the material means and ends of exploração with his epistemological skepticism of colonialist ontology.

Conrad’s language in Lord Jim forges a unified critique of both epistemological processes at the individual level and simultaneously the international politics of race around which western culture is constructed through ecological positivism. Yet the place

243 of Lord Jim in Conrad’s literary anti-imperialism has not been properly acknowledged since critics tend to focus more narrowly on narratology and epistemology. This stems in part from the fact that Lord Jim’s commentary on imperialism is deeply embedded in the fog of one of the most challenging narratives in English fiction, which unfolds through frames in epistemological circling. Kieron Ohara’s initial section on “Politics and

Literature” in Joesph Conrad Today (2007), for instance, omits Lord Jim from his list of

Conrad’s “major political statements (12). Later in his study, O’hara (who works mostly as a political philosopher and analyst of contemporary British politics) reinforces this exclusion of the novel: “Conrad de-glamorised the empire; with the possible exception of

Lord Jim, his work is unremittingly negative about the effects of empire on colonized and colonisers alike” (26). While O’hara’s explication of Conrad’s anti-imperialist position is useful and well-argued, it neglects the imperial critique at the heart of Lord Jim and the fact that the novel’s epistemological performance is political. On the other hand,

Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1980) selects Lord Jim107 as an example to illustrate his notion that all subjectivity is political, and his basic critical project of unlocking “the political unconscious” within literary texts coincides with my effort to articulate the continuity between Conrad’s psychological and political themes.

My endeavor to comprehend Conrad’s literary vision at the intersection of epistemology and coloniality enjoys an important precursor in Beth Sharon Ash’s Writing

107 While the method Jameson demonstrates through commentary on Lord Jim provides a productive means of synthesizing the antagonism both within the text and in its history of reception, his interpretation (he may not be concerned with this) on the novel is not clear to me. As a result, his readings of the novel in the chapter “Romance and Reification” do not significantly inform mine. 244

In Between: Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

(1999). In her explication of Marlow’s narratological function in Heart of Darkness and

Lord Jim, Ash examines “how imperialism is not just an ideological formation or practice of domination, but also a psychological matrix—indeed a culture built around narcissistic fantasy” (80). As Ash suggests, coloniality is sustained by a “narcissistic fantasy” which privileges one ethnocentric perspective and structures the world—ideologically and materially—from this perspective. While Marlow appears to be more perceptive in Heart of Darkness than Lord Jim, there is a clear difference between Conrad and his narrators, and Conrad’s works emerge as depictions of the errors of colonialist observation and reason.108 Conrad’s employs shifting perspectives to construct his skeptical epistemology that unsettles the claims of ontology and science.

As I have mentioned in connection with the shared name of the protagonists, there is a clear reciprocity (part of the larger coherence of this period of Conrad’s works) between “Narcissus” and Lord Jim, evident in the latter novel’s demonstration of colonial narcissism through Marlow’s narrative. Unlike Heart of Darkness, Marlow inhabits the demonic sea of disorientation in Lord Jim, he circles around Jim (and himself/us) in the closure of coloniality (colonial epistemology) and engages in a futile search. Critical interpretation has followed this track and given relatively less attention to the novel’s dialogic with colonialist culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Jameson, for instance, provides a lengthy discussion of Lord Jim “Romance and Reification” in

108 Particularly in Lord Jim, Marlow, like Stephen Daedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is not admired by the author who created him, rather he is an illustration of the European’s encounter with his own culture’s erroneous view of things. 245

The Political Unconscious) and only briefly discusses the presence of the Muslims—

“merely a narrative device or pretext”—in order to highlight the question of faith in the novel (246-247). He explicitly denies any political specificity, not recognizing the possibility that the novel signals British imperialism in India as its target. Written just after Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim transports Conrad’s critique beyond the Atlantic and targets the fact that Great Britain proclaimed the abolishment of slavery while constructing a new empire of forced labor further east in India, capitalizing on the fact that distance grants further license.109 In this way, Conrad’s sardonic irony survives as critics and readers (myself included)110 follow the narcissistic route of Marlow around

Jim and the self and thereby fail to attend to the novel as a denouncement of British imperialism in India, reproducing the same cultural narcissism at the heart of the novel’s critique.

Close attention to Conrad’s perspectivism may ultimately clarify the perennial doubt over Conrad’s message on imperialism and the apparent contradictions in his representation of colonizers and colonized. Beth Sharon Ash joins a long series of thinkers—she cites “Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Patrick Brantlinger, and Edward

Said—in representing Conrad’s ideological position as ambivalent, both “critique and

109 As late as 1883 one estimate suggested that there were 9 million indentured servants (slaves by contract) in British India (Sherwood 30). Not surprisingly, the first Indian forced laborers were brought to the Americas in 1836 during the 1833-1838 period of abolition in the British West Indies (National Archives Online). 110 With the exception of “Narcissus,” Conrad’s technique leaves the abuses of coloniality at the margins of the narrative, providing little opportunity for a literary (as opposed to extemporaneous historical) analysis of the politics of the subaltern figures in his texts. That said, all of the plot of all of these texts departs from encounters of colonialist exploitation. 246 complicity” (80). Yet while the heteroglossia of his major maritime works does include contrary positions, they are decided critiques of imperialist action and colonialist thinking. Kieron O’hara summarizes in Joesph Conrad Today (2007), that Conrad’s

“work abounds with the trappings of imperial fiction,” yet many of these reflections of colonialist ideology are just that, traps, which a close reading reveals to be the objects of

Conrad’s critique. Heart of Darkness denies the natural (ontological) difference that occidentalist thinking posits in order to justify the legal difference with which western institutions and individuals treat the non-western subject. Conrad’s major works illustrate how colonialist ontologies that are authorized as ‘the natural order of things’ cloud western perceptions of self and other by diminishing the importance of asymmetrical relations of power.

Utilizing the imaginative maritime space, Conrad builds his technique of narrative perspectivism through the transnational interplay of subjects at sea and the epistemological snares of the transcultural encounter. In both novels (though to a lesser degree in Heart of Darkness than in Lord Jim), some fun is had at Marlow’s expense as he fails to think beyond ethnocentric values, resulting in his misinterpretation of the facts.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s crew is bolstered by the addition of a group of African

“cannibals,” who, despite extreme hunger, make no attempt to eat the Europeans and serve with dignity. The crew members have also been cheated of their food and compensation by the colonists. Having been told they were cannibals, Marlow is completely baffled at the “restraint” the hired African sailors show in neither eating nor

247 stealing the food of the Europeans despite scarce rations on the Nellie. Rather than attributing their benevolent actions to strong moral character, Marlow sees another mystery rising out of the darkness: “But there was the fact facing me—the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma” (113). He does not recognize he has misunderstood them by believing the foundational colonialist myth of the dark-skinned cannibals. The fact that the African sailors are ethical or simply inclined to honor their word does not enter Marlow’s head.

Here, Marlow is more fool than sage as he struggles to reconcile his prejudice with reality, almost as if Conrad is parodying Marlow’s (and his own) propensity to speak of the inscrutable and the unknown without considering the simple explanation of cultural bias.

Also central to Melville’s Moby Dick, Conrad’s perspectivist critique of colonialist ideology constitutes a crucial intervention in western thought because it reveals the bias of master morality of the West, which increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century adopted the language of science in order to explain colonialist politics.

In Nietzsche’s theory of class-driven ontology and morality in On the Genealogy of

Morals, moral values are divided by their origin in the master or slave classes, and the rights of power allow the masters to name and thereby exercise dominion over all elements of society. Though Nietzsche neglects to analyze the master morality of his own cultural context in late-1880’s Europe, no better example of this process could be

248 found than the scientific racism of the late nineteenth century.111 As enlightenment funneled into the popularization of biological science in the nineteenth century, colonialist ideology reinscribed ontologies through scientific discourse in support of biopolitics that favor their interests. The new ecological and evolutionary vocabulary was largely employed by western theorists in underwriting extant class differences like colonizer/colonized, master/slave, and rich/poor, allowing the logics of race and geography to explain social inequities that developed historically through the colonialist construction of modernity. The colonial traps of Melville and Conrad dangle positivist- colonialist rhetoric as bait in order to set in relief the real causes that lie in the unjust maritime culture of the West.

Marlow’s hopeful refrain that Jim is “one of us” signals his desire to establish the validity of his group (and therefore individual) identity by reaching conclusive knowledge of a human subject with whom he shares valued categories of self, especially whiteness. This is the same desire that drives secondary character Captain Brierly to suicide. Marlow and Brierly desire a stable category of moral identity: the “sovereign

111 Nietzsche’s master-slave dialectic describes the production of value-laden ontologies, so that definitions/ontologies of the human are constructed in accord with a value system of either the master or slave class. Scientific racism of this period (Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals roughly coincides with the Berlin Conference in 1886) constituted a new articulation of colonialist master morality in the white supremacist hegemony of the West. A Nietzschean genealogy-critique of this positivist anthropology would deny the naturalness of racial and class hierarchies by exposing the bias of the theory—my argument does this by showing the laws of biological positivism to be a transference of perennial natural law theory. While writers like Conrad and Hardy undertake this kind of challenge to positivist social and moral theory, Nietzsche’s text is conspicuously silent as to the contemporary production of master morality and remains in a speculative account of vague and distant time periods. Though he does not say it is strictly superior to slave morality (which is more intelligent), Nietzsche paints the master morality with a kind of healthy naïveté that also seems antithetical to the methodology of skeptical historicizing of power associated with his technique of genealogy.

249 power” of a law of nature that would determine a “fixed standard of conduct” or essential moral character of a human being, or certain types of human beings—of white men like

Jim, Brierly, and (maybe) Marlow.112 Yet, as Jim demonstrates, there is no fixed conduct, no deterministic guarantee that Jim will not jump or leave Jewel.113 On one level, Marlow’s use of the word sovereign denotes the autonomy of the subject, and his inability to decipher this sovereign power calls free will into question and Jim’s guilt along with it. In this case, the novel opens the human subject to the anxious mysteries of free volition while positioning that freedom against autonomy and knowledge of the self, and the judgment of a human subject becomes irreducibly problematic as the agency of the criminal cannot be proven. The irony of the royal lexicon goes further to subvert

112 In part, the critique of racialism running through Conrad and Melville’s fiction developed through manipulation of perspective, and, while never confirmed, the reader is given cause to view Ishmael and Marlow as racially non-white. The narrators of Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick flirt with color as each are linked to mixed race. While the name Ishmael probably allies the narrator of Moby Dick with outsiders generally, the biblical Ishmael is historically associated with color and slavery, and the narrator remains conscious of race throughout the novel. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow is enigmatically figured like the Buddha by the frame narrator at the beginning of the novel, and in this depiction the reader is told that Marlow has “a yellow complexion” (66). Though this image may attest to Marlow’s enlightenment reflecting upon his journey through the Congo or simply indicate the deep tan of a seasoned sailor, it may also be read as a straightforward statement that Marlow is not quite white. With Conrad’s fondness for misconstrued transcultural names—Nostromo, Tuan Jim, Nigger—Charlie Marlow’s name may be an outsider’s attempt to be English, adopting but misspelling the name of the famous English playwright Christopher Marlowe. This being the case, Marlow would, like Conrad (who also changed his last name to look more British), be from the East rather than from Britain and be passing as British. Ultimately the outsider perspective of Ishmael and Marlow permits them to challenge the principles of racial and cultural division that structure the nineteenth century, and as sailors moving constantly through and around multiracial subjects, the maritime mise-en-scène provides them with the best platform for the subversion of racialist social norms. 113 Though not in Sartre’s vocabulary from Being and Nothingness, Lord Jim sounds the problem of existential freedom, the impossibility of a determinable (“fixed” in Marlow’s words) conduct or even autonomy that controls the actions of the subject and. Largely borrowed from Kierkegards’s The Concept of Anxiety, Sartre’s version of freedom is troubling in that it removes autonomy, and it is precisely this anxiety over the free and unstable self that moves Marlow’s quest and drives men of faith like Brierly to mortal despair. One cannot trust or know absolutely; the line from appearance to essence cannot be drawn. Nothingness is freedom, and only this gap lies at the bottom of the unpredictable human subject.

250 natural law or the morality of the divine Sovereign, as well as its conflation with the sovereign laws of nature that govern the physical events of the world

By punning on the relation between political and natural law with “sovereign” and

“enthroned,” Conrad the sliding chain of signification that drives western notions of science and morality as the signifier “law” is employed metaphorically in diverse disciplines and theories often with distinct meaning. Marlow’s abstruse phrase asserts that there is no natural law of the individual act, nor one distinguishing the behavior of the races or any other “organized body of men” (Lord Jim 89). Following the extended metaphor, there are no laws of human nature, no mechanical or biological laws of human behavior. In this way, Lord Jim undermines the encroachment of biological positivism into the humanities.114

Nor is the term “us” fixed in what or whom it signifies, rather, it remains undefined through most of the novel and points to different signifieds in different utterances. Brierly, for instance, seems to mean seamen at one moment and white men at the next. Marlow, however, never directly articulates—perhaps because he cannot or is afraid to define a category that he may not belong to—what “us” means, though he does highlight Jim’s whiteness (even draped in “immaculate white”) at several points in the novel (11). Wrapped in Conrad’s shifts of narrative perspective and buried deep in the lengthy text, a letter written by Marlow to an unnamed listener of his yarn offers the

114 The novel inserts itself into the debate over free-will by using one position to undermine the first. Generally, arguments that deny free-will assert are founded on a deterministic law of causality that conditions all existence, or, less-commonly, that no law of autonomy unites the subject with its actions and thoughts. 251 reader a definition of “them” as put in the listener’s words according to Marlow. “You said,” Marlow’s letter reads, that ‘giving your life up to them’ (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow or black in colour) ‘was like selling your soul to a brute’” (270). It is impossible to determine whether the parenthetical definition is in

Marlow’s words or in those of his reader, so whether or not it is Marlow or his unnamed racist reader that identifies “us” with white men remains a mystery. The uncertainty over

Marlow’s equation of “us” with whiteness reflects the constructed (i.e. unreal) nature of race and the ontological indefiniteness of categorical amalgamations like race or other

“organized bodies of men.”

As in Heart of Darkness, the economy of colonial “work” in Lord Jim must be justified with colonialist ideology that asserts the hegemonic value of our culture over theirs. The debate between Marlow and this unnamed frame narrator centers around the existence of a natural order (an ontology) that determines race and philosophy together, a fixed cultural chain of being that the positivist anthropology of the West might prove in validation of its own superiority. “You contended,” Marlow’s letter continues, “that ‘that kind of thing’ was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress” (271). ‘Racial ideas,’ this is the positivist fallacy that Conrad’s writing undermines: the notion that human thought is biologically determined and that morality is a product of stages of evolutionary progress and degeneration. The absurd belief that ideas belong to races—which Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire (2008) argues

252 spurred the development of British liberalist theory—exhibits the destructive interplay of ontology and exploitation that continues to fuel coloniality around the world.

As concepts of natural law merged with the laws of nature that became increasingly linked to evolutionary biology (rather than divine law), writers of the natural sciences expanded their interpretive powers to human morality, which became a central question dividing fin-de-siècle fiction from forms of Naturalism to aestheticism. As

Allen Hunter’s Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (1983)115 catalogues,

Conrad’s fiction is consistently preoccupied with interrogating positivist/scientist moral theory that ties human behavior (ethics) to ‘natural’ causes like race and geography. Like most writing in the period of biological scientism and literary Naturalism, “Narcissus,”

Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and “Typhoon” all incorporate ecological116 structures of humanity by exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world. With the fusion of ideas of natural law and laws of nature during the flourishing of evolutionary biology in the late-nineteenth century, Evolution displaced theology and became a

115 Another good summary of this influence can be found in Ludwig Schnauder’s Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major novels (2009) 116 While not in use during the period, the term ecology best represents the theory of biological Positivism, which studies human life through the relationship between human biology and the physical environment. I use the term Positivism to describe the appropriation of biological theory into other areas of study, particularly those of human culture and sociology. Unless explicitly making a distinction, I will use the terms biological Positivism, Positivism, Scientism, Darwinisticism, Ecology, and positivist Anthropology interchangeably to signify this first period of evolutionary biology. Rather than Auguste Comte, the most significant proponent of the Positivism explored here is Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who argued that the Law of Evolution, the principle law of nature, could explain all of human life, including and especially questions of culture, sociology, and psychology—a total knowledge which Spencer called his “Synthetic Philosophy.” Spencer is probably most responsible for the popularization of “Social Darwinism” which continues to haunt the western enlightenment tradition to this day. A final dubious distinction: Spencer coined the Darwinistic (i.e. inaccurate with respect to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the Origin) phrase “survival of the fittest,” which has done much to distort Darwin’s legacy. 253 metaphysics and source of morality. Most notably in the two Marlow novels published in

1899 and 1900, Hunter’s argument clearly illustrates the ways in which Conrad’s writing constitutes a dialogue with much of the scientific writing of the second half of the nineteenth century.

The many variants of the theory of degeneration were mirrored in the prevalence of the theme in the literature of the period, both in straightforward naturalist plots of decadence and fictions that challenged the beliefs of contemporary science. Western intellectuals were particularly interested in the potential results of displacing the races—a mask of the anxiety over having erected a mass Atlantic displacement of peoples. In

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles (1891), the family line of descent does not determine character or behavior, and Hardy’s novel subverts the ability of genetics to calculate human qualities and behavior and opens the space for psychological and cultural analyses. On the other hand, Angel does become dangerously ill during his emigration to Brazil, reproducing a typical trope of geographical determinism in the relationship of race and environment. Similar to Hardy’s novel, Graça Aranha’s novel

Canaan (1902) depicts the immigration of two German farmers and explores how they adapt racially and ecologically in Brazil. The trope of the degeneration of the white man in the tropics is acutely representative of western literature and the larger cultural construct of the West, an auto-imaginary spreading on both sides of the Atlantic through the flow of ideas. Fiction offered an alternative mode of thought from the closed

254 experiments of Naturalism and Positivism, allowing late-nineteenth-century writers to question and complicate scientific theory.

Conrad’s fiction illustrates how the constitution and value of nature was a fundamental philosophical question supporting coloniality and the ideological construction of the West, particularly in the focus on the relationship between race and geography. Heart of Darkness is an ironic look at western decadence and a novel which challenges widespread ideas of degeneration in evolutionary anthropology and literary

Naturalism. These ideas drive many characters in Conrad’s stories but often serve as masks for more immediate considerations of economic exploitation and imperial politics.

In “Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy” (2009), Allen Macduffie highlights

Conrad’s bonding of contemporary ideas about nature—specifically thermodynamics— with his depiction of coloniality. Macduffie notes that Conrad’s major works overlay scientific principles like evolution and energy onto a geopolitical “system of dependency extending far beyond the bounds of London and other western capitals” and “[plot] the coordinates of an exploitative, directional, global economy imagined in the thermodynamic vocabulary of energy flow, efficiency, and waste” (76). While Conrad strove to understand and depict the world in novel scientific ways, his fiction also illustrates how the application of scientific rhetoric in imperial politics often directly served colonialist profits. In this way, Conrad both explores the possibility of understanding human life in scientific terms and suggests that late-nineteenth-century science develops in (at least in part) support of colonialist economics. Conrad’s interest

255 in natural science is genuine, but his works trace the limits of positivist science and the dangerous authority these theories provide to colonialist exploitation.

In its ironic turn on the plot of tropical decadence, Heart of Darkness mimics and subverts the naturalist tale of degeneration, continuing the “Trojan-horse” technique began in “Narcissus.” Marlow’s journey into the African rainforest engages the idea of degeneration117 as central to the rhetorical maintenance of coloniality, and in Heart of

Darkness exposes the geocultural mask protecting organized piracy. As to the degeneration of white and black men in Africa, Heart of Darkness offers “the horror” of

New Imperialism as an alternative theory to racial and geographical determinism through, a critique that emerges through Marlow’s ironic explanations of the Europeans and

Africans he encounters along the way. In route to the Congo, a Swedish captain explains away a suicide with the climate, telling Marlow,

“The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a

Swede, too. “Hanged himself! Why, in God’s name?” [Marlow] cried. He kept

on looking out watchfully. “Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the

country perhaps.” (79)

The last we hear from this particular (type of) European, Conrad lets the joke fall at end of the episode, allowing the silent force of the novel’s brutality to ridicule the ecological

117 Works like Bénédict Morel’s Traité des Dégénéresences (1857), Cesare Lombroso’s The Born Criminal [L’uomo delinquent] (1876) popularized an evolutionary theory of the varieties of homo sacer, and later texts like Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) crystallized the ideas of degeneration and the West’s cultural decadence. This includes the notion (as in Spengler) that the entire West itself was decadent, an idea which contributed to a great deal of modernist art.

256 answer. As its title conspicuously declares, Heart of Darkness rehearses the literary tale of decadence by sending the white man into the jungle, but, once submerged in Marlow’s projection of the Congo, the reader sees that greed, incompetence, and cruelty are driving the degeneration of all involved, not climate and blood. Ultimately, Marlow’s sardonic narrative voice buries the degeneration plot.

The central form of misinterpretation in Lord Jim is physiognomy—the metonymic methodology that attempts to determine essence from appearance or to read the soul on the body, which colonialist thinking maps against the colonial difference.118

The novel demonstrates that the ethical cannot be explained by the physiological; the depths cannot be read on the surface. Marlow is obsessed with the incongruence between the appearance and essence of human beings and wishes to link Jim’s skin color and the other characteristics that make him “one of us” to his actions. Marlow’s study of Jim represents the impossibility of a scientific, causal theory that explains human behavior, a limitation which Marlow slowly realizes is compounded by language:

it was I, too, who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now

was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for fear of losing a

slippery hold. It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that

we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share

with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were

a hard and absolute condition of existence the envelope of flesh and blood on

118 Physiognomy is also parodied in Heart of Darkness in the figure of the Belgian doctor who measures Marlow’s skull before his journey to the Congo. Marlow inquires as to why the doctor measures all employed by the Company, but the doctor does not inform him what his “little theory” is meant to prove. 257

which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains

only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no

hand can grasp. (149)

Here Marlow introduces the problem of the “slippery” nature of language into the epistemological critique of science, a critique that Conrad embodies in Marlow’s fruitless search for the truth. Marlow’s failed quest denies the validity of physiognomic thinking, the foremost example of which is racialist theory. It is not a coincidence that the central, eponymous characters from Lord Jim and The Nigger of the Narcissus share the same name: Jim, and James “Jimmy” Wait—both of whom are inaccurately understood because of their race. The problematic of these two books is the same: Marlow and the crew of the Narcissus seek to discover the truth at the bottom of Jim and Jimmy, and the novels dramatize the pitfalls and ultimate inconclusiveness of that search.

Conrad echoes Nietzsche’s skepticism of the sign and physiological discourse in

“On Truth and Lying in the Non-moral Sense” by highlighting the steps of distortion between being and knowledge. Though he is thought to have paid only a little, lukewarm attention to Nietzsche by reading a couple late works,119 Conrad’s epistemological skepticism and construction of nature as dark truth closely parallel Nietzsche’s early thought in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and “On Truth and Lying” (1873). The latter directly challenges the positivist faith in the ability of science to explain human life, and, like Lord Jim, Nietzsche’s imagery and terminology ridicules the study of humans “laid

119 For this account see Edward Said (who wrote his first book on Conrad), “Conrad and Nietzsche” (1976). 258 out as if in a glass case,” in the laboratory of fiction and philosophy. Unlike naturalist writers who employ nature to illustrate predicted hypotheses, Nietzsche’s essay on truth rejects the capacity of human knowledge to penetrate nature, asking,

What does man actually know of himself? Could he ever be capable, even just

once, of perceiving himself entire, laid out as if in a glass case? Does nature not

conceal virtually everything from him, even his body, banishing and locking him

up in a proud, spurious consciousness, far removed from the convolutions of the

bowels, the rapid flow of the blood-stream, the intricate vibrations of nerve

fibers? Nature has thrown away the key. (21)

Typical of Nietzsche, there is a tension in his challenge to natural philosophy and his use of physiology in this passage and throughout much of his late philosophy.120 Like

Nietzsche’s ironic adoption of the rhetoric of the natural sciences that continues throughout “On Truth and Lying,” Marlow tells his friend Stein that Jim is his

“specimen” over the backdrop of Stein’s taxonomy of butterflies. Ultimately, Marlow must concede that he cannot fully know Jim and that there is no natural law of ethics that anchors us to the world.

For both Nietzsche and Conrad the dialectic contrary to the truth of nature is the lie of civilization or culture, the Apollonian “pleasurable appearance” that masks reality and allows humans to silence and transcend “the horror.” The dionysian realm of the

“horrific wisdom” is found in the sublime mystery of the forest and the sea—the spaces

120 Ecce Homo (1888) offers a particularly rich example of Nietzsche in his physiological mode. 259 away from civilization (i.e. the natural space), most-thoroughly expressed in Heart of

Darkness but also echoing throughout Lord Jim’s examination of the idea of human nature. Nietzsche muses that Apollonian culture “must always triumph over…a horrific depth of contemplation of the world…by resorting to powerful misleading delusions and pleasurable illusions” (BT 29). For Nietzsche, civilization and art mask the terrible truth of nature, and in the same way colonial rhetoric hides the horrifying reality of colonization in Heart of Darkness. As he approaches the intended, Marlow imagines the voracious chasm of Kurtz: “he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence” (152). Kurtz lies at the heart of darkness because in his duality he embodies first the apollonian lie of civility and eventually the dionysian truth of cruelty.

While retaining the identification of nature with the truth found in both post-

Darwinian scientism, Naturalism, and natural law theory, the conception of nature in the early works of Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy and “On Truth and Lying in the Non- moral Sense”) and Conrad (“Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and “Typhoon”) reverses the claim to definition and order made in most nineteenth-century theories of nature. While the Naturalists incorporate nature into their theory in terms of subjugation and clarity, the dionysian picture found in Conrad and Nietzsche constructs nature as uncontrollable mystery. In Conrad’s fiction, nature—embodied in the sea and the jungle—is the seat of the Kantian noumena, or the unknowable true reality that resists

260 scientific laws and the totalizing explanations of biological positivism. Writing during the heart of Naturalism’s popularity, Nietzsche and Conrad both find ways to utilize and parody natural science and, contrary to optimism of western enlightenment, assert the unknowability of “nature.”

Natural Law Meets Natural Science Part II: Bom-Crioulo’s Dissemination of Nature

Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo (The Good Negro, 1895) ramifies the signifier

‘nature’ and reveals its variants and contradictions in western natural and legal philosophy. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the applications of natural law theory differed dramatically and extended to many political questions. While the concept of ‘crimes against nature’ had assisted humanitarian abolitionists in arguing for justice through the change in positive law, it also opened the door for the oppressive marriage of biological positivism and criminal or hygienic imprisonment via the dangerous proliferation of ‘legal-medicine.’ While purported to be an eternal natural law, the contents of the category ‘crimes against nature’ must ineluctably derive from human definition, and, as such, is susceptible to cooption in the service of human prejudice and open to varying interpretations. The moral authority of the theory of natural law may be

(and was) employed to discriminate against those deemed to be in conflict with the natural order of things, a class which evolves with new ideologies and values. Thus, as other ideas in the grip of sundry powers, natural law liberated and confined human beings in the late-nineteenth century West. Throughout the novel, Bom-Crioulo questions

261 notions of freedom and confinement and performs the biological trial of the criminal, whose seemingly perverse black body predetermines him to murder his lover in the end.

However, a closer reading of the novel reveals the polyvalency and complexity of the concept ‘nature’ in scientific debates of the period, and, in its indeterminacy, enlivens the debate over biopolitics and morality that seethed in Brazil and around the West.

Increasingly in the nineteenth century, the moral values surrounding race and sex became questions of national health and biopolitics as national ideologies developed in the context of both biological positivism and the political nationalism of the period. The new moralism of sexuality went hand-in-hand with the racialist nationalism of fin-de- siècle imperialism: the metaphoric idea of the physical growth of the nation pervaded social and political theory so that sexuality and race were connected and viewed in terms of a national biology that dictated cultural development and social morality. In the context of Brazilian nationalism, morality conforming to nature signified accord with the dictates of biological positivism whose ideal limited itself to procreation of white bodies.

Hardt and Negri praise Foucault’s theory of social discipline for emphasizing that subjectivity is structured at the level of corporality through the direct relation of politics to the body. In order to articulate Foucault’s contribution, Hardt and Negri cite the following passage from “La naissance de la médicine sociale”: “The control of society over individuals is not conducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal” (27). Amaro’s body is in many ways the central

262 object of observation in Bom-Crioulo and his corporal state becomes the locus for examining major themes in the novel such as disciplinary control, freedom, degeneration, sex, and labor. Bom-Crioulo primarily explores the manipulation of the body—including the bodies of Aleixo and Carolina as well—in social relations that are both institutional

(slavery, the navy) and interpersonal (sex, love, business).

With depictions of sexual deviance, alcoholism, the sanitarium, crime, and disease, Bom-Crioulo encapsulates the fin-de-siècle literary and journalistic discourse that engaged in a social debate on the medicalization of sex as a sociological measure of criminality and the body politic. In a fascinating historicist contextualization, “Race and

Transgressive Sexuality in Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo” (2001), Robert Howes cites a famous Portuguese murder trial which focused on the complex intervention of medical theories of sexuality, degeneracy, and insanity in the judicial process and the wider social conception of moral and legal responsibility. Beyond the specifics of the 1888 Marinho da Cruz trial, Howes offers a thorough account of the constellation of theories of degeneration: listing, in addition to Cesare Lombroso, European scientists such as

Nordau and Morel, that were widely influential in social ideologies in fin-de-siècle

Europe and Latin America. Additionally, Cesar Braga-Pinto’s more recent article,

“Othello’s Pathologies: Reading Adolfo Caminha with Lombroso” (2014), presents the novel as an expression of Cesare Lombroso’s idea of the “born delinquent.” Lombroso is famous as the father of criminal anthropology which sought physiognomic connections between the capacity for crime and physical traits, and Braga-Pinto highlights

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Lombroso’s concepts of atavism and degeneration as an inspiration for Caminha’s construction of Amaro. In accordance with these ideas, Bom-Crioulo has typically been identified as a naturalist text that presents a literary-scientific case study of a degenerate subject bound by his blackness and queer sexuality.

Yet as Sânzio de Azevedo and David Foster recount, there were strong critical and public objections to the novel’s obscenity dating from the book’s publication until as late as the 1969 recommending that readers avoid the novel because of its obscenity

(124;14). As cited in Azevedo’s Adolfo Caminha: vida e obra (1999), Caminha defended the book’s validity against the accusations of perversion by contemporary Brazilian critics José Verissimo and Valentim Magalhães by declaring Bom-Crioulo to be a forthright study of homosexuality written in accordance with positivist scientific theory.

Though I will demonstrate how the novel breaks from naturalist determinism, Caminha’s language certainly positions the novel as an intentionally naturalist work written with the ethos of positivist science and the biopolitics of legal medicine. Caminha’s defense of the novel denies its obscenity (recall the novel is published the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial) on the grounds that it is a straightforward naturalist exposition of anthropological and psychological analyses of deviant types: “Nothing more than a case of sexual inversion, studied in Krafft-Ebing, in Moll, Tardieu, and in books of legal-medicine

[Nada mais que um caso de inversão sexual estudado em Krafft-Ebing, em Moll, em

Tardieu, e nos livros de medicina legal]” (Azevedo 123). All three European scientists

264 mentioned had written of homosexuality as a kind of pathological sexual “inversion” linked to degenerate and potentially criminal types.

In this same defense of the novel—“A Condemned Book”—that Caminha wrote in response to “the sentence to which public outcry condemned my book [a sentença que condenou à execração pública o meu romance],” the author goes on to use the same language of criminal judgment to characterize his novel’s treatment of homosexuality.

He attempts to legitimize his role as literary author—scientifically—by asserting that in the novel “homosexuality is studied and condemned [se estuda e condena o homossexualismo],” and therefore the book should not offend the propriety of its readers

(Azevedo 124). As a true devotee of progress, Caminha justifies his fiction through a claim that as science it cannot be immoral, which is the naturalist inverse of Wilde’s aestheticist statement in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

That is all.” (xxiv). The fact that literary merit becomes entwined with criminal judgment during the 1890’s in both England and Brazil demonstrates the pervasive reach of positivist thought that pulled literature into dialectic engagement with the new theoretical intersections of nature and criminality. Since its publication, Bom-Crioulo has been locked in a series of different condemnations that ultimately have prevented deeper, symptomatic readings of the nuanced challenges to sexual normativity embedded in the novel.

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Nevertheless, Caminha’s own condemnation misrepresents the complex treatment of race and sexuality that, perhaps in spite of his intentions, emerges in a close reading of the text. While Braga-Pinto explicitly accepts Caminha’s detached claim, Howes rightly warns against taking Caminha at his word that the novel simply reflects the legal medicine of the day. In accord with Braga-Pinto’s explication of the positivist influence on the novel, traditional scholarly views on race in Brazilian Naturalism such as David

Haberly’s 1972 article on racist abolitionist stereotypes (“Anti-Slavery and Anti-Slave”) and David Brookshaw’s Race and Color in Brazilian Literature (1986) comprehend

Amaro as a victim whose biology and former status as a slave determine his fate as an executioner, a prominent trope inherited from Brazilian abolitionist literature. Citing the specific connection to Lombroso, Braga-Pinto asserts that “Caminha’s comments can indeed illuminate the novel” as an example of Naturalism (149). Yet while Caminha’s commentary—he even uses the phrase “born degenerate [degenerado nato]”—seems to indicate his intentions rather clearly and support a firmly naturalist reading of Bom-

Crioulo, Howes offers a crucial cautionary note as to its authority:

[This statement] has frequently been quoted to explain Caminha’s motives in

writing Bom-Crioulo but it needs to be treated with some caution. It was not a

dispassionate account of his writing methods but an attempt to repair the damage

inflicted by hostile comment from two of the major critics of the period. (45)

As Howes asserts, Caminha’s interpretation of his own work constituted a defensive response against deeply negative critical commentary, contextualized by the polemical

266 issue of homosexuality in the 1890’s. Rather than elucidating the novel’s complexity,

Caminha’s statement similarly reinforces the superficial identification of the novel with scientific work and elides the indeterminacy that makes it a great work of literature.

According to Caminha’s statements, his project of medical judgment developed under the influence of contemporary scientific writing on biopolitics, specifically mentioning Kraft-Ebing, Moll, and Tardieu. German psychiatrist Richard von Kraft-

Ebing’s Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study (1886) propagated theories of

(what he deemed) sexual deviances such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, bisexuality—anything not leading to procreation—and advocated the legislation of sexual normativity. His chapter “Pathological Sexuality in its Legal Aspects” in the 1894 edition begins with an embarrassing plea for legal medicine:

The laws of all civilized nations punish those who commit perverse sexual acts.

Inasmuch as the preservation of chastity and morals is one of the most important

reasons for the existence of the commonwealth, the state cannot be too careful, as

a protector of morality, in the struggle against sensuality. (378)

Caminha’s gross characterizations of Amaro reflect the pathological typology of Kraft-

Ebing, who declares the delinquent to be: “as dangerous to society as a murderer or a wild beast” and warns that “in no domain of criminal law is co-operation of judge and medical expert so much to be desired as in that of sexual delinquencies” (379).

Embodying the synthesis of legal medicine, Kraft-Ebing goes on to stress that judges must examine the “perpetrator” and “not only the crime.” This change in the analysis of

267 criminality towards explication of essentialist types constitutes an essential import of

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Rather than the single judgment of the crime, the judicial analysis (whether in courts, the hospital, public commentary, or the novel) began to incorporate various scientific and moral hermeneutics, or, as Thomas L. Dumm concisely explains in Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (2002), “Judges find that they are judging much more than crimes” (82).

With the transfer of judgment from the crime to the criminal, there developed in social theory an ontology of the criminal, or as Foucault phrases the new object of study,

“the delinquent.” As Dumm points out, the investigatory attention now focuses on the subject, not because of his “having committed a crime, but because of being what he is”

(109 my emphasis). The criminal is now a text to be read, “a biographical unity” that represents a certain undesirable ontological type (Discipline and Punish 254). A parody of this kind of ontological criminal anthropology, Lord Jim is the story of Marlow’s vein attempts to construct Jim’s biographical unity. The study of the criminal (or degenerate) as object provides a perfect paradigm for the genre of Naturalism, which consciously focused on vice and its causes and generally cast characters as biological types.

Not only does the task of the judge expand, but, more importantly, judgment expanded and diffused to general theories of morality, sociology, and politics. As a result, judgment of criminality becomes the prerogative of the social body as a whole, entering into the national imaginary and discourse as a primary concern of the modern society. Writers and readers—even the field of fiction—engage themselves in the

268 judgment of criminality, that is to say, not individual crimes, but the criminal as a type of being within society that may be detected or represented according to other signs of association. Thus, in Bom-Crioulo, the narrator announces a “crime against nature,” involving narrator, characters, and readers in a project of judgment, not of the homosexual act, which is absent in the narrative, but of the eponymous ‘criminal.’ The emphasis on the criminal rather than the crime may be glimpsed through the near- silencing or marginalization of the homosexual acts of the white officers that share

Amaro’s naval space yet remain on the periphery of the novel’s project of judgment. The homosexual acts of non-degenerates (i.e. white and upper class) are not judged in the novel, only quietly alluded to in passing. As empowered white subjects, the naval officers would not be (physiognomically) read as delinquents, so their judgment is deferred in the novel and relegated to subtle but very significant hints from the narrator.

As was typical in Conrad’s technique, these dark spaces in Caminha’s novel tell an entire story of their own that subverts the superficial, racialist reading of the novel.

As the task of judgment falls on the ontology of the criminal derived from the sexual act of deviance, Amaro’s real crime of murder receives little attention in the novel or from its commentators. Amaro’s final crime of murdering his lover Aleixo spans only a few lines and only matters insofar as it confirms the degenerate’s type—it is the final piece of evidence but needs to be neither shown nor commented on. A classically naturalist feature of the novel, the crime is a given result of the empirical conditions that compose the criminal, and our judgment should already be made with regard to Bom-

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Crioulo’s nature. In other words, in the typecast novel of Naturalism, Amaro’s final crime would be an inevitable result of his nature. Bom-Crioulo is as reticent as possible with regards to the murder, and, critics have been less concerned with the judgment of whether Amaro is a born murderer than whether he is a born homosexual. Published in the same year as Oscar Wilde’s trial, Caminha’s novel focuses on deviant sexuality and how it is interpreted, punished, and produced by military discipline and civil confinement. That sexual orientation eclipses murder in the public interest suggests a deep and mysterious question over the place of sex in culture that would preoccupy psychologists and anthropologists from this period onward. Desire, like color, was the ultimate sin against society because they offended the fundamental identities that hierarchically structure the social body.

Although it forms part of a larger field of transgressive sexual events, the story’s first homosexual act and its condemnation by the narrator provide the basis for the most prominent deconstruction of ‘nature’ in the novel. In the opening chapters of Bom-

Crioulo, we learn of Amaro’s “escape” from slavery via impressment into the navy, his reputation for strength and subservience, and his sexual awakening inspired by the fair, young Aleixo. The third chapter concludes with the first sexual encounter between

Amaro and Aleixo, consummated in total darkness. Unlike Aleixo’s later sexual encounter with Carolina which is described in zoopomorphic detail, the sex between

Amaro and Aleixo occurs in the absent space between the third and fourth chapters; it is not narrated. Aleixo whispers his consent to Amaro and the narrator concludes the

270 chapter with this brief statement: “and the crime against nature was consummated (E consumou-se o delito contra a natureza)” (74).

Yet following this iteration, the concept of ‘the natural’ recurs with a different and antagonistic meaning, building an aporia of natural morality that continues to be developed throughout the rest of the novel. While the narrator’s reference to criminality implicitly defines nature as consisting of moral law, in the opening pages of the following chapter Amaro’s voice offers a distinct and incongruous signification of the term nature.

Shortly after the narrator’s annunciation of a “crime against nature,” Amaro analyzes his impulses and is able to justify them as part of his nature:

Nothing could be done, except to be patient, once ‘nature’ imposed upon him

these punishments…not everyone had the strength to resist, nature is more

powerful than human will (Não havia jeito, senão ter paciência, uma vez que a

‘natureza’ impunha-lhe êsse castigos… nem todos têm fôrça para resistir: a

natureza pode mais que a vontade humana). (79)

Amaro conceptualizes his sexual desire as natural in the sense that it is part of his biological impulse as a creature of the Earth. An aporia of the ‘natural’ arises as the utterances of narrator and Amaro reveal the dialogic conflict in the concept of nature: in

Bom-Crioulo nature commits crimes against nature. The novel’s dissemination of the

‘natural’ reveals the inconsistency of this term and interrogates its employment as a rhetorical tool of western morality. More broadly, this contradiction of the natural law of sex opens the novel to critique the positivist reach into the ethical and therefore illustrate

271 the need for more complex theories of culture that take into account a plurality of material and ideal factors.

If Caminha sought to craft a novel based in scientific novelty, his narrator’s judgment echoes traditional orthodox views of sexuality. According to German scholar

Harry Oosterhuis’s historical analysis in Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing,

Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity, historians of science agree that many late- nineteenth-century theories of sex, such as that proposed by Richard von Kraft-Ebing— the first scientific authority cited by Caminha in defense of his literary treatment of homosexuality—speciously gave scientific authority to preexisting cultural notions of normative sexuality that were primary influenced by religious dogma (8). This generation of scientists of sexuality legitimized the social control of sexual morality through an appeal to progress without overthrowing the dictates of tradition. In a kind of prelude to his study, Oosterhuis briefly outlines the Christian theological theory of sexuality that became the hegemonic view in the West, and shows that the writings of

Augustine (354-430) and most notably Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) established conventional beliefs about sexuality that would not be challenged until the twentieth century. A symptomatic reading of Bom-Crioulo reveals the beginnings of the destruction of these ancient values as evolving theories of nature reveal latent contradictions in the conventional theories supporting heteronormative values.

Oosterhuis explains how Aquinas defined sexuality in terms of both vice and natural economy so that any sexual act which could produce offspring would be in line

272 with nature, though only moral if performed within the context of marriage. Thus, a four part schema was created, the worst of which was the category of “vice contrary to nature,” which “included masturbation, same-sex intercourse, bestiality, and sexual intercourse between man and woman whereby conception was actively prevented” (22).

In this formulation, ‘nature’ signified procreation such that any act not potentially leading to procreation would be termed contrary to or against nature. Albeit simplistically, positivist applications of evolutionary biology could logically embrace this view since procreation is the single determinant factor in evolution. The narrator’s famous condemnation of Amaro—“and the crime against nature was consummated”—is actually a rephrasing of Aquinas’s medieval doctrine which persisted in Western ideology through the Naturalism and biological positivism of the fin-de-siècle. Nonetheless, rather than a univocal echo of the traditional theological theory of sexuality, the novel introduces a plurality of sexuality that upsets the organization of the conventional category of “vice contrary to nature.”

While Nature remained a symbol of justice and divinity in natural law theory, the western ideology of civility was constructed around the apotheosis of white civilization in opposition to colored nature, which identifies people of color as being more primitive and therefore closer to nature than the white man. Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Captain

Delano from Benito Cereno both conceive of the Africans as being more “natural” and uncivilized than white men, even when the narrators are attempting to compliment people of color. While literary Romanticism and modernist theories of European decadence

273 were often rooted in the identification of the uncivilized with the natural, natural law theory still figured nature as the ultimate moral authority of civilization. As nineteenth- century evolutionary theories attempted to distance whiteness from nature, western thought remained permeated by beliefs in the divine morality of nature. As a result, the concept of the natural constituted another point of duplicity of western ideology in which two contradictory positions emerged: N/nature was invoked to describe the divinely superior and the bestially inferior to white culture, God and the savages.

The ideological construction of sexuality, and in particular its moral value, is not only presented through Amaro’s homosexual acts, but rather is continuously and systematically explored through the successive and varied episodes of supposed sexual deviance in the novel. The first captive to be whipped in a show of naval discipline, the ironically named Herculano stands accused of masturbation when the novel opens. And from this first episode, the novel begins its interrogation of libidinal criminality and the system of signs that sustain contemporary notions of legality and morality. Furthermore, the need to define and distinguish between natural law and human law is already present in the narrator’s rhetoric of criminality that will be retained throughout the novel:

Herculano had just committed a real crime not listed in naval law, a crime against

nature, spilling uselessly, on the dry and sterile deck, the generative seed of man

[Herculano acabava de cometer um verdadeiro crime não previsto nos códigos,

um crime de lesa-natureza, derramando inútilmente, no convés sêco e estéril, a

seiva geradora do homem]. (30)

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In this example, the narrator’s commentary marks masturbation as another “natural crime,” rationalized as a transgression against the utilitarian necessities of biology and the growth of the nation. Since masturbation could not enlarge the body politic,

Herculano’s act is condemned as a crime against nature. And while the prohibition of masturbation coincides with the legal medicine of positivist psychiatry, this vision of

‘spilling speed’ repeats the story of Onan in Genesis around which coalesced the western censure of masturbation. Yet, as the narrator mentions, Herculano has not committed a crime according to the letter of the law, and, perhaps more easily than with the homosexual act, the reader may doubt if he has truly violated natural law.

Through incremental examples of deviation from monogamous procreation,

Caminha’s novel explores the limits of the ideology of sexual morality in western society that is sustained by a complex mixture of religious, scientific, and nationalistic thought.

The coherence of a natural law of sexuality becomes further strained in chapter four when

Amaro experiences a nocturnal emission, an event in which Amaro lacks agency and responsibility but whose body is nonetheless guilty of “vice contrary to nature.” Though no one notices but himself, it is a moment of “disgrace” for Amaro, and he “curses nature,” upon which he places the responsibility of the sexual event (82). This instance is particularly significant because the sexual act was involuntary, something that Amaro

“had suffered unconsciously in his sleep [sofrera inconscientemente durante o sono]”

(82). This episode raises the question of responsibility upon which moral culpability depends; the subject’s agency is removed or at least put into question by virtue of

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Amaro’s being asleep, so the concept of sexual transgression (non-procreative sexual activity) no longer seems co-extensive with a violation of moral law. The inclusion of different shades of agency reinforces the aporia surrounding the possibility of free-will and moral responsibility found in the book’s presentation of morality and legal order.

The sum result of the these differential misdemeanor’s, coupled with Amaro’s sympathetic interior monologue of self-alienation, undermines the culpability implicit in notions of immoral or illicit sexuality. Since the nocturnal emission divorces sexual transgression from any conscious volition, there remains no other culprit aside from raw

‘nature’ and biological functioning—again pointing to nature’s direct role in causing these sexual acts that are deemed “crimes against nature.”

In addition to the novel’s dissemination of ‘nature,’ the prevalence of deviant sexuality across the confluence of races, genders, and sexual orientations in Bom-Crioulo invalidates any association of sexual deviance with any particular type so that any thesis of biological determinism cannot fit the novel. Though the conventions of Naturalism suggest a causal relation between Amaro’s blackness and his queer sexuality, the text of

Bom-Crioulo subtly undermines such racialist biological determinism through the mention of homosexual acts committed by elite white subjects. The novel is not, as is commonly suggested, a typical Naturalist rendering of the perverse biological/racial nature of the black subject. Braga-Pinto’s article affirms Caminha’s claim that Amaro is a degenerate subject of positivist sexual pathology and portrays the novel as an expression of Lombroso’s born criminal. Yet Amaro’s deviant nature cannot be

276 explained through his ontological difference of blackness since the novel contains multiple allusions to white officers engaging in homosexuality on board navy ships.

These references, made by Amaro as well as the narrator, occur somewhat inconspicuously, as if on the margins of the work, and indubitably intimate that both white men of rank and ordinary sailors are sexually involved with other men in the

Brazilian navy. The most visible example occurs with the opening words of chapter eight:

The commander of the battleship, beautiful exemplar of a noble military officer,

irreproachable and capricious, was the same, the very same of whom, in the

coarse phrase of Good-Negro, ‘things were said’ [O Comandante do couraçado,

bela estampa de military fidalgo, irrepreensível e caprichoso, era o mesmo,

aquele mesmo de quem, naa frase tôsca de Bom-Crioulo, ‘falavam-se coisas’].

(140)

Precisely the narrative elements prized by the reader-response theory of Jameson and

Iser, these liminal allusions form part the symptomatic reading of the text that, by bringing to the fore those “unwritten” pieces of the text, directly challenge the hegemonic ideology of the work’s time that is voiced by the narrator. Caminha’s use of offensive language and the implicit authority of the narrator’s voice in Bom-Crioulo seduces the reader to the hegemonic discourse of the day, which the novel then proceeds to undermine.

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While Howes give a comprehensive account of the importance of the historical context of continental positivist theories of degeneration and sexual deviance to the novel, he also refers to Caminha’s nuanced skepticism towards the absolute capacity of ideas of biological determinism to explain human behavior (52). Citing Caminha’s review of this scientific theory in his major collection of criticism, Cartas Literárias

(1894), Howes suggests that neither Caminha nor his novel may be understood as fully endorsing a conclusive degenerative power over the subject that stems from biology or environment. He provides evidence for this claim in the character Herculano, a Brazilian of mixed-race who, although whipped for masturbation in the opening scene, appears later in the novel in full health. Although his allusion to Herculano (a character whom I will return to shortly) constitutes a clever close reading, Howes does not return to the implications of the Herculano sub-plot in his analysis of the ”transgressive sexuality” of the novel. Still, his recognition of the health of Herculano effectively points to the novel’s avoidance of any clear causalities of biological degeneration.

Further complicating the conventional naturalist reading of degeneracy, the narrator explicitly (if ambiguously) describes Amaro as not being physically degenerate in the initial description of the protagonist. The novel opens on a scene of maritime punishment that closely recalls slavery, in which sailors of color are whipped as punishment for their “crimes” against naval code. The third of three shackled sailors to be flogged on deck, Amaro emerges into the novel as

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a colossal kaffir figure, challenging, with a formidable musculature, the morbid

pathology of an entire decadent and weak generation [figura colossal de cafre,

desafiando, com um formidável sistema de músculos, a morbidez patológica de

tôda uma a geração decadente e enervada]. (33)

Amaro begins the narrative as the anti-decadent figure. On the other hand, the description does feel reminiscent of familiar bestial stereotypes of the black body, and the figure of the dangerous or angry black men haunts Amaro through the entire narrative until he brutally murders his former lover in the street. The specific physicality of the description also points to the dissemination of the concept of decadence, which may refer to physical, moral, intellectual, and other qualities. While the novel certainly utilizes the naturalist lexicon, it’s plot and language leave unclear precisely in what part of the human or the race decadence takes effect, and its ambiguity with regard to the decadence of its characters points to the ideological contradiction in these natural conceits.

The novel is generally recognized to be a degeneration plot—either innate (born delinquent) or environmental—as Amaro devolves from the “Good Negro” to a homosexual to a murderer. Aside from his sexuality, Amaro is also represented as being perfectly moral and agreeable when not under the influence of alcohol—from this reputation for affability comes the appellation Bom-Crioulo. It is also possible that

Amaro’s “degeneration”—physical and mental—is exacerbated by his drinking alcohol, which French degeneration theorist Bénédict Morel came to recognize as a fundamental cause of physical and especially mental illness (Abel). While this possibility is never

279 suggested by the narrator,121 when Amaro is interned in the naval hospital he is placed in the tuberculosis ward, and his increasing thinness is consistent with consumption—

Caminha died from this at age 29, less than two years from the publication of Bom-

Crioulo. Given Caminha’s devotion to criticizing the abuses of life in the navy, it is most likely that the excesses of naval discipline, Amaro’s broken heart and depression, increased drinking, and imprisonment in the asylum all contribute to his downfall, at least as much as his race or sexuality. Social factors like Amaro’s alienation as an exploited object of labor and personal ones like his lovelorn depression are typically overlooked as critics and readers focus on the “crime against nature” and the biological determinism that characterizes Naturalism and seems to drive the narrative. Caminha’s novel upsets theories of biological determinism with respect to race and erases moral hierarchies of sexuality by prodding the very tenets of Naturalism and in particular the concepts of natural law and crimes against nature.

In addition to Amaro’s conflict with ambivalent, multifarious ‘nature,’ Bom-

Crioulo continues to intimate the fallacy of a natural law of sexuality in the representations of the heterosexual encounters between Dona Carolina and Aleixo.

Because of the over-emphasis of the same-sex relationship, readers and critics tend to ignore the implicit pedophilia surrounding the tryst of Aleixo and Carolina, whose attempts to lure the “beardless,” “almost child-like” Aleixo into bed are at least as devious as Amaro’s rather straightforward courtship (115). The heterosexual encounter

121 Bom-crioulo’s narrator operates through free indirect discourse and is privy to the thoughts of each character, with particular attention to the thoughts of Amaro. The narrator also makes his own commentary throughout the novel, creating a dialogue between himself and the various characters. 280 between the two white characters contains the most overtly bestial representation of sex in the entire novel, and Carolina’s love for Aleixo never reaches the tenderness of

Amaro’s. The narrator’s allusions to his “virginity” and “deflowering” during the first sexual encounter between Aleixo and Carolina suggests that the loss of Aleixo’s innocence occurs when these two sleep together rather than during his relationship with

Amaro. Once Carolina has seduced Aleixo, the Portuguese woman takes control and loses her ontological femininity in the narration, becoming instead a kind of zoopomorphic force of nature and sex: “as if suddenly a flood-gate of pleasure had opened, she sank her teeth into the cheek of the cabin-boy in a brutal fury [como se lhe houvessem aberto de repente uma caudal de gôzo, cravou os dentes na face do grumete, numa fúria brutal]” (118). As the scene continues, Carolina is further distanced from the conventions of ‘womanness’ as gender roles dislocate: “[Aleixo] let himself remain still, greatly admiring this women-man that wanted to deflower him, torpidly, like an animal

[êle deixava-se estar imóvel, muito admirado para essa mulher-homem que o queria deflorar ali assim, torpemente, como um animal]” (ibid). Through her sexuality,

Carolina has become monstrous, detaching from the two ontological categories of woman and human so as to become contrary to nature. Carolina’s animality is reinforced in the following lines—“all that was missing was the woman’s growl [A mulher só faltava urrar!]” (120). A close reading of the text reveals that Carolina is the novel’s most zoopomorphic character. If animalistic sexuality is to be read as a sign of degeneracy, and I believe in Bom-Crioulo it should not be, then it is not the black Amaro but the

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Portuguese (maybe white, maybe not quite)122 and heterosexual Carolina that is the degenerate figure.

Finally, by way of Aleixo’s reflections, the narrator seems to redeem the animal within the human, suggesting that the animalizations are not signs of delinquency or perversions. Having known bestial carnality in relations with a black man and now a white woman, Aleixo reconsiders the negative valuation of animal behavior: “after the initial surprise, he felt that he too was made of flesh and bone, like Amaro and Carolina

[passado o primeiro momento de surprêsa, sentiu que também era feito de carne e osso, como o negro e D. Carolina]” (120). This final note of realization on the part of Aleixo suggests that rather than depicting the degradation of certain non-heteronormative sexualities, Caminha’s text acknowledges ‘perverse sexuality’ as ineluctably human, transcending race, gender, and sexual orientation. By locating perversion/vice as well as nature in a matrix of varied instantiations of sexuality, the novel implicitly challenges the very concept of sexual ethics that would label any forms of sexuality as either perverse or unnatural, effectively nullifying any natural law of sexuality.

122 As Nelson Vieira’s study of literary intersections between Brazil and Portugal points out, because she is Portuguese, Carolina may not be considered entirely white according to racialist hierarchies of the time. Vieira’s comments on the novel in his study highlight the negative depiction of Carolina in the novel, but focuses only on the way she embodies contemporary Lusophobic stereotypes of greed — framing her seduction of Aleixo as an act of the Portuguese exploiting the Brazilian—rather than engaging with the animalization and gender dislocation present in the passages that represent her sexuality (117-120). However, since Aleixo is passive and ineffectual—seduced by woman and man alike, the novel should not be read as establishing racial hierarchies with the Aryan-like Aleixo in a superior position. Ultimately, if the three main characters are racial symbols, the instances of sexual transgression they embody cannot be read to suggest a hierarchy of race constructed by the narrative.

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While there are reasons to classify Bom-Crioulo as a hypothesis-novel of literary

Naturalism, Caminha’s novel continues to be a relevant piece of literature because of its indeterminacy and its nuanced commingling of ideologies. Caminha’s desires for the novel are also uncertain, but while the novel invites an analysis that supports its complicity in the cultural imaginary’s positivist validation of racial and sexual prejudice, closer reading reveals many elements in the novel which preclude the closure of naturalist determinism and undermine the very concept of depravity as applied to sexuality. As Howes suggests by linking Bom-Crioulo with classical and Shakespearian tragedy, the novel mimics the new scientist account of the crime/criminal but grounds the story in traditional conflicts of socio-economic class, human emotions, and the hero’s struggle with fate.

Perhaps above all, Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo remains a fascinating and complex example of the problematic ideological tendency to assign value to human behavior in accordance with a natural law of the world. Yet long before the popularization of natural science after Darwin, natural law was employed in diverse and often opposed arguments. Abolitionist efforts around the Atlantic rested on this principle of natural law, but pro-slavery theorists also invoked natural law in asserting the universal moral validity of slavery. The campaign for abolition of the trade and the conceptualization of crime and the law depended greatly on humanist principles like human nature, natural law, and crimes against humanity. The literature of the period explores the same concepts, revealing the power of this discourse to both liberate and

283 oppress. In the twentieth century, the discourse of natural law would continue to shape positive law, political action, and moral beliefs throughout the nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries and would evolve into international human rights discourse following the Second World War.

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Conclusion: The Continuing Curse of Lawlessness

The culmination of my progression through polemics of identity, law, and natural order in maritime fiction, the prospective fourth chapter of my project will assay the real and phantom disorder of mutinous revolt that dialectically stemmed from and stimulated the pain of maritime discipline. The threat and enactment of revolt by slaves and sailors generated pervasive anxiety among government officials and the naval officer class, which often resulted in increased repression through statute and disciplinary method. In a feedback loop, the desire to control the rebellious momentum through discipline often pushed mariners too far, resulting in the foment of mutinous behavior. The Haitian

Revolution effectively demonstrates this relation: in terms of population and brutality, slavery was most intense in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which correspondingly precipitated the greatest slave revolt in western history. Ships, too, were operated through extreme discipline and were therefore especially prone to mutiny. As the slave ship and slave revolt at sea are the paradigmatic examples of this cycle of discipline and rebellion, the whips and chains of the floating coffin haunt merchant and naval ships, and maritime literary heroes of all trades struggle against the bondage of

‘the free sea.’

The critique of discipline characterizes most nautical fictions: Billy Bud culminates in its protagonist’s execution at the hands of the ships figure of authority,

Captain Vere, Benito Cereno dramatizes the revolt against discipline and its caricature,

285 while Bom-Crioulo opens on a scene of three whippings. Discipline, along with its specter disorientation, constitute the most pervasive motifs of late-nineteenth century maritime literature. The relation between slavery and naval discipline that lies at the heart of Caminha’s No país dos Ianquees (1887) and Bom-Crioulo. Prior to both of these works, Caminha had already written a short story that served as a kind of anti-discipline manifesto: “A Chibata” (“The Whip”), for which he came under censure by the military and its supporters. Primary texts in this chapter such as Melville’s White Jacket would also fit in the second chapter’s discussion of the law as the repressive nature of the maritime force of law for naval servicemen constituted the central impetus for mutiny.

The curl of the whip shapes the satanic structure of the stanzas in Castro Alves’ “The

Slave Ship,” and texts from earlier chapters such as Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and

Blake, or the Huts of America could be analyzed in the fourth chapter through the lens of revolt. With considerably more detail than British maritime law receives in Billy Bud,

White Jacket (1850) inspects and critiques the American Articles of War that restrict naval life for all sailors except the officers. Just as Melville’s White Jacket and Billy Bud dialogue with concrete repressive laws in Atlantic navies, Caminha’s No país dos

Ianquees and Bom-Crioulo emerge surrounding a series of major Brazilian naval revolts in the early 1890’s and anticipates the 1910 “Revolt of the Lash” that reacted against corporal discipline in the navy. The fourth chapter’s discussion of revolt also incorporates the U.S. Supreme Court case of The Amistad (1841), revealing the intersection of complex international law with concrete episodes of rebellion and

286 persecution. Paired with this historical reference, I analyze Frederick Douglass’ novela

The Heroic Slave (1853), which reimagines another slave revolt from 1841 on the

American vessel Creole.

At its end, this project will return to Douglass, as American society turns its eyes back to slavery and to a new reevaluation of African Americans in DuBois’ “kingdom of culture.” The second decade of the twenty-first century has introduced a new phase in

American civil rights, a new construction of the definition of freedom, which the nation has always used to define itself. In conjunction with a new era of social consciousness of race in the United States, slavery and slave narratives have entered the popular imaginary to an unprecedented degree with Hollywood films like Django Unchained (2012) and 12

Years a Slave (2013). The controversy over the film The Help (2011) suggests a public reevaluation of the legacy of African American stereotypes left by slavery and abolition.

Memorial Day weekend of 2016, The History Channel, A & E, and Lifetime are airing a new version of the miniseries Roots, which, according to The New York Times writer

Melena Ryzik, “hope[s] to recontextualize “Roots” for the Black Lives Matter era.” As studying slavery helps contextualize questions of race and justice, western culture takes increasing interest in exploring the history of black identities and the evolution of Afro- descendent cultures since the Diaspora.

The pursuit of identity for people of color, both before the law as well as in cultural production and the national imaginary, fundamentally shaped the twentieth century in Brazil, the United States, and the rest of the western world. Twentieth century

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Brazil reinterpreted itself in terms of racial integration: proceeding from a national ethos of whitening to the supposed harmony of “racial democracy” and later to black consciousness and the recognition of racial conflict and inequality in a troubled criminal justice system. U. S. segregation was a contrapuntal referent for the 1930’s ideology of

Brazilian racial democracy, and Jim Crow became the major object of the continuing struggle over equality that followed the constitutional (i.e. legal) establishment of equality in the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868. Tensions building since reconstruction would culminate in the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s as a particularly salient moment in the continual pursuit of promises of justice and equality announced in the

Enlightenment.

Suggesting that the colonized were forced into post-modern subjectivity before demanding that the colonizers join them, there are parallels between certain Afro-

American theory and twentieth-century continental philosophy (which writers like

Bhabha and Gates have synthesized). Double-consciousness anticipates Sartre’s being- for-itself and being-for-others, in other words, the experience of being caught between subjecthood and objecthood which requires a negotiation of identity. Sartre himself acknowledged a general connection in a preface he wrote for an anthology of Negritude writing called “Black Orpheus” (presumably an allusion to the French-Brazilian film of the same name depicting Carnival in Rio de Janeiro). Writing in 1963, Sartre declares in his first paragraph: “Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you— like me—will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has

288 enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen” (13). The white man has just entered

Sartre’s being-for-others, where the black man has dwelt since the Portuguese began to traffic slaves in 1444. In other words, until the realization of civil rights, white people have enjoyed unchallenged subjectivity, but are now forced to be the object of the black gaze and to contend with the perspective of the non-white. Sartre recognizes that with black liberation will come white double-consciousness—a fascinating statement, if hyperbolic. Perhaps there is a reversal in the guilt of being seen: under white supremacist cultural hegemony the person of color was naturally guilty of the ‘crime of color,’ ontologically at fault, but it is now the white subjectivity that faces the gaze of the person of color with inherent guilt and an identity (as oppressor) that he or she has not chosen.

As a new stage in the pursuit of equality before the law, the instruments of force— notably the police but also prison and criminal justice institutions are now being seen, increasingly watched with suspicious eyes and analyzed in their treatment of race. The public eye exercises an unprecedented power against the forces of law and order with special vigilance against discriminatory inequality. Largely because of the unsettling construction of modernity, the question of justice haunts identity in the post-modern condition.

In January 2014 the ongoing crisis of the Brazilian penitentiary system received international attention from human rights groups and the media as over sixty deaths were reported in 2013 in Pedrinhas prison in the northern state of Maranhão (Conectas.org).

Persistent overcrowding, brutality, unhealthy conditions, and criminal activity

289 characterize Brazilian prisons demonstrates the persistence and depth of the social problem of incarceration in twenty-first century Brazil. The legacy of slavery and that period’s culture of racial confinement has remained a point of comparison for Brazilian writers, evident in Amaro’s movements between freedom and bondage in Bom-Crioulo and other late-nineteenth century and Belle Epoque Brazilian fiction.123 Responding to today’s emergencies of social justice, Sergio Bianchi’s 2005 film What Is it Worth?

[Quanto vale ou é por quilo?] juxtaposes the ethics of charitable organizations with humanitarian arguments during slavery and features a brief scene comparing the prison to the slave ship. As Afro-Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos speaks directly to the audience and laments the prisoner’s condition as “slave without master,” he suggests that Brazilian democracy only safeguards the “freedom to consume” and, much like Caminha’s novel from a century before, invokes slavery to highlight a new link between confinement and profit that undermines “Order and Progress,”.

The penitentiary crisis, rather than being limited to Brazil, seems to be an international phenomenon. Similar problems of overcrowding, violence, and a February

2016 riot resulting in 49 deaths have been reported in Monterrey, Mexico’s Topo Chico prison (BBC.com). According to the World Prison Brief, the United States had the world’s (second after the Seychelles) highest incarceration rate, whereas Brazil ranked

31, and England ranked 101. So, what is suggested by the fact that the United States incarcerates the most people, but incarceration constitutes a more visible social problem

123 Works such as Machado de Assis’s The Psychiatrist [O Alienista] (1881) and Lima Barreto’s Cemetery of the Living [Cemitério dos vivos] (1920) imagine the asylum (manicômio) in relation to social and scientific theories or race and morality at the turn of the twentieth century. 290 in Brazil? In both nations, incarceration is clearly a racial issue as people of color occupy disproportionate percentages of the prison population. What should the relation between the justice and the prison system be at this point in history, and how do former slave societies like Brazil and the United States escape the perpetuation of the confinement of color? Why does England have a low rate of incarceration and the United States the highest, even though imprisonment and discipline seemed to be primary concerns in both societies at the turn of the twentieth century and the two remain closely linked politically in the twenty-first?

Although the international relations of the distinct empires of Brazil, the United

States, and Britain have transformed greatly since the nineteenth century, the fundamental spatial aspect of the distance of coloniality has remained an important factor in international economics. Although the common narrative of coloniality describes a shift from a territorially organized colonialism to the deterritorialized globalization of late-capitalism, this does not mean that the spaces of coloniality have changed. This is the distinction, for instance, that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make between nineteenth century imperialism and the new coloniality which they dub “Empire.”

Additionally, Walter Mignolo’s preface to Local Histories/Global Designs explains,

the emergence of global colonialism, managed by transnational corporations,

erased the distinction that was valid for early forms of colonialism and the

coloniality of power. Yesterday the colonial difference was out there, away from

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the center. Today it is all over, in the peripheries of the center and in the centers

of the periphery” (ix).

However, though coloniality has lost the possession of territories, the spaces of coloniality have changed very little and colonialist exploitation still depends on distance and the sea to hide its abuses. The citizens of former colonies still suffer the worst labor conditions, and much of the first-world’s wealth is still derived from profiting off of resources and labor in the third-world. In the United States, for instance, the vast majority of consumer products were fabricated in Asia or Latin America for wages and under conditions that would be reprehensible and illegal within the United States. The relative opacity between American consumption and the distant production of these goods facilitates the perpetuation of this system of coloniality, which is now diffused to every corner and every member of society.

As the global economy persists in operating through the transnational alienation of labor (the geographic and imaginary distancing of colonizer from colonized), international intervention by hegemonic powers carries many of the ethical-political dilemmas that it did during the nineteenth century. Useful comparisons may be made between hegemonic humanitarian politics of the nineteenth century British empire and the post-Cold War United States; between what Robert Edgar Conrad referred to as the

British Empire’s “complete disregard of Brazilian sovereignty,” and the United States invasions of Iraq in 1990 and Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. Both intercessions involved the globe’s primary imperial power engaging militarily with another sovereign nation on

292 behalf of a specific sub-population whose well-being was threatened by the politics of that nation-state. In each case, political hegemony infringes on sovereignty in the name of human rights but with mixed motives and results. In each case, the empires had self- interested economic reasons for the military encroachment of another nation’s sovereignty. Garry J. Bass’ Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention

(2008) asserts the nineteenth century anticipation of issues of international human rights that we associate with the contemporary, post-Cold War era:

All of the major themes of today’s heated debates about humanitarian

intervention—about undermining sovereignty or supporting universal human

rights, about altruistic or veiled imperialistic motivations, about the terrible

dangers of taking sides in civil wars and ethnic conflicts, about the role of public

opinion and the press in shaping democratic foreign policy, about multilateral and

unilateral uses of force, about the moral responsibility of political leaders—were

voiced loud and clear throughout the nineteenth century. (5)

Legal scholar Jenny S. Martinez views the relation as a single continuous issue of international human rights and notes that studying the nineteenth century campaign for the abolition of the slave trade “is evocative of contemporary problems in international relations, including efforts to foster democracy and human rights” (15).

Post-Cold War U.S. imperialism has operated through the same rhetorical model undermined by Conrad and Césaire: the three C’s have been resignified (after the fourth

C, Capitalism during the Cold War) under the unimpeachable label “Freedom,” but the

293 paradigm of bringing western enlightenment to the savage cultures of the East remains the primary justification for the thriving, militarized western imperialism led by the

United States. Like nineteenth-century British imperialism, U.S. imperialism operates according to genuine humanitarian motives and in the pursuit of money. Indeed,

Britain’s nineteenth century cold war against the slave trade and its purveyors stands as the archetypal example of one of the most significant political dilemmas of modernity: under what conditions (and guises) may nation-state sovereignty be transgressed? When should “humaneness” be guaranteed by the sword or morality forced upon a nation-state or subset of a nation? What are the motives and consequences of spreading ‘Commerce,

Christianity, and Civilization,’ (in the late nineteenth century) and Freedom124 and

Democracy (in the early twenty-first) to what western hegemony considers unenlightened nations, or “the dark places of the Earth”?

In addition to armed intervention, the desire to found international human rights that take precedence over national sovereignty currently applies to the political question of universal jurisdiction in special cases such as ‘crimes against humanity.’ The classification of slave-traders as enemies of humanity in the nineteenth century allowed for certain crimes to be subject to universal jurisdiction, and this special development in the law of nations would have important ramifications in the twentieth century. This

124 Australian comic Jim Jefferies’s 2016 stand-up special Freedumb attacks the rhetoric of freedom and its link to notions of American superiority prevalent in the political and especially imperialist discourse of the United States. Jefferies draws effective common sense comparisons of freedoms and restrictions among other nations of the English-speaking world (Australia, Canada, South Africa). Noting that the U.S. has twice the incarceration rate of its nearest competitor, South Africa, the Australian comic quips that “statistically, in the land of the free, you have the least amount of free people.”

294 legacy was perhaps most evident in the criminal proceedings following the Holocaust and the collapse of Yugoslavia. In considering charges of torture that occurred in Chile, the

1980 U.S. Second Circuit appeals case Filártiga v. Peña-Irala reaffirmed this principle that especially heinous crimes could be tried in U.S. criminal courts under universal jurisdiction because the offenders were enemies of humanity, as pirates and slave traders had been before them. In short, this decision authorized the law of nations to operate within national sovereign territory, giving U.S. courts the right to prosecute anything deemed to be a crime against humanity. Conferences like the one which produced the

Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction (2001) continue to advance global policy towards the positive prosecution of crimes against humanity in ways that transcend sovereignty, a reflection of the original need for jurisprudence to manage the threat of nationless pirates.

If the category of crimes against humanity began in the natural religion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its definition is still being fixed in international law and its place in positive law is still being forged. This category remains essential to the construction of international law in the post-humanist era in which moral consensus becomes the new, non-theological foundation of the law. In 2014 and 2015 multiple international law groups held conventions and proposed the creation of a comprehensive international treaty on crimes against humanity, and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is currently working to introduce crimes against humanity legislation in the United States

Congress that would firmly authorize this concept in positive national law. As western

295 law moves forward, it continues to grow in response to traditional, meta-legal ideas of justice.

Conversely overturning long-held beliefs of natural law, the jurisprudence of sexuality underwent dramatic changes in 2015 when U.S. judges finally denied the civil deviance of homosexuality. Natural law theories of sexuality have both lost considerable force as arguments and been expanded to include homosexuality as natural (evidence of animal homosexuality is often cited by progressive voices). This change, born of the cosmopolitanism of twentieth century civil rights, signifies real progress as a liberation from natural law theory. While employed for good in the campaign against slavery and the slave trade, the theological character (Derrida’s “Mystical Foundation”) of natural law theory—its appeal to superhuman authority—makes it a powerful political tool that may liberate and oppress. The legal recognition of homosexuality constitutes a particularly significant step in the evolution of American law since opposition to that right was based in natural law theory rather than practical political reason. Obergefell v.

Hodges is, in this way, a liberation from natural law conceits toward more utilitarian legal principles and consensus-thinking, a realization of enlightenment. In the court’s decision,

Justice Kennedy highlights the fact that our nation must be loyal to the present rather than the past so that concepts of freedom evolve as American culture refines its ideology:

Obergefelle v. Hodges “Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a

Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations” (2). The negotiation over freedom and equality born with the ascension of modernity’s legal

296 nation-states continues today, evident in the 2015 national recognition of the right to same-sex marriage.

Although, the liberal significance of Obergefell v. Hodges is tremendous, the U.S.

Supreme Court has been ambivalent on questions of liberty with regards to detainees away from U.S. soil. The most recent controversy of habeas corpus surrounded the detention center Guantanamo Bay, which, since separated from United States territory by the sea, the Department of Defense believed would be able to escape American jurisdiction. Opening in 2002, for years the American government sidestepped the

Geneva Convention and the basic right of habeas corpus, enabling torture and unrestricted detention respectively. In the 2008 case of Boumediene v. Bush, the United

States Supreme Court ruled that, despite being in Cuba (of all places) the detainees at

Guantanamo are protected by the United States Constitution and should enjoy the writ.

Two hundred thirty-six years later, Boumediene v. Bush had the same result as Somerset v. Stewart in that a marginalized group gained the protection of the national law. Yet as judges have done in previous centuries in order to avoid granting rights without denying them, in 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court has opted out of hearing habeas appeals related to detainees of Guantanamo Bay (NYT). Finally, in February of 2016 the Obama administration announced its plan to close entirely the detention center in Cuba, an objective the president cited during his first term and one with significant symbolic importance for his political legacy. As colonialist exploitation persists and nations live

297 off transnational interests, the law must be continually realized and its reach must be constantly negotiated, particularly outside of sovereign territory.

In July 2015, Ian Urbina published a series of six articles “on the lawlessness on the high seas” in The New York Times entitled “The Outlaw Ocean,” a project which catalogues persistent issues of the force of maritime law in the twenty-first century. For

Urbina, the lack of sovereign power (law and enforcement) at sea facilitates a pervasive culture of criminality and unethical behavior:

Few places on the planet are as lawless as the high seas, where egregious crimes

are routinely committed with impunity. Though the global economy is ever more

dependent on a fleet of more than four million fishing and small cargo vessels and

100,000 large merchant ships that haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods,

today’s maritime laws have hardly more teeth than they did centuries ago when

history’s great empires first explored the oceans’ farthest reaches. Murders

regularly occur offshore—thousands of seafarers, fishermen or sea migrants die

under suspicious circumstances annually, maritime officials say—but culprits are

rarely held accountable. No one is required to report violent crimes committed in

international waters. Through debt or coercion, tens of thousands of workers,

many of them children, are enslaved on boats every year, with only occasional

interventions.

Slavery, crime, commerce, and secrecy: Urbina’s twenty-first century “outlaw ocean” reminds the post-modern reader—who, beyond the modernist paradigm shift of air travel,

298 moves rhizomatically through the internet—that the maritime world continues to be the clandestine motor of global civilization and the site of legal fluidity, unchecked criminality, and the abuse of human rights. As it was for the slave trade, the problem of enforcement in the non-sovereign space of international waters facilitates frequent and inhumane criminality. Devoting one of the segments to maritime murder, Urbina explores the breakdown of jurisdictions and lack of surveillance ensures that most violent crimes at sea go unprosecuted. The relatively unpoliced sea supports a massive security industry that includes widespread use of private guards and floating armories.

As Urbina’s project outlines, the contemporary system sometimes known as

“flags of convenience” dictates that vessels may purchase rights to national flags provided they follow the regulations of that nation, and it is customary for ships to adopt a “flag state” with loose regulations or little capacity for naval enforcement. Seeking tax exemptions and as well as lax environmental and labor policies, many of the world ships are registered with flag states of Liberia, Hong Kong, Panama, Bahamas, Mongolia,

North Korea, Cambodia, Marshall Islands (USA); and the International Transport

Workers’ Federation considers the use of flags of convenience to be a primary obstacle to the realization of satisfactory global labor conditions (ITFglobalorg). Major environmental and human rights violations occur constantly at sea, but jurisdiction is generally murky or falls to flag-state that cannot or will not enforce maritime policy. The crime against nature has returned to Coleridge’s killing of the albatross as ocean vessels commit grave violence against nature itself. Just as only the British Navy instituted

299 physical enforcement of slave trade prohibitions in the nineteenth century, twenty-first century maritime criminals—most of whom operate under the guise of legitimate commerce—continue their insidious exploitation of the marine and the maritime using the old slaver trick of flags of convenience, an opportunistic mask of identity employed to circumvent the law.

Typical of the problems of modernity, slavery remains a significant issue of global social justice as human trafficking continues to circumnavigate the world. Current estimates of the number of people held in slavery range from 21 million (International

Labour Organization) to 35 million (Gallup), about half of which lives in Asia, and a quarter of which consists of sex trafficking of women and children (ILO). Urbina’s segment on slavery focuses on commercial fishing in Southeast Asia, tracing common

American pet foods to slave labor on fishing boats in the Gulf of Thailand. Disreputable maritime staffing agencies deceive workers into forced labor and kidnappings occur frequently offshore. Living conditions for mariners are commonly inhumane and the isolation provided by the ocean contributes to the lack of regulation enabling crimes and unscrupulous practices. Kevin Bales’ “Winning the Fight, Eradicating Slavery in the

Modern Age” (2009) highlights the dramatic reduction in global prices for slaves in the last few decades, indicating that human trafficking has become more efficient in recent years (15). International leaders and human rights groups have responded with renewed attention to slavery in the post-modern world. Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2014 article “Working with the Vatican Against Modern Slavery” outlines his joint efforts with

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Pope Francis to increase international measures against modern slavery: “we find perhaps no greater threat to human dignity, no greater assault on basic freedom, than the evil of human trafficking — what we call modern-day slavery and what Pope Francis himself denounced as ‘a crime against humanity’” (IIP Digital).

In addition to closely echoing eighteenth and nineteenth century voices of abolition, Kerry’s text establishes the connection between twenty-first century slave trade and other contemporary global concerns such as the environment and organized crime, and, while much trafficking occurs domestically within nations (ILO), the interpenetration of global capitalism means that slavery affects a variety of transnational problems. In combatting modern slavery, Kerry advocates focus on the maritime:

A major zone of impunity is beyond the border and jurisdiction of any single

country. Research shows us that people laboring on the high seas are subject to

brutal abuse and enslavement. This fact cannot be separated from our other

concerns about the ocean: if we want to secure safe and free trade routes, bolster

global food security, or curb environmental degradation, we ignore the oceans at

our peril. Trafficking sits at the intersection of all these issues.

As it was throughout modernity, the sea remains a space of widespread and sometimes highly organized criminality, a less-visible space that facilitates slavery and the denial of human rights. As Urbina points out with regards to maritime slavery, many of these issues are most grave in the waters off the southern coasts of Asia (South China Sea, Gulf of Thailand, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal), and the New York Times reports American and

301 international preoccupation with China’s increasing militarization of the South China Sea

(5/20/2016). We have recently witnessed new British and American commitments to ending modern slavery around the world as Parliament passed the 2015 Modern Slavery

Act, and in February of 2016 the United States passed the Trade Facilitation and Trade

Enforcement Act of 2015 that strengthened U.S. prohibition of imports produced by slave labor. At this moment, slavery is returning to the center of western political debate, and it remains to be seen if new technologies and a more globalized international consciousness will be able to suppress the fearful alchemy.

“And as the sea,” Ishmael’s predecessor White-Jacket concludes, “is the stable of brute monsters, gliding hither and thither in unspeakable swarms, even so is it the home of many moral monsters” (380). Maritime slavery has not disappeared with its legal abolition, rather it retreated from view and further adapted to the weak and heterogeneous force of law in maritime conditions in order to continue a practice that is lucrative and universally condemned. The challenges of maritime subjects found in nineteenth century western literature largely remain in the experience of twenty-first century mariners.

Although laws and cultural attitudes have evolved, exploitation of disadvantaged (and usually non-white) persons at sea continues to fuel the global economy as it once did through the transatlantic slave trade. While our imagination has largely turned away from the waters, the maritime continues to be a space of relative lawlessness and coloniality. As on maps in the beginning of modernity, the sea should still be marked hic sunt dracones.

302

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