Outlyers: Maroons and Marronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature By Sarah Jessica Johnson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Stephen Best, Chair Professor Kathleen Donegan Professor Nadia Ellis Professor Karl Britto Spring 2018 1 Abstract Outlyers: Maroons and Marronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature By Sarah Jessica Johnson Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Stephen Best, Chair My dissertation, “Outlyers: Maroons and Marronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature,” foregrounds an archival pursuit in which recovery is deprioritized. Crucial to this study is an archival paradox: Maroons absented themselves from the printed record, eschewed the position of author, only to be figured and represented by others who, expectedly, struggled with the depiction of a practice they could not know firsthand. The intentional erasure of “traces” by maroons was necessary to the successful practice of marronage. The project is organized around four “maroon objects”—the portrait, the fetish, the epaulette, and the hatchet—that recur in historical representations concerning maroons. These maroon objects mediate maroon subject and text. My first chapter, “Maroon Portraits,” examines the circulating narratives of La Mulâtresse Solitude of Guadeloupe. Solitude sits for a portrait that is continuously painted, as artists insist on producing visual images in tension with the long textual record that precedes them. Chapter Two, “Maroon Fetishes,” reads the proliferation of fetishes in Le Macandal by Marie Augustin and other iterations of the story of Haitian Maroon leader François Macandal. I read for the extension of belief in a fetish’s power to the realm of fiction and representation. In Chapter Three, “Maroon Epaulettes,” I examine how Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown and George Washington Cable work through the maroon’s military position in the context of slave revolution. Their depictions highlight the maroon practice of camouflage through the representation of military uniform, epaulettes in particular. The final chapter, “Maroon Hatchets,” examines the severing violence of the hatchet as employed by authors representing the earliest moments of marronage. The chapter reads works by Aimée Césaire, Victor Séjour and Martin Delany, who turn to formal innovations in their imaginings of the individual’s path to marronage. i to my parents and perdi ii Contents List of Images iii Introduction iv Acknowledgments x Chapter 1 Maroon Portraits 1 Chapter 2 Maroon Fetishes 29 Chapter 3 Maroon Epaulettes 44 Chapter 4 Maroon Hatches 63 Coda 87 Bibliography 90 iii List of Images 1. Statue of Solitude by Jacky Poulier 2. Osman 3. Solitude atop the traffic circle 4. Detail of Solitude 5. Solitude’s face and torso 6. Solitude and girl with glasses 7. Complete Alquin installation 8. Alquin next to wooden Solitude sculpture 9. Woman leans into Solitude sculpture 10. Women in African History series, Solitude 11. The eyes of Solitude 12. Solitude and the revolutionaries 13. “This is how I will treat you when the time comes!” 14. The Daughters of Solitude 15. Solitude reflects in prison 16. Portraits of Marronage 17. Toussaint Louverture Chef des Noirs Insurgés de Saint Domingue 18. Paul Robeson for Vanity Fair magazine 19. Epaulettes 20. Commodore, first class, and mate, full dress. Boy in background. 21. Frontispiece from 1826 edition of Bug-Jargal 22. Napoleon Crossing the Alps iv Introduction There is a particular scene described in a book that I read in researching this project that, if possible, would be superimposed onto every page as a watermark visualizing the human thrust of the dissertation. The scene contains an image that, like a snapshot, is a scene frozen in time suggesting movement that occurred in the past. Here is the small citation from 1783: Rosette, a black woman of average height with a depression in her forehead, gone Maroon the eighth of this month for the hundredth time, waving a knife as she fled.1 Rosette’s wielding of this object, in this case described as “waving,” is an act of double transformation that reveals the insistent fungibility of both the enslaved person and their tools on the plantations of the Atlantic world. The object in Rosette’s hand is a knife, a cognate of the hatchet—one of the objects around which this dissertation is organized. The frozen moment described in the citation above (Rosette waving her knife) is the necessary pivot point at the start of so many maroon narratives. The decision to make a break for it, in pursuit of marronage, whether for the first or the “hundredth” time, is the individual decision that I try to keep at the forefront of my analyses. In writing the first chapter, I came upon an image, originally, I think, a watercolor, that matched my own mental picture of Rosette’s scene of marronage. The image is from a UNESCO educational cartoon biography of the famous Guadeloupean maroon mother Solitude, discussed in the first chapter (see Image 16). In the small frame we see a woman from the back, her limbs fully-extended in motion, the green tree limbs of the forest ready to engulf her. She does not look back. She is off. She is gone. The ever-latent capability of the slave to go maroon and of the tool to become a weapon is the lived reality underlying every maroon narrative discussed below. Whether this potential for individual revolutionary change is interpreted as an inspiration or a threat, varies depending on the author of the narrative. Marronage, as a solution to the problem of enslavement for those men, women and children who were bound as a product of racial prejudice and greed, was one solution among others. The practice almost always intersects with other solutions to slavery, such as spiritual freedom, “everyday resistance,” and outright armed conflict. Living as a maroon took many historical forms and was adapted to suit each environment confronted by those enslaved around the Atlantic world. I define marronage in its broadest sense as a practice of living free in small or large communities while remaining within a slave state. Maroons often needed to attack or pillage nearby plantations, in either collaboration or conflict with those who remained enslaved there. Proximity to a plantation was, in many cases, the counterintuitive lynchpin to sustained marronage. Marronage presents an archival paradox for the scholar. Maroons primarily sought to promote the kinds of archival silences lamented by many scholars of slavery. The intentional erasure of “traces” was necessary to the successful practice of marronage. The maroon’s scarcity in the archive is at once systemic and endemic; it is produced by both the violence of the archive that has been subsequently unmasked by historians and literary scholars of African-American life and the maroon’s preference for oral and spatial history. My response to this paradox is to deprioritize recovery in my work. Instead of searching for obscure documents that might reveal more historical details about individual maroon communities, I seek a critical reorientation towards the archive of slavery that reframes absence as a resource. In this pursuit, I work 1 Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons, 253. Emphasis added. v alongside other scholars of slavery who have begun to think about the potential radical histories behind what we do not or cannot know.2 Take Rosette’s case again. Her name, a word that deeply personalizes and individualizes her for the reader, was most likely only recorded because of the chance that it might help lead to her recapture. The text is a tool of capture in many cases. One can only hope that this snippet is the last mention of Rosette, that her hundredth time was (if she so desired) the last time, if it meant that she permanently escaped the mark of the oppressor’s pen. The grammatical contortions of that last sentence reflect the ongoing adjustment I make to this approach. Working in the wake of a long tradition of recovery scholarship in slavery studies, I must carefully describe my celebration of Rosette’s disappearance. I want to emphasize that this written record of Rosette describes a radical embodied escape, while acknowledging that I cannot presume to know her individual desires. Without searching for more, I can cheer her on into the unknown. I cannot know her, and that is the success. How then, does the scholar of literature confront the reality that, in the context of marronage, less is more. The fewer the [written] words the better. Readers may appreciate the particular difficulties this poses for a project situated in and concerned with the textual. Maroons absented themselves from the printed record, eschewed the position of author, only to be figured and represented by others who, expectedly, struggled with the depiction of a practice they could not know firsthand. This paradox is not a site of scholarly frustration on my part, though it could be. It serves for me as a launching pad from which to think about how stories of marronage—a practice deeply rooted in secrecy and subterfuge—still managed to have lasting impact on the printed worlds of multiple empires and various resistances. What are the forms of literary works that attempt to represent a practice that exists primarily in the realms of the unwritten and the secret? My inquiries are particularly concerned with the historical realities of the period in question, that written records, documentation and archival preservation were mechanisms of control, capture and violence for enslaved persons or those fleeing bondage. However, the maroon—who most often appears in the archive at the moment of escape or in reference to that escape—offers an opportunity to reconsider the inconclusive nature of that story as an opening in the archive, one that some authors attempt to fill using the mechanisms of fiction.