The Complexion of Race

Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Roxann Wheeler

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780812217223
• eBook ISBN: 9780812200140
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition's success as being "Black as Coal." Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: "here, thro' Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men." The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period.Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment's scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be "redeemed" by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler's eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Chapter 1

Christians, Savages, and Slaves

From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic

Christianity has so long prevailed in these Parts of the World [Caribbean and American colonies], that there are no Advantages or Privileges now peculiar to it, to distinguish it from any other Sect or Party; and therefore whatever Liberties the Laws indulge to us, they do it to us as English-Men, and not as Christians.

— LORD BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts (1711)¹

An analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its critical tradition exemplifies the way that a theory of multiplicity helps to recover the emergent character of race in the early eighteenth century. Because skin color became a more important racial category to the British only later in the eighteenth century, a color binary of black and white does not help to elucidate British reactions to other Europeans, Moors, West Africans, or native Caribbeans or, indeed, their representation of them. Of course, Robinson Crusoe does not perfectly reflect English culture or economic investment in the first two decades of the century, but it does present some fascinating ideological dilemmas conjured up by eighteenth-century articulations of human difference and colonial power relations.

Because Robinson Crusoe marshals categories of difference, such as savagery, slavery, and Christianity, it appears to define precisely the boundaries between people in various racial terms and thereby elicits a picture of European superiority. Despite this apparent precision, the novel has fostered readerly confusion about the status of the Caribbean islander Friday, the Spanish Moor Xury, and even the English Crusoe in its many subsequent interpretations. Indeed, the novel’s difficulty in situating Friday in a stable category of cannibal, slave, or servant reflects a cultural uncertainty about the signifiers of racial difference in the early eighteenth century and their significance, an idea seldom explored in critical assessments of Defoe’s novel or other early eighteenth-century literature. Beginning with a recent interpretation of Robinson Crusoe emphasizes the problems that arise when an analysis seeks to confine an eighteenth-century colonial text to a color binary informed by current notions of race.

* * *

In 1992, when Toni Morrison introduced Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality and sought to make sense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s position in relation to racial politics in the United States, she chose a comparison to Robinson Crusoe. Morrison identifies Friday’s subservience to Crusoe as a particularly appropriate analogy for Thomas’s relationship to the Bush administration.² Overall, because her attention is focused on Thomas, the effect of Morrison’s comments is to homogenize race to a rigid binary that divorces the literary text from its cultural context. The result is a narrative about racial relations in Robinson Crusoe that seems remarkably contemporary.

Morrison’s “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac” juxtaposes Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings with scenes from Robinson Crusoe. Her critique of Thomas and the Bush administration is first introduced in the epigraphs, which include comments by Thomas and Anita Hill as well as the scene in which Friday bends his head to Crusoe’s foot. Arguing that the significance of the hearings is, in part, the interpretation of “history” and suggesting that the Hill/Thomas investigation was “the site of the exorcism of critical national issues” by being “situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people,” Morrison’s essay deftly unveils the way that U.S. racial politics played out in 1992, exposing the structure of racial discrimination in which both Thomas and Hill were placed by the media and other Americans.³ Morrison contends that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the media coverage of the hearings positioned the two main players within a discourse derived from slavery that featured two stereotyped responses of slaves to their masters—codependency and rebellion—or the “torn” (Clarence Thomas) and the “savage” (Anita Hill). In her interpretation of the hearings and the aftermath, Morrison shows the ease with which this binary was adopted and claims that the hearings were a process “to reorder these signifying fictions [‘natural servant’ and ‘savage demon’]” (xvi). Not surprisingly, perhaps, these terms are the very terms in which Robinson Crusoe works out Friday’s position, but in a way that is obscured by Morrison’s invocation of them.

A comparison of Morrison’s recollection of Robinson Crusoe with the novel itself reveals how she overlaid a late nineteenth-century racial sensibility on it. This change enables the racial dynamic between the English Crusoe and the Caribbean islander Friday to characterize Clarence Thomas’s position in relation to the Bush administration. Beginning the comparison between the present and the past, Morrison spotlights Friday: “On a Friday, Anita Hill graphically articulated points in her accusation of sexual misconduct. On the same Friday Clarence Thomas answered . . . those charges. And it was on a Friday in 1709 when Alexander Selkirk found an ‘almost drowned Indian’ on the shore of an island upon which he had been shipwrecked. Ten years later Selkirk’s story would be immortalized by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe” (xxiii).⁴ Morrison’s version of the novel’s origin is mistaken, but such a confusion, especially about Friday, has been part of the novel’s critical history since its initial publication. First, it is arguable whether narratives of shipwrecks on Juan Fernandez Island in the South Seas are the basis for Crusoe’s Caribbean island. There were two instances of solitary individuals on Juan Fernandez Island that Morrison’s version conflates. One involved a Guyanese man, the Mosquito Indian Will, who was not shipwrecked but left behind accidentally by his shipmates in 1681; the other was the Scotsman Alexander Selkirk, who was not shipwrecked either but abandoned by his captain in 1704. Thus, Selkirk did not find an Indian, drowned or otherwise. Will had been rescued by another buccaneer ship in 1684.

Transferring an Indian from Robinson Crusoe to Selkirk’s narrative creates space for a character Morrison refers to as a black, savage cannibal to replace the Caribbean native Friday in her recollection of Robinson Crusoe. Morrison has recalled a fiction of the fiction: “There [in Defoe’s novel] the Indian becomes a ‘savage cannibal’—black, barbarous, stupid, servile, adoring. . . . Crusoe’s narrative is a success story, one in which a socially, culturally, and biologically handicapped black man is civilized and Christianized—taught, in other words, to be like a white one” (xxiii). Notably, in this passage, Morrison superimposes a more recent conception of race on Robinson Crusoe.⁵ In the novel, Friday is not “black,” “stupid,” or considered “biologically handicapped” (xxiii), though I agree with Morrison that Friday is taught to behave like a white man, and a certain kind of white man—a servant. The stereotypical features that she lists are the products of mid-nineteenth-century racism and a North American, post-civil rights critique of the construction of race. They are also a measure of black power to act as proxy for all other oppressed groups. In the novel, the “savage” is not an African but a Caribbean islander, who is attached to a sociopolitical group with specific customs, religious and social beliefs, and rules of governance.⁶ The novel carefully depicts Friday in a way that it refuses to depict the other “savages.”

Morrison observes that the interaction between Crusoe and Friday takes place on Crusoe’s terms, not Friday’s, because of the way that power differences are structured by language use: “The problem of internalizing the master’s tongue is the problem of the rescued” (xxv). Commenting on Friday’s assimilation to Crusoe’s version of British culture, particularly the loss of his “mother tongue,” and the associated consequences of internalizing the norms of the master’s language, Morrison concludes that Thomas and Friday “are condemned . . . never to utter one single sentence understood to be beneficial to their original culture” (xxix). Of Clarence Thomas and his political allegiances, Morrison writes: “If the language of one’s culture is lost or surrendered, one may be forced to describe that culture in the language of the rescuing one. . . . It becomes easy to confuse the metaphors embedded in the blood language of one’s own culture with the objects they stand for. . . . One is obliged to cooperate in the misuse of figurative language, in the reinforcement of cliche, the erasure of difference, . . . the denial of history, . . . [and] the inscription of hegemony” (xxviii).⁷ Morrison’s critique of Thomas’s reinforcement of cliché and the resulting denial of history is applicable, in a different sense, to Morrison’s own erasure of the Caribbean Friday and to the association of blackness with servility. Substituting a black man for Friday in her recollection of Robinson Crusoe inadvertently repeats the material eradication of native Indian cultures (through disease and population manipulation as well as slaughter, despite their resistance, and, of course, through rewriting history) on a figurative level. This replacement also fails to articulate the historical connection between native Caribbean populations and African slaves, especially the forced introduction of African people to the Caribbean and mainland Americas as slaves to supplement a native labor force that Europeans could not adequately command or had destroyed. By making internalized racism seem eternal, Morrison’s greater truth about Clarence Thomas’s unthinking assimilation to hegemonic norms misses the historical difference I wish to untangle in this chapter.

Morrison emphasizes similarities between the past and the present. Her logic is reminiscent of the current political hegemony in the United States that encourages the construction of only one Other at a time. (Hence the confusion and general failure to find a way to discuss the ideological similarities between Thomas and Hill or the differences between a Caribbean Friday and an African one.) A corollary to acknowledging only one Other at a time is that if the black/white color binary breaks down, it tends to be in racist ways, such as in the construction of a “model minority.”⁸ An important implication is that, in general, only one group at a time is positioned as Other, marginalized, or disenfranchised from a white norm in the contemporary moment. Nevertheless, Morrison’s trenchant critique of dominant U.S. racial politics allows us to discern a troublesome aspect of the black/white binary: the way that race is made equivalent to blackness in the United States. Of course, the black/white opposition is never borne out in social reality, but it does constitute the metaphysics of present-day racism in the United States.

Despite my critique of Morrison’s substitutions and embellishments, that they appeared in 1992 is symptomatic of a relatively recent binary understanding of race. As I show below, a binary sensibility has largely informed critical attention to Robinson Crusoe and fostered cogent analyses of it. By also bringing a theory of multiplicity to bear on this material, I offer a more dynamic conception of early eighteenth-century ideas about human variety. Significant reasons for textual ambiguities about racial differences at this time include vast economic changes in the intensity of colonialism and a massive change in the population mixture of the Atlantic colonies. Robinson Crusoe harks back to the cataclysmic shift from a diversified subsistence-based or moderate profit economy to a single crop, profit-oriented economy dependent on African slaves that occurred first in the British West Indies. In fact, between about 1645 and 1665, the proportion of Europeans, Caribbean islanders, and African slaves changed dramatically, especially on Barbados, from one of European dominance in numbers on the settled islands to one of African majority in numbers.⁹ Robinson Crusoe conjures up older New World Others, however, and manifests a desire for European difference to be constructed in relation to Caribbean peoples.¹⁰

* * *

Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (1986) has been instrumental in framing Robinson Crusoe as a study of colonial discourse and in making visible the significance of cannibalism to constructions of European identity.¹¹ Hulme and other critics have tended to regard the novel primarily in its construction of European superiority, and certainly such an emphasis is warranted given that, overall, power relations in the Atlantic benefited Europeans. Most of this scholarship, however, has focused only on the island segment. My analysis links the Caribbean to other geographies of imperialism in the early eighteenth century and attends to the way that a theory of multiplicity, not simply difference, helps interpret the representation of the relations between the English Crusoe and the Spanish Moor Xury and between Crusoe and the Carib Friday.

In examining eighteenth-century discourses about savages, Christians, slaves, and servants, it appears that race as we understand it today did not fully anchor European perceptions of difference at this time and cannot analyze colonial relations adequately. Robinson Crusoe corresponds to a particular episode of the colonial process when practices were not justified by relatively seamless ideology. In this early stage of colonialism, the representation of racial differences was not as systematized as it became later in the century. Indeed, the novel reflects the fact that only some differences were belatedly cobbled together to justify European domination. To eighteenth-century Britons, savage and Christian were crucial concepts of difference, while only to a lesser extent were slavery and skin color relevant. In practice, of course, both skin color and slavery effectively distinguished others from Europeans in the colonies, but a coherent ideology had not yet emerged to match the de facto situation. As scholars are just beginning to explore, British slavery and colonial life were structured as much, if not more, by custom than by law, the latter of which worked on a need-to-have basis rather than on a strictly ideological one, especially until the slave trade and conditions of enslavement came under parliamentary scrutiny in the late 1780s. By emphasizing an interpretive practice based on the analysis of difference and multiplicity, it is possible to read Robinson Crusoe as a vindication of the European, specifically the British, colonial spirit and an exploration of its fissures.

Several colonial factors give impetus to the plot and align Crusoe indisputably on the colonizer’s side. For example, Robinson Crusoe rehearses the early stages of European colonial contact in the Atlantic twice, once in Brazil and then on the Caribbean island. Before Crusoe has even left Britain, the novel betrays its colonial underpinnings in Crusoe’s desire to improve his middling station in Britain through speculative trading schemes and sea voyages as well as in his ability to travel voluntarily to diverse parts of the world. On the island, his fear of bodily harm from the Caribbean islanders, the eventual necessity of eradicating the cannibals, and his desire to domesticate Friday all bespeak the imbrication of fear, violence, and optimism in forging an empire. All in all, the differences between Crusoe and the Others with whom he comes in contact establishes the superiority of enslaver to enslaved: the Africans he trades in, the Spanish Moor Xury whom he sells as a slave, and the Carib Friday whom he relegates to perpetual servitude.

In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, the hero travels between Britain, Africa, and Brazil. He encounters Moors, West Africans, the Morisco Xury, and other Europeans.¹² Initially, Crusoe’s desire for advancement beyond the station allotted to him propels the plot forward and takes him well beyond England’s borders. Crusoe’s wish for advancement materializes when he joins a trading expedition to Guinea: “That evil influence which carryed me first away from my father’s house, that hurried me into the wild and indigested notion of raising my fortune . . . whatever it was, presented the most unfortunate of all enterprises to my view; and I went on board a vessel bound to the coast of Africa.”¹³ Although Crusoe reiterates that his desire to travel and to amass wealth is inexplicable, a modern-day reader might explain these goals as a result of the unprecedented capital accumulation in Europe made possible through global trade and colonization from the sixteenth century onward. Expanded trade routes and new colonies stripped parts of what was called the “uncivilized” world of their natural and human resources and permanently altered those economies and ways of life to satisfy spiraling British consumer desire—including a desire for adventure and travel.

The novel establishes Crusoe’s method of rising in the world as possible because of a developed colonial labor force and because of the demands of trade. African trade, particularly in slaves, provides Crusoe’s capital and labor base for his profitable production of sugar in Brazil. Crusoe notes that by joining a slaving expedition, “This voyage made me both a sailor and a merchant.” The gold dust he brought back yielded him £300 in London, and “this filled me with those aspiring thoughts which have since so corn-pleated my ruin” (40). The even greater desire to increase this wealth leads to another African voyage, but Moorish pirates take him prisoner, and he is enslaved in Morocco. In North Africa, piracy fills the narrative function that the hurricane does in the Caribbean, “accidentally” situating Crusoe in a histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. The Empire of Climate: Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• 1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
• 2. Racializing Civility: Violence and Trade in Africa
• 3. Romanticizing Racial Difference: Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel
• 4. Consuming Englishness: On the Margins of Civil Society
• 5. The Politicization of Race: The Specter of the Colonies in Britain
• Epilogue. Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments