Roundtable by Kerry Sinanan
Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.12
Cite: Sinanan, Kerry. 2020. “Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 39-40.
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The Woman of Colour (1808), an epistolary novel by an anonymous author, remained out of print until 2008 when an authoritative, detailed new edition by Lyndon J. Dominique was published with Broadview. Featuring Olivia Fairfield, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white “master,” the novel takes the reader from Jamaica to England. Olivia is sent to marry her white cousin Augustus Merton to whom she will bequeath £60,000 in return for being protected and assured of her freedom. As the daughter of an enslaved woman, remaining in Jamaica would be precarious, and, during her time in England, Olivia gains full independence and the wealth that enables her to return to Jamaica a free person. The plot is structured as a packet of letters that, like its antecedent Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), has been published by a fictional editor. Unlike Pamela, The Woman of Colour contains no editorial “preface.” Instead we have a concluding dialogue in which the fictional editor tells “a friend” that the purpose of the novel is to show how “virtue, like Olivia Fairfield’s, may truly be said to be its own reward.”[1] And so The Woman of Colour explicitly resituates eighteenth-century female virtue in an independent, legally unmarried woman—a woman of color, who leaves England for her home in Jamaica to pursue a better life. While the novel remains in many ways trapped within the plot conventions and gendered norms of the Romantic period, it simultaneously rejects them and offers trajectories of emancipation that unsettle gender, race, and nation. This double movement in the novel unsettles white hierarchies of moral superiority and liberal ideals exposing them to be less immutable than they appear.

The power of the novel, then, lies in the promise it holds to reach forward into a more multicultural future in which gender and race might not be such oppressive structures as they are in 1808. The very title, The Woman of Colour, is what many women today choose as a term that designates a politically conscious identity that is both defined by and resistant to whiteness. The term woman of colour came to prominence in the 1977 at the National Women’s Conference when The Black Women’s Agenda was being brought forward. As Loretta Ross explains in an interview,

All the rest of the “minority” women of color wanted to be included in the “Black Women’s Agenda.” Okay? Well, [the Black women] agreed . . . but you could no longer call it the “Black Women’s Agenda.” And it was in those negotiations in Houston [that] the term “women of color” was created. Okay? And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”²

Dominique’s detailed critical introduction suggests that the anonymous author, indeed, is likely to have been herself a woman of color. The author is thought to be Ann Wright, who was likely completing the novel just as the bill to abolish the British slave trade passed in 1807. Crucially, as Dominique tells us, the term “people of color” would, in eighteenth-century Britain, have been understood “to refer to specific groups of free people in the Americas—the gens de coleur in Haiti and free mixed-race and Negro North Americans, and mixed-race freedmen and women in Caribbean outposts” (21). The invocation of Haiti must have been fundamental to the term woman of colour as the liberatory consequences of the Haitian Revolution, and its second constitution, adopted in 1805, reverberated throughout the world. Dominique provides strong evidence that proposes, albeit inconclusively, that the author of the novel was Ann Wright, the mixed-race daughter of an English planter, Andrew Wright. Ann married a free man of color, Francis Maitland, in England in 1808 after her father’s death. Within this possible context, then, the title The Woman of Colour suggests a reforming multiracial, political solidarity, extending from the colonies as they fought for freedom to the morally stultified metropole.

In 2019, I set up a Facebook group called “Woman of Colour,” named after the novel. The group was intended to gather those of us in eighteenth-century studies and beyond who were teaching Woman of Colour and other texts that deal with enslavement, race, whiteness, and transatlantic histories. It was clear through discussion threads on the Facebook group “18thc Questions Quick Link,” and also at recent conference panels at ASECS meetings on the novel, that Dominique’s edition has made The Woman of Colour much more central to our teaching and research in intersecting areas of eighteenth-century studies. Important critical interventions have built on Dominique’s work. Notable examples include from Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire (2016), and Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour” in Women’s Studies (2016).                               

In the Facebook group “Woman of Colour,” the novel has become a site of multidisciplinary, academic solidarity and a hub for questioning the boundaries of disciplines and canons in the long period as many of us seek to “unwhiten” our syllabi and offer students texts that highlight the centrality of colonialism and enslavement to the period. This roundtable offers thoughts from a few of us on how we are teaching the novel and how it enables our incorporation of multidisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, gender studies, Critical Race Theory, and transatlantic historiography that both expose the endurance of slavery’s legacies and offer us the tools that eighteenth-century studies very much needs.

We dedicate this roundtable to British citizens who are descendants of the Windrush generation currently being illegally deported by the British government to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

ENDNOTES

[1] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 189. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.

[2] Lisa Wade, “Loretta Ross on the Phrase, ‘Women of Color.’” The Society Pages, March 26, 2011, accessed January, 11, 2021. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/26/loreta-ross-on-the-phrase-women-of-color/