Roundtable by J. Ereck Jarvis
Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Ap-proaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.14
Cite: Jarvis, Ereck J. 2021. “Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Ap-proaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 45-47.
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Recently, in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, I regularly refer to Enwhitenmen’, a term I fashioned, though I deny any claim to its origination or ownership. The pun marks the maintenance of patriarchy and the development of white supremacy implicit in Enlightenment: the equation of “Universal reason” and “specific European logic . . . form[s] part of the unspoken epistemological matrix of European superiority, the Enlightenment’s legacy, a conflation that helped secure the hierarchical racial order of the imperial world.”1 I connect persistent racist colonizing influences of Enlightenment to my classroom by noting that university—our institution’s type, part of its name—gestures at “Universal reason” and that, for example, literary study at our school is almost exclusively in English (primarily British or American). I foreground the past racism of, say, Macaulay’s 1835 minutes on education as legacy of Enwhitenmen’ in its assertions that dialects of India “contain neither literary nor scientific information” and that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”2 Yet, I reenact Macaulay’s ideas institutionally and disciplinarily; I reinscribe the faux universality of English. Perhaps my use of Enwhitenmen’ as a critical term playfully invokes and promotes code-meshing, the espousal of multidialectalism particularly through the intentional blending of dialects in formal and informal speech to “reduce language prejudice and promote the power of language as opposed to the codes of power.”3 Yet, my code-meshing and critical invocation of it as a white cis-male professor are not radical or transformative articulations. Vershawn Ashanti Young explains, “The big deal is that for white people, it’s okay [to code-mesh]. But when minorities do it . . . we say it isn’t . . . . We tell them that, in order for them to be successful, they have to turn off and deny a large part of themselves.”4 Obstinately tied up with Enwhitenmen’, the literary education I impart risks what Ross Gay protests as “one of the objectives of popular culture . . . to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness . . . to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering.”5
The Woman of Colour works to unsettle this conflation. Read alongside Dominique’s critical introduction and his “A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose,” the novel functions as one component of emergent literary history coincident with but divergent from Enwhitenmen’.6 The titular Olivia Fairfield demonstrates a self-possession bequeathed from her mother, Marcia, upon whose character she “love[s] to dwell” (55). An African woman enslaved by Olivia’s father, Marcia taught Mr. Fairfield to respect the humanity of Black peoples before dying in childbirth. Olivia, who denies her own heroic potential later in the novel, explains, “It was from my father that I adopted this opinion of my mother . . . and learned to venerate this sable heroine (for heroine I must call her)” (55). Such regard for her mother supports Olivia in advancing what Brigitte Fielder describes as a “radical articulation of mixed-race women’s alignment with enslaved people . . . without ignoring the privileged position in which our woman of color is situated.”7
At “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-In,” Fielder implicitly extended this argument. She applied “Black futurity” to other eighteenth-century works, positing ways in which Black authors from the period—constricted by the racist limitations of British society—imagine anti-racist reconfigurations, Black futures, through their writings.8 Fielder suggested that that eighteenth-century “Black futurity” is coterminous or co-operative with Afrofuturism, standardly recognized as a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. Anticipating Fielder’s intervention, Danielle Fuentes Morgan asserts, “The term [Afrofuturism] itself is malleable because it treats these traditional realms of time and space, of identity and context, as malleable—it practices what it preaches. Past experience is contextualized through future insights, the future holds the possibilities of the past, and both influence the present.”9
Olivia Fairfield then operates not only as a “radical articulation” or “Black Atlantic figure” but also as a persistent participant in Black futurity.10 Olivia herself acknowledges this participation when, following the discovery that her husband’s previous wife remains alive, she departs from her newly established residence in New Park: “Shall I not go on, upheld by an approving conscience, and the bright hope of futurity?” (148). Olivia invokes a Christian futurity that is also necessarily a Black futurity. In her Christian devotion, she follows the “glorious example” of her mother whose race is reinforced in the identification of her strength “though an African slave.” Olivia’s discourse here bridges two instances when she actively applies herself to Black futurity: her anti-racist lesson for young George, son of Mrs. Leticia Merton, and the vocation she pursues in willfully returning to Jamaica at the novel’s conclusion—“ameliorating the situation . . . instructing the minds . . . mending the morals of our poor blacks” (188). In her return to Jamaica, she enacts moral justice, which her father, agent of Enwhitenmen’, “could not adopt” (55).
In a current course considering the bildungsroman and nineteenth-century British imperialism, The Woman of Colour fits neatly alongside Mansfield Park. Yet, it also destabilizes the components of the bildungsroman: subjectivity, national-historical time, and the nation “as the ultimate horizon of cultural identity and the largest unit to which one can bear any meaningful moral responsibility”—all constituents of Enwhitenmen’.11 What is Black-historical time? How does one read “human emergence . . . on the border between two epochs” when the latter continues to emerge presently?12 Olivia’s Black futurity cannot diminish the infinitude of suffering and destruction faced by Black peoples past and present. It reveals a counterhistory of Black women “striving for the future [they] want to see, right now, in the present,” a counternarrative “as imperative rather than subjunctive.”13 Such an imperative connects critically with the present in which we encounter it: it inquires the extent to which Olivia’s Black futurity has been realized. It likewise insists that current creation and endorsement of Black futurity are inextricable from those in The Woman of Colour.
ENDNOTES
[1] Anna Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 215. See also Justin E. H. Smith, Race and Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 9. For maintenance of patriarchy, see, for instance, Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21–22.
[2] Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Indian Education: Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835,” in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 719–730: 721–722. On the relationships between knowledge, nation, national language, and colonialism, see Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5 and ch. 6.
[3] Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Coda: The Power of Language” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018), 153–156; 156. Over the last decade, code-meshing— embrace of “multidialectism not monodialectism”— has emerged especially in the fields of composition, TESOL, and education as a pedagogical alternative to code-switching (A. Suresh Canagara, “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 57, no. 4 [June 2006]: 586–619; 598). Code-switching asserts that students who grow up speaking undervalued languages and dialects, such as African American English or Black British English, should be taught to shift into dominant or mainstream English in formal contexts to better access power. According to Young, “code-switching is a racialized teaching method that manufactures linguistic segregation and unwittingly supports it in society” (Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Linguistic Double Consciousness” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy [Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018], 55–65: 58). Code switching does not promote anti-racism but rather directs racial minorities to avoid racist judgment, thereby reenforcing white supremacy.
[4] Vershawn Ashanti Young in conversation as quoted in Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, “Code-Meshing and Responsible Education” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018), 87–93: 89.
[5] Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019), 220. Commenting on the television series Being Bobby Brown, Gay here writes in an expressly American context. In recontextualizing his words, I do not intend to collapse racial and ethnic distinctions, but rather I hope momentarily to extend the meaning of Black to include the Blackness of students in my American classroom along with an earlier conception of the term as “a conscious political rather than a racial identification, used to forge allegiances between African and Indian anticolonial liberation activists” (Heidi Safia Mirza with Yasmin Gunaratnam, “‘the branch on which I sit’: reflections on black British feminism,” Feminist Review, no. 108 (2014): 125–133: 127).
[6] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008). All subsequent citations will be noted parenthetically.
[7] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185: 173.
[8] Brigitte Fielder, “18th-century African American Literature and Community” (lecture, “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-in”, UTSA Department of English and Mills College Center for Faculty Excellence, Zoom, August 6, 2020). Cited with generous permission of Fielder. Part of this work is forthcoming in her “Early Black Futures,” African American Literature: In Transition, 1750–2015, Volume I, 1750–1800, ed. Rhondda Thomas. Cambridge University Press.
[9] Danielle Fuentes Morgan, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Afrofuturism and Black Histories in Neo-Slave Narration.” Journal of Science Fiction 2, no. 3 (July 2018): 19–33: 19–20.
[10] Fielder, “Woman,” 173, 175.
[11] James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century Novels (Princeton: Princeton University, 2005), 47. On The Woman of Colour as bildungsroman, see Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour,” Women’s Studies 45 (2016): 613–623. In Barnett-Woods’s thoughtful analysis, I resist her reading of the novel in strictly national terms.
[12] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59: 23.
[13] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.
