Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

S. Salih

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136913211
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study considers cultural representations of "brown" people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and "histories," Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it's possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of "mixed" identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss "mixed race" people.

1
Introduction

The Mulatto in Law and Literature

[The bourgeoisie] must be seen … as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and the body … [T]he bourgeoisie … looked to its progeny and the health of its organism when it laid claim to a specific body. The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex. (Foucault, 1990: 124)

[T]he social regulation of race emerges not simply as another, fully separable domain of power from sexual difference or sexuality, but … its “addition” subverts the monolithic workings of the heterosexual imperative … The symbolic–that register of regulatory ideality—is also and always a racial industry, indeed the reiterated practice of racializing interpellations … Especially at those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity, the “threat” of homosexuality takes on a distinctive complexity. (Butler, 1993: 18)

I

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the mulatto was, among other things, a legal entity. Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Jamaica (1769) cites an ‘An Act to secure the Freedom of Elections, and directing the Proceedings in the Choice of Members to serve in Assemblies in this Island; to qualify Persons elected to serve in future Assemblies in this Island; and to ascertain who shall be deemed Mulattoes for the future’ (Acts, 1769: 1.179). Enfranchisement was partly a matter of descent—which we would probably now refer to as ‘race’–and the various levels of descent were determined by statute. For this reason perhaps, the tenth clause of this Act is quite clear on the matter:

… for the better ascertaining who shall be deemed Mulattoes within the Intent and Meaning of this Act, be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That no Person who is not above Three Degrees removed in a lineal Descent from the Negroe Ancestor exclusive, shall be allowed to vote or poll in Elections; and no one shall be deemed a Mulatto after the Third Generation, as aforesaid, but that they shall have all the Privileges and Immunities of his Majesty’s white Subjects of this Island, provided they are brought up in the Christian Religion. (Acts, 1769: I.179)

Clearly, there is nothing self-evident or ‘natural’ about ‘who shall be deemed Mulattoes.’ The point at which one passes from brown into white seems arbitrary–why three degrees removed from the negro ancestor? Why not two, or four? So we may refer to ‘mulatto-ness’ and whiteness as allocations rather than identities, although they may well be identity-forming, since they govern who may vote, who may give evidence against whom, and who is entitled to the other privileges and immunities automatically granted to His Majesty’s (white) subjects. In this same volume of Acts, we find that individuals may acquire racial status through the passage of private Acts granting mulattoes ‘the same Rights and Privileges with English Subjects born of white Parents.’¹ So in 1738, Susanna Augier, ‘a Mullatto [sic] Woman, of the Parish of Kingston,’ must have appeared before the Jamaican House of Assembly, or (more likely) hired a lawyer to appear for her, in order that she and her two children might heretofore enjoy the rights and privileges of Englishmen, born of white ancestors (Acts, 1769: 1.15). If passed, such Private Acts released the petitioners from legal disabilities which were intended ‘to prevent the Inconveniences arising from the exhorbitant [sic] Grants and Devises, made by White Persons to Negroes, and the Issue of Negroes, and to restrain and limit such Grants and Devises’ (2.60). Such disabilities were intended to ensure that property remained in the control of white people, and was not passed down to members of a burgeoning class of increasingly indeterminate individuals termed ‘mulattoes’ or ‘people of colour’:

And whereas it is the Policy of every good Government to restrain Individuals from disposing of Property to the particular Prejudice and Detriment of their Heirs and Relations, and to the Injury and Damage of the Community in general; May it please your most Sacred Majesty that it may be enacted, be it therefore enacted … [that] no Lands, Negro, Mulattoes, or other Slaves, Cattle, Stock, Money or other real or personal Estate, in this Island whatsoever, shall be given, granted to, or declared to be in Trust for, or to the Use of, or devised by any white Person to any Negro whatever, or to any Mulatto or other Person not being their own Issue born in lawful Wedlock, and being the Issue of a Negro, and deemed [sic] a Mulatto, according to the true intent and Meaning of an Act, intitled An Act to Secure the Freedom of Elections … (2.60).

I cite these Acts to illustrate what is a simple but perhaps counterintuitive point: namely, that ‘mulatto’ was not primarily an ‘identity’ in the way ‘identity’ is often currently understood, but a legally-enacted, legally-regulated entity–a category really–a set of prescriptions and proscriptions which could be enforced or lifted as the legislature saw fit. Reading such Acts from a twenty-first-century perspective, we might assume that they have an ontological valence, since it may now be our default to infer some kind of group identity and/or attendant lived experience when we come across terms such as ‘mulatto,’ ‘negro,’ ‘white.’ How or whether Susanna Augier and her children felt and experienced themselves as legally-defined ‘mulatto’ or ‘white’ has not been recorded. Obviously, their feelings and thoughts were not a matter for the law. Accordingly, my emphasis throughout this study will be on Acts and acts rather than affect, on legal enactments, cultural expressions and the relationship between what Foucault would call discursive formations, principally the law, fiction and non-fiction (Foucault, 1972: 38).

If it is difficult now to imagine someone petitioning in court to be awarded the legal status of whiteness, it may be because we have grown accustomed to emphasizing–perhaps even to a degree lending credence to–the cultural narratives which have accreted around terms such as ‘negro,’ ‘mulatto’ and ‘white’ as the centuries have passed. So we may assume that the terms ‘negro’ etc., are identities with some kind of self-evident ontological reality and affective content. I would like to suspend such assumptions for the duration, at least as far as is possible, in order to approach these terms more nearly as they may have been deployed in the particular context I am discussing: that is, primarily (although not uniquely) as legal categories that were juridically enacted. It may be that this is to emphasize form rather than content– although of course I shall not disregard the latter–in order to examine the juridical, legal, jurisprudential, as well as discursive and disciplinary aspects of racial status and (eventually) race in specific geographical locales and historical moments. I understand that I may be working against the contemporary academic grain, which has frequently sought to uncover and examine affect, interiority, the psychic operations of racial identity, whether of the oppressor or the oppressed (to put it in crude dialectical terms). Such studies are useful, but instead of pursuing this strand of investigation, I am going to focus on what you might call the externals of racial status in discourse, the determinations of race by statute, along with cultural representations of race. I take colonial statute as the starting-point for a set of questions which, while I believe they are worth posing, may well remain intractable. In pursuing this line of thinking, I am inspired by and indebted to scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler and David Scott who have produced important and influential accounts of the workings of colonial power. Scott, for example, calls for a move away from a postcolonial ‘decentering’ of Europe to a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities and projects through which colonialism inserted itself, in all its varied forms, into the lives of the colonized (Scott, 1999: 26). He writes: ‘even if as a system of representation “race” can be shown to operate across the colonial period, what also needs to be understood and specified is when and through what kind of political rationality it becomes inserted into subject-constituting social practices, into the formation … of certain kinds of “raced” subjectivities.’ What, asks Scott, are the specific power-effects of ‘race’? (Scott, 1999: 30; emphasis in text). In any historical moment, what is colonial power targeting, and for what project? What is colonial power’s structure as it inserts itself in and constitutes the colonial domain? ‘These important questions … have to do with the nature of the terrain available for the colonized to produce their responses’ (Scott, 1999: 31).

As Scott implies, it would certainly be simplistic to sketch a neat chronology in which the rule of force is replaced by the rule of law, and yet I think it is worth considering the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what we might call subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law (Scott, 1999: 25). If it is obvious and true to say that people make laws, it is also obvious and true to say that laws ‘make people,’ specifically in this context, by determining who shall be deemed mulatto, who shall be deemed white, and so on. What might these and other laws tell us about the genealogy of race, racial taxonomy and racial categorization? As Paul Gewirtz suggests, laws may be regarded as artefacts that reveal a culture; they are not just policies that shape the culture (Brooks and Gewirtz, 1996: 3). If what we now call ‘mixed-race identity’ was instantiated by and in statute (I will not risk the conjecture that ‘mixed race’ was inaugurated as a legal category), then it is surely worth investigating the cultural narratives that accreted around, or you might say, filled this discursive structure in the non-legal texts of the past. We might also consider the role legal and non-legal discourse may have played in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts. How are other bodies and identities–e.g. black, white–discursively disciplined? Is it possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions, are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining? And more broadly, what do contemporary formulations of ‘mixed’ identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations (Scott might call them ‘problem-spaces’), in other words, to what extent do we perpetuate the disciplinary discursive structures of the past in our contemporary notions and formations of ‘mixed’ identity?²

My aim is to contribute to recent histories of the postcolonial present (to borrow Scott’s phrase) by thinking about how a discursive formation (‘the mulatto’) moved from legal category to culturally-recognized identity–i.e. from ‘mulatto’ as legally-designated and legally-enacted, to ‘mixed race’ as type and as claimed and lived ontology (Scott, 1999: 15). Bourdieu might characterize this as the shift from orthodoxy to doxa, i.e. from the processes of normalization to the taking for granted of a norm that is ultimately so entrenched that it seems invisible as normalized entity (Bourdieu, 1987: 848). Foucault similarly tracks the coming into being of the ‘human species’ through the progress from law to norm to normalizing society (Foucault, 1990: 144, 146).³ ‘Because the subjective necessity and self-evidence of the commonsense world are validated by the objective consensus on the sense of the world, what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying’ Bourdieu writes in his earlier text, Outline of a Theory of Practice: ‘the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition: customary law is content to enumerate specific applications of principles which remain implicit and unformulated, because unquestioned’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 167). Bourdieu implies that what he calls ‘the doxic relation to the social world’ is absolute and unanimous because the question of doxa’s legitimacy is unrecognized. The undiscussed is brought into discussion through critique, which in turn is precipitated by crisis. For Bourdieu, that crisis is the class struggle whereby the dominated reject the social classifications that are imposed on them and ‘undertake the work of conscious systematization and express rationalization which marks the passage from doxa to orthodoxy’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 168, 169). We might substitute Bourdieu’s ‘class struggle’ with ‘emancipation,’ in which case it would be useful to chart the discursive ‘crises’ which, over the last two hundred years or so (i.e. since the abolition of slavery) have given rise to critiques of orthodoxy and the rejection of prevailing norms. However, ‘the passage from doxa to orthodoxy’ is not what concerns us here: rather, we will be scrutinizing the prior passage–from orthodoxy to doxa, or in other words, the processes of normalization and the consolidation of norms.

This may have a very broad reach: we are not just talking about ‘mulatto,’ ‘black,’ white,’ after all, since when we begin to probe these terms we inevitably come up against the contingency of ‘the human.’ This is why I want to trace notions of legal and non-legal personhood as they are set down in legal and non-legal colonial texts, and this is why I will pay close attention to the conjuncture of personhood, race and humanity as it appears in legal texts and in geographical and chronological cultural imaginaries–principally, Jamaica, Britain, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And throughout this study I shall be particularly attentive to those moments when cultural expressions such as prose fictions appear to be complementing the law, or even as it seems, effecting a kind of disciplinary work of their own.

II

This book will be largely concerned to historicize the production of race, sex and sexuality in a variety of textual domains, including fiction, nonfiction, statute and legal discourse, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Foucault’s chronologies are always contestable, but his suggestion that bourgeois sex was inseparable from blood, and that the (presumably white) bourgeois body laid claim to specific incarnations of sex, reproduction and race, informs one of the operating premises of my own study: namely, that these cannot be discussed in isolation from each other. Hence perhaps the inverted commas around Butler’s ‘addition’ in the second of this chapter’s epigraphs, since as she implies, socially regulated race is not an appendage to socially regulated sexual difference or sexuality. Rather, hegemonic sexuality, hegemonic race, and hegemonic reproduction are all part of the same ‘industry,’ the word suggesting the degree to which sexuality, sex, race, reproduction are indeed the products of a culture.

The domain of power on which I shall focus is a colonial one; in particular, I am going to discuss the production of sex, sexuality and race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textual spheres with regard to the mulatto/ the mixed-race person/the person of colour/the brown person. As I have written, my focus will be on Britain and Jamaica, although Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, in which the brown protagonist’s mother is from Barbados, not Jamaica; I think the novel is still a relevant subject of discussion here, since it is Midwinter’s ‘brownness’ and negro provenance, so perceived, not the country from which his mother came, which are central preoccupations in this novel, and as I will argue in Chapter 4, the portrayal of Midwinter is generic in some of the ways I have already suggested.

The multiply-named ‘brown person’ may not be considered in isolation from contemporaneous productions of whiteness, blackness, heterosexuality, homosexuality and what we might now, more broadly, call ‘queerness.’ Other vectors, such as class and religion, are also important, although they will receive less attention here. The mulatto (I denude her of inverted commas, but you may be sure they hover around this, and related sobriquets) is a likely object of analysis because her perceived racial indeterminacy, ambivalent sexuality and uncertain sexual status, are routinely textualized, as though it is somehow important to press her into (legal, non-legal) texts.⁴ Such descriptive efforts seem highly symptomatic, if only because of their frequency, and they may tell us much about the racial, sexual, heterosexual imperatives underwriting a particular culture in a particular time and place. Further, the way contemporary writers and readers parse the representations of the past invariably reveals our own preoccupations and vested interests, by which I mean to imply that our analyses (mine no less than anyone else’s, no doubt) are in themselves symptomatic, and may consolidate or perhaps even confirm and re-produce categories of identity as they pertain to race, sex and sexuality. And so as Stoler suggests, we need to remain alert to the differences between a reappraisal of the colonial order of things as a politically engaged strategy, and the kind of scholarship at a safe distance that is a retreat from the political exigencies of the present and a voyeurism of the past (Stoler, 1995: 198).

I am thinking about race, sex and sexuality as discursive formations, stories that were told and which we continue to tell ourselves. When you find that a given culture is repeating the same or a similar story time after time and text ...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
• Contents
• Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race
• 3 Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century
• 4 Mulattos in the Contact Zone
• Coda Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index