5/16 EXCERPTS FROM Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter"


The fear is not that the barbarous colonial renegades and
criminals will come home to England, but rather that the primitive
tendencies already loosed in Surinam and Virginia are emerging in
England, spurred on by the seventeenth century’s multiple rebellions
and many emergent, subversive theories of political obligation.
(p. ??)

Such a conclusion is crucially important to the development of
early modern English nationhood. Instead of a naturalized or intrin-
sic racial quality, geographically determined barbarism was an oner-
ous and regrettable aspect of the English past which could be
expunged from the national character through the rigorous applica-
tion of political, social, linguistic, and epistemological civility.20 Thus
the process of English civilization was fashioned as heroic and
exceptional by its triumph over the rather cumbersome burden of a
“barbaric” geography. The process of civilizing England, as Helgerson
argues, was conducted with direct reference to the primitive north-
ern past: “sixteenth-century national self-articulation began with a
sense of national barbarism, with a recognition of the self as despised
other, and then moved to repair that damaged self-image.”21 By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, English culture had been
regulated, civilized, and refined as a response to the barbaric past—
(p.?)


Even when confronted with native people in America or
Africa, English merchants and colonists relied first on class as a
means to comprehend and sort the people they met. While theories
of racial superiority were current and powerful, in most cases they
were secondary evaluative indices, as Karen Ordahl Kupperman has
argued in her study of seventeenth-century English interpretations of
native Virginians.26 (p. 8)

Oroonoko’s position as an advo-
cate for slavery looks deeply ironic to us. There seems to be a conflict
between Oroonoko’s status as a chattel slave and his embrace of
natural slavery. But the text does not share this ambivalence, endorsing
the right rule of natural superiors like Oroonoko while decrying the
unnatural authority of a degenerate race of colonial rapists, thieves, and
barbarians. Thus the novella suggests a modified Aristotelian view of
natural class status in which a benevolent and paternalistic master-slave
or monarch-subject relationship stabilizes the household and the state.
(p. 16)



Oroonoko's blackness:

Behn uncharacteristically refrains from lightening Oroonoko’s skin to make
him more palatable to an European audience. But Oroonoko’s
blackness carries with it much ideological freight—as Gallagher
points out, black skin meant, above all, that a person was subject to be
exchanged as a commodity.45 It is precisely that blackness which
allows Behn to point out the depraved and wrongheaded priorities of
Whig capitalism. There are two models of value mapped onto
Oroonoko’s body—one of commercial value, the other of political and
moral value. The commercial system within which Oroonoko circu-
lates repeatedly demonstrates these competing models of value,
forcing its agents to choose between them. Either Oroonoko is to be
treated as a man of honor and an exemplary monarch, or he is to be
treated as chattel, as a valuable commodity to be exchanged and
employed for financial gain. Not surprisingly, from the slave trader’s
duplicity to Byam’s and Banister’s cruel barbarism, in every case
Oroonoko’s value to the agents of commerce is exclusively financial.
Oroonoko’s blackness, his value as chattel, trumps his value as an
intrinsically noble and gracious monarch within the acquisitive and
debased moral calculus of Whiggery.
(p. 18)

Margo Hendricks has argued that the play [The Widdow Ranter] uses the threat of a
barbaric, potentially miscegenous Indian other to stabilize and re-
unify the English colony in Virginia and ratify the genocidal aims of
the imperial project. While Hendricks is quite correct to point out
the genocidal implications of the colonial project, as well as Bacon’s
own deep involvement in such ideology, she misreads the play’s
central threat. The barbarians at the gate are not Indians but tailors,
panders, and pickpockets. The few representations of Indians in The
Widow Ranter are almost all positive from a royalist perspective
(p. 20)

While it seems that Bacon is a second Oroonoko, his suicide is the
result of a misreading of the battle, and in the context of a tragicom-
edy it is at least partially ridiculous that the victorious general kills
himself after his forces have won. Bacon is hardly the transparent
vehicle for absolutist ideology that Oroonoko is—his insistence on
the points of honor is overwrought, making him look either foolish or
tendentious. (p. 20)

As a propagandist, Behn argues that the moral calculus of Whiggery is
corrupt and politically irresponsible, for it privileges exchange value
over virtue, commerce over justice, violence and barbarism over
stability, and the rule of the wild and ignorant people over the rule of
the educated and just. These American texts, which are so critically
concerned with forms of government, are not primarily warnings
against colonial dissolution, miscegenation, or imperialism. Rather
they represent Behn’s more local warnings tuned to a fever pitch; for
the barbarians are at the gate in England, and popular rule means that
the project of English civilization has failed and chaos is come again.
(p. 25)
-----------------------------------
See Laura Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in
Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Brown (New
York: Methuen, 1987), 41–61. See also Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1995); Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race,
Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the
Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 209–24; Judith Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism
and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique 26 (1994): 189–214; Anita
Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” SEL 34 (1994): 491–
506; and Richard Frohock, “Violence and Awe: The Foundation of Government in
Aphra Behn’s New World Settings,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 8 (1996): 437–52.

5/12 Thoughts


"Dido comes at the threshold of this book because the multiple versions of her story challenge the notion that history had to happen the way it did, or that it did happen the way any single textual or nontextual source of information suggests that it happened. Dido's stories thus dramatize the existence of competing histories in what counts (for some) as the cultural literacy of the West."
-- Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido's Daughters, Prologue, p.2


I'm attracted to this statement because of the idea of "competing histories" and the idea that history didn't have to happen the way it did seem to be helpful ways of looking at what I'm trying to do with creating this performance piece (and because it helps me to recognize that I've always wanted to find a way to set a number (two at least) of competing and contradictory stories onstage at the same time). I set about trying to find and tell a story about how we came to see ourselves––and to perform ourselves––as the particular kind(s) of white people we are, and I hit on the idea of using the visit of the "Four Indian Kings" to Queen Anne's court in 1710 as a way of doing that. And then I got lost in the thicket of stories. Stories about Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter; stories about the Triangular Trade; stories about the Restoration and the emerging British Empire; stories about the slave trade and different attitudes towards it and toward commercial success in any "trade"; stories about skin color and its importance or unimportance in determining who we are by deciding who we are not; stories about the difference between attitudes in London and attitudes in colonial New York or Jamestown or Surinam or Boston; stories about two ships passing each other, one inbound to London carrying four Iroquois sachems and one outbound to America carrying wandering German refugees; stories about slaves after the American Revolution wandering to Canada, to London, to West Africa; stories about people reading The Spectator aloud in London coffeehouses; stories about tragic and heroic lovers and noble savages and beautiful African women who turn from black into white as they move from the page to the stage; stories about celebrity Indians at a performance of Davenant's adaption of Macbeth being made by the crowd in the galleries to sit on the stage so they could be seen during the performance.

So is there a story, or competing stories, in all these other stories about how certain people (in London, in America, in Asheville) came to see themselves as white and therefore as somehow privileged (or privileged and therefore white), and then to see that whiteness and that privilege as so much the norm, so much the natural and inevitable way of things that the idea of "whiteness" or "privilege" somehow disappeared? And does it make any kind of logical or psychological or theatrical sense to link those stories to what happened in London in 1710? And if so, how do I do it?

Another way of thinking about it: Somehow, over time, people figured out how to act––how to talk, how to stand, sit, walk, carry themselves, how to dress, how to carry a certain set of expressions on their faces, how near or far to put themselves in relation to other people depending on who or what those other people were––in ways that would say to themselves and to others, "This is who I am," and "This is what I think is normal," and "This is me being important." All of these behaviors couldn't exist in a vacuum. They all had to be performed in relation to something else and someone else, someone who was different and less important than they were. The point was to distinguish oneself from others in the way one behaved. And it was important to carry an image in one's head of what it was that one was trying so hard not to be. The clearer that negative image was, the more positive one could be about how to embody a sense of who one was. At one time, the clearest and most significant negative/positive dichotomy was "heathen/Christian"; eventually it turned into "black/white" (which had the advantage of being obvious, on the surface, on the skin). The more successful one was in life--success being measured in different ways but almost always in terms of the accumulation of wealth and privilege--the more the particular way of behavior was seen as desirable and as "normal".

So that's a nice story, nice because it's simple. But of course the point of this all is that no story is simple and there isn't just one story. All those words I've just used in the paragraph above are problematic, are contested, are capable of multiple meanings depending on who's talking. So how do I stage that.

Maybe one way is to take those "stories" I listed (incompletely) in my first long paragraph, think of them as scenes, moments, episodes, or emblems, and throw them together in different ways without worrying about what the "whole story" of the piece is. Seek out contradictions. Let the spectators decide what the story is.

5/10
EXCERPT FROM: A note to the community about plans for Warren Wilson Theatre:


. . . I will begin assembling a group to start preliminary work on a production to be performed at the end of the fall semester (people can certainly participate in both projects). This project does not yet have a final name, but it will involve an investigation into the history of the concept of race in America. I'm particularly interested in looking at the ways we perform our racial identities (for me, that means my white identity) and how these identities came to be. That's a huge topic, so I plan to focus the production around an incident that took place in London in 1710, when a group of four "Indian Kings" (actually, sachems from the Iroquois Confederation in North America) made a sensational visit to London, during which the were presented at the court of Queen Anne and visited several theatrical productions. A number of plays were presented at the time of their visit; they certainly attended Davenant's popular adaption of Macbeth, as well as a puppet show. A play they may have seen, which is most significant for our purposes, was a theatrical adaption of Aphra Behn's novella, Oroonoko, or: The Royal Slave, her story of an African prince captured and transported to to the English colony of Surinam with his wife, Imoinda (who is black in the original story and white in Thomas Southerne's stage adaption, interestingly enough). Other plays they may have seen include John Dryden's heroic tragedy, The Indian Emperour, or: The Conquest of Mexico, and Behn's comedy The Widdow Ranter, which is set in Jamestown in the Virginia colony. It's the intersection of the English, African, and American Indian races at a particular point in our early history, represented by the characters in these plays as well as the audiences attending them, that I think is significant and interesting to explore. At this point, I don't know the shape or style of the production we will create, though I'm hoping it will involve video and a good deal of music. Carol Howard, Chair of the English Department, is serving as dramaturg for the project, and with her help I expect to have a working script in the fall which will serve as a framework. I invite students and community members of all races to join me in this project.

5/1 Thoughts



Opening image of Orr's Empire on the English Stage: Charles II dressed in Persian robes. The point is not that he styles himself as and identifies with "oriental" cultures, but that he wears them because they are exotic, they are "other", and so he is performing/affirming his identity as different from "exotic" cultures. There is a way to use this. (It's similar to Charles II dressing in drag in "Stage Beauties"--he can do it because he's not a woman.)


OK: I'm reading this material trying to understand how the people (English people) were fashioning their cultural identities as white people, if they were. They are writing, performing, watching Dryden, Behn, and others (later I'll get to the fact that the Iroquois are watching them do this while performing their own cultural identities). But if the point is to explore how we Americans came by our identity as white people, then why am I looking at what people were doing in London in 1680s-1710s? There were already plenty of colonists from England in the Americas, and they (if I can generalize) already seemed to perceive themselves as different from the Londoners. And the Londoners certainly perceived them as different--and as inferior. If you take Behn's colonists seriously in The Widdow Ranter (and we're not meant to, at least not the Council members), the colonists perceived themselves as quite superior (see the drunken party scene where they discuss "matters of state"). So does that mean that important elements of the white American identity are already developing separately from white English identity? It would seem so. But does that mean that the identity taking form in London is negligible? Not necessarily.

So what should I be looking at? How are the colonists (Virginia, New England, and elsewhere) performing their own cultural identities? Where's the evidence?

Am I searching for the roots of Anglo-American white identity as it is performed in the whole circum-Atlantic theatre (Roach)? Or am I looking for something more specific?

What was happening in the "northern" colonies in 1710? I come back to the idea that King Philip's War was crucial...

Also Bacon's Rebellion: see this PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p274.html Good for lots of over-simplified information, such as:
"Bacon's Rebellion demonstrated that poor whites and poor blacks could be united in a cause. This was a great fear of the ruling class -- what would prevent the poor from uniting to fight them? This fear hastened the transition to racial slavery. " http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p274.html

And this:

"The status of blacks in Virginia slowly changed over the last half of the 17th century. The black indentured servant, with his hope of freedom, was increasingly being replaced by the black slave.
"In 1705, the Virginia General Assembly removed any lingering uncertainty about this terrible transformation; it made a declaration that would seal the fate of African Americans for generations to come...
"All servants imported and brought into the Country...who were not Christians in their native Country...shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion...shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master...correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction...the master shall be free of all punishment...as if such accident never happened."
The code, which would also serve as a model for other colonies, went even further. The law imposed harsh physical punishments, since enslaved persons who did not own property could not be required to pay fines. It stated that slaves needed written permission to leave their plantation, that slaves found guilty of murder or rape would be hanged, that for robbing or any other major offence, the slave would receive sixty lashes and be placed in stocks, where his or her ears would be cut off, and that for minor offences, such as associating with whites, slaves would be whipped, branded, or maimed.
"For the 17th century slave in Virginia, disputes with a master could be brought before a court for judgement. With the slave codes of 1705, this no longer was the case. A slave owner who sought to break the most rebellious of slaves could now do so, knowing any punishment he inflicted, including death, would not result in even the slightest reprimand. "

And this:
Royal African Company established
1672
"Long before the establishment of Jamestown, English captains had made occasional profits in the rising trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bur during the early years of the 17th century, the English generally viewed the trading of human lives with a certain degree of contempt. By 1640, however, with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the corresponding need for labor, the views of the English had changed. They, too, would become regular participants in the trade.
"In 1660, the English government chartered a company called the "Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa." At first the company was mismanaged, but in 1663 it was reorganized. A new objective clearly stated that the company would engage in the slave trade. To the great dissatisfaction of England's merchants, only the Company of Royal Adventurers could now engage in the trade.
'The Company did not fare well, due mainly to the war with Holland, and in 1667, it collapsed. But out of its ashes emerged a new company: The Royal African Company. Founded in 1672, the Royal African Company was granted a similar monopoly in the slave trade. Between 1680 and 1686, the Company transported an average of 5,000 slaves a year. Between 1680 and 1688, it sponsored 249 voyages to Africa.
"Still, rival English merchants were not amused. In 1698, Parliament yielded to their demands and opened the slave trade to all. With the end of the monopoly, the number of slaves transported on English ships would increase dramatically -- to an average of over 20,000 a year.
"By the end of the 17th century, England led the world in the trafficking of slaves."

Bacon's Rebellion, effects of (excerpt from Wikipedia):
Historian Helen Hill Miller has pointed out that one of the most important reforms made during Bacon's government was the recognition of the right to bear arms, so that the common man could defend himself from hostile Indians, but also so that he may oppose a despotic regime. After Berkeley's resumption of power, this right was one of the first he repealed. She suggests it was Bacon's Rebellion that may have served as one of the major motivations for later colonists' intense appreciation of the right to bear arms.
Because it was the poor, white farmers, many of whom were formerly indentured servants, who attacked, a new social hierarchy with controlled persons devalued even more than the poor whites was needed. Thus, many easterners saw slavery as a viable option for minimizing the number of future rebels and satisfying these rebels by making them not the lowest people in society. Thus was born a racially defined, permanent form of slavery.
On the surface, Bacon's Rebellion was a power struggle between two diametrically opposed personalities that almost destroyed Jamestown. An historical analysis of the uprising in the context of New World colonization reveals the beginnings of America's quest for independence.