Roundtable by Rebecca Anne Barr
From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.13
Cite: Barr, Rebecca Anne. 2021. “From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 41-44.
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In 2019–20, during the squalls of socioeconomic crisis that preceded the global pandemic, academics across the United Kingdom took industrial action to protest cuts to pensions, increases to workloads, and the increasing casualization of higher education. Before lockdown emptied universities, the escalating strike halted teaching in many places. Classrooms were quiet, picket lines less so. As precarity and casualization disproportionately affects Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) scholars, academic equality is also a racial issue.1 Writing on the tragic and untimely death of historian Thea Hunter, whose adjunct status deprived her of access to adequate health care, Adam Harris notes that casualized labor is “often described as akin to a form of slavery . . . [but] Thea, a scholar of rights, slavery, and freedom, would have [said] . . . that is not the case. It is more like the lowest rung in a caste system, the one that underrepresented minorities tend to call home.”2 If academia frequently relies on the labor of underpaid minorities, it trades on a phantasm of equal intellectual opportunities, which ironically helps sustain a reality of racialized hierarchies. Before America’s Black Lives Matter movement reignited a long-overdue reckoning with structural racism, issues of academic decolonization and British universities’ confrontation with the legacies of slavery, were combining to make 2020 an important moment to read The Woman of Colour.
As a Romantic-era fiction that satirizes the myth of enlightened Englishness and reveals the prevalence of white hostility, The Woman of Colour offered an ideal opportunity for a “teach out”: a learning event which analyzes a contemporary problem through an academic text.3 In its heroine, Olivia Fairfield, the novel concerns the living legacy of slavery and its transformative effect on romantic conventions. If romance threatens to “awaken a form of aesthetic or emotional response without a correspondent sense of responsibility,” Woman of Colour holds both its heroine and its reader to a rigorous sense of accountability.4 Systems of morality and pleasure exert competing pulls from the outset. Olivia’s religious conscience and “kindred claims” impel her to remain in Jamaica to proselytize and “meliorate” the enslaved. “But,” she laments, “my father willed it otherwise—Lie still then, rebellious and repining heart!”5 No “mere state machine,” her “heart revolts” (59) at the prospect of the marriage arranged by her white planter father. The projected union between Olivia and her cousin, Augustus Merton, aims at assimilating the financial and sexual products of Caribbean slavery into the libidinal system of (white) marriage: sentiment smoothing over violence.
Irrespective of professed benevolence, the novel shows how white paternalism brutalizes the dutiful protagonist: she is oppressed and estranged by both her filial obedience and her own desire. Olivia’s sanctioned love for Augustus proves inherently harmful. As Olivia’s mother, Marcia, is disavowed by the man she “loves,” so her daughter is likewise traduced by her husband, Augustus, who remains in thrall to the irradiating whiteness of his first wife, Angelina. Though she becomes besotted by Augustus’s goodness, Olivia is consistently aware of his ambivalence and the insufficiency of his desire, his distance, and lack of intimacy. His praise of Olivia’s “noble and dignified soul” palls beside his rapturously erotic reminiscence of Angelina’s “transparent skin of ivory” (102). Augustus’s rationalized acceptance of Olivia (and her dowry) bespeaks both a white savior complex and a fundamental incapacity for romantic reciprocity with a Black woman: “I must rescue her from a state of miserable dependence . . . my heart does not beat with the rapture of passion—How can I assail her with professions of love, whilst conscious that heart can never more feel that passion?” (102–104).6 As Western “economies of attraction . . . resemble more or less the economies of attraction of white supremacy,” Black and colored women are not merely deprecated but disposable.7 The novel thus illuminates the racial inequalities of love, providing an historical instance of what Averil Y. Clarke pungently calls “race-based romantic deprivation”: educated Black women marrying later and more rarely than their white peers and having fewer children because of adverse circumstance and reduced opportunity.8 These “symptoms of black women’s disadvantage in romance and marriage and racial inequality in the distribution of love” are clear in Olivia’s experience in England.9 Despite her superior intelligence and moral acuity, Olivia’s social position is marginal: as a wife, emotionally deprived; as a feme sole, subject to racist remarks and sexual objectification.
Despite her vulnerable status as a woman of color in England, Olivia attempts to assert “sexual citizenship”—that is, a claim to social protection from sexual violence and the liberty to choose whether to marry or reproduce.10 Since conventional romance “charts the heroine’s liberation from oppressive circumstances and the resolution of difference with a move into domesticity,” England should provide the locus for marital liberation.11 Instead, The Woman of Colour “rewrites the heterosexual love plot”: a Caribbean women’s “antiromance” which “rethinks alternative ways of belonging to the nation by shifting the focus to the sexual complexities of dwelling at home and abroad.”12 Once Augustus is reunited with the hyperfeminine Angelina, Olivia rejects a proposal from the milksop Honeywood. Quashing the prospect of interracial marriage and the consolations of sentiment, her decision also conveys a bracing skepticism about white men of feeling. But rather than tragedy or self-sabotage, Olivia’s refusal is resistance. The “Dialogue between the Editor and A Friend” robustly dismisses objections that the heroine ought to have received the hedonic dividends of romance. Having failed to “reward” Olivia “even with the usual meed of virtue—a husband!” the editor insists that “there is no situation in which the mind . . . may not resist itself against misfortune, and become resigned to its fate” (189, emphasis added).
Students’ responses to the ending confirm the continuing power the “happy ending” still exerts. Does the novel deliberately foreclose (Black) women’s sexuality, they ask, consigning Olivia to a sexless unhappily-ever-after in the West Indies? Here, I think, the novel challenges readers, asking us to take seriously the explicitly religious form of love and self-fulfillment Olivia elects. As Brigitte Fielder rightly argues, the “insistence on remaining single involves a radical reproductive choice, as women of color’s childbearing was often dictated (and even forced) within the white patriarchal system of enslavement. Olivia ultimately rejects the social reproduction of Englishness, whiteness, and empire, and embraces kinship with the African diaspora of the colonies.”13 But in its theological ultimatum, The Woman of Colour also poses a powerful argument for decolonial love.14 Defined by Joseph Drexler-Dreis as an expression of a faith which “calls and actualizes liberation,” decolonial love frees Olivia from love under the sign of white supremacy.15 By rejecting England, “not only as a physical referent in a political and economic sense, but also as a narrative or epistemological referent,” Olivia recognizes that libidinal relations within a colonial framework are frozen “into hierarchical patterns of domination.”16 What might read as resignation is recalibrated by that reflexive “resistance against misfortune”: failure is reconfigured as emotional opportunity, a new beginning rather than plot termination. She anticipates a “communion with and participation in God’s gratuitous love . . . [but most] specifically love concretized as solidarity with the oppressed . . . a praxis that moves toward liberation.”17 The novel thus proffers a distinctly theological response to colonial modernity, arguably born from evangelical Christianity. Returning Olivia to the West Indies, the novel suggests that “love is made concrete in history” not through the gratifications of the romance plot but through the labour of care for others: “struggles to reveal and shatter the structures of colonial modernity” which will remake the conditions for love itself.18
Reading The Woman of Colour in a time of gathering crisis counsels against comforting fictions of economic and libidinal fulfilment, of falling in love as a quick fix for prestige and cultural capital. As the success of the “postracial” TV series Bridgerton confirms, twenty-first-century readers are hungry for the generic consolations of regency romance. But The Woman of Colour transcends such ersatz imaginings by being the real thing in all its discomforting refusals. In light and humorous prose it deftly reveals the ways in which romantic narratives and forms of love are inherently racialized in the eighteenth century (and beyond). It subverts romance’s affirmation of personal happiness and individual fulfilment and chooses the jouissance of struggle. If pedagogy sometimes depends on imaginative pleasure to generate academic engagement, The Woman of Colour forces readers and educators alike to question our investment in “happy endings”, and to ask what forms of narrative might be compatible with love and respect.
ENDNOTES
[1] BAME is an acronym of “Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minorities,” and its usage is contested. However, the University and College Union (UCU) used it as a primary diagnostic in its survey on academic conditions (https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf), and it thus provides some insight into racial and ethnic disparity. See in particular 14–18 which details specific forms of precarity (fixed-term, hourly paid, zero hours, etc.) by race, ethnicity, and gender.
[2] Adam Harris, “The Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professors-higher-education-thea-hunter/586168/.
[3] See Eric Joyce, “From Teach-In to Teach-Out,” Center for Academic Innovation, University of Michigan, accessed January 7, 2021,
[4] Corinna Russell, Romance and the Ethics of Response, 1765–1837 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004) 7.
[5] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 55–6. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.
[6] Coined by Teju Cole; the term defines self-serving interventions and philanthropy by white people for nonwhite people. See Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 12, 2012,
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.
[7] Junot Diaz, “Junot Díaz on ‘De-colonial Love,’ Revolution and More” (keynote presentation, Facing Race Conference, 2012), accessed October 31, 2020, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/junot-diaz-de-colonial-love-revolution-and-more-video.
[8] Averil Y. Clarke, Inequalities of Love: College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
[9] Clarke, Inequalities of Love, 21.
[10]. See Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4.
[11] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 4–5.
[12] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 6.
[13] 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, 183.
[14] Joseph Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 4.
[15] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 3.
[16] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 1.
[17] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.
[18] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.
