Roundtable by Mindy Lin
Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.5
Cite: Lin, Mindy. 2021. “Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 16-17.
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Etched onto the ocean-battered surface of Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, the year 1620 remains ingrained in the cultural and literary memories of over three centuries of American identity. As a collective imaginary, the cultural monolith of American national belonging partakes in a historical narrative that extends its roots far beyond the shores of the North American coast and into the fragmented, mobile histories of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. The notions of Anglo-centricity in the dominant discourse of the Enlightenment are challenged by the existence of an extensive anthology of literatures that echoes many of the transnational experiences of the colonial legacy through storied portrayals of pivotal transatlantic figures.
Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour, an anonymous novel about a mixed-race Jamaican heroine who must marry her white English cousin to retain her fortune, and the genealogical memories of the 1619 Project powerfully embody the voices of the oft-overlooked threads of Enlightenment prosperity—the plantations, the slave trade, and the fragmentation of people and communities—that characterize the timeline of New World discovery. Dating the history of the United States is an endeavor that necessitates a retelling of the stories that counter longstanding cultural narratives of white imperial dominancy. In the postcolonial context, apprehending the Enlightenment’s ideological narrative is a social imperative that necessitates the creation of literary spaces for the many Black men and women who embody Paul Gilroy’s vision of a “rhizomorphic, fractal” Atlantic.1
Literature communicates the enduring effects of centuries of transnational interaction, one replete with struggles against the hierarchies of social power enabled by racialized imperialism. Having witnessed the subjugation of her people under imperial conquest in The Woman of Colour, Olivia Fairfield implicates her cousin’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Merton, for her prejudiced view of Olivia’s Jamaican heritage. Olivia’s unfettered observations of slavery’s inhumanity emerges within her dialogue as she condemns the hypocrisy of colonization and impels Mrs. Merton to affirm the immorality of racist imperial practices: “The feelings of humanity, the principles of my religion, would lead me, as a Christian, I trust, to pray for the extermination of this disgraceful traffic, while kindred claims . . . would likewise impel me to be anxious for the emancipation of my more immediate brethren!”2 Likewise, the haunting poetries of the 1619 Project revolutionize modern perceptions of a nation born out of the ashes of a tragic colonial legacy; in each story is evidence of intergenerational trauma and systemic repression that speaks against privileging the colonizer’s narrative in our examinations of American history. Clint Smith writes in his poem, “I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families,”3 echoing the moving histories of people, communities, and nations that underwrite myths of a unified national identity. These declarations of transnational experience continue to resound the heterogeneity of resistances against the colonizer’s narrative and the salience of centering historically marginalized voices into the timeline of America’s inaugurating moments.
The imprints of racialized colonial ideologies remain embedded in the institutional workings of an American society that has historically privileged uncontested narrative portrayals of its conflicted past. It is the collective efforts of the many visionaries, scholars, and teachers of postcolonial methodology that inform future generations of the significance of revisiting historical experiences that speak against erasure. Contextualized in history and revived through mechanisms of postgenerational study, the literatures of colonialism continue to shape our understanding of the American identity as one partaking in intertwined discourses.
ENDNOTES
[1] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
[2] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007), 81.
[3] Clint Smith, “August 1619,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.
