Stedman's Narrative : its origins & transformations

Tese de Doutoramento em Estudos Ingleses e Americanos na especialidade de Estudos Americanos (Literatura Inglesa, século XVIII) apresentada à Universidade AbertaO tema desta tese de doutoramento é a obra Narrative of a five year’s expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, from the year 1772 to 1777 de John Gabriel Stedman, publicada em Londres, em 1796, pelo editor radical Joseph Johnson. Levantam-se duas questões relacionadas com esta obra. A primeira refere-se à escrita do texto, à sua evolução mediante várias versões, e à sua extensa influência nas obras dos escritores ingleses, alemães, franceses e guyaneses que utilizam a história para usos próprios. A Narrative começou por ser o diário de Stedman durante os anos em que esteve no Suriname. Este diário tornou-se a base do manuscrito enviado para o editor em 1790 que foi, posteriormente, rescrito por um revisor e publicada como a Narrative autorizada em 1796. Entretanto, as origens deste texto importante podem ser traçadas através de duas versões prévias (nomeadamente o Journal publicado pela primeira vez em 1962, e a ‘Narrative’ de 1790, publicada pela primeira vez em 1988). William Blake foi o autor de pelo menos dezasseis das ilustrações presentes nesta edição e de poemas e gravuras que transformaram a história de Stedman. Após 1796, a história – especialmente o relato de Stedman do seu casamento com Joanna, uma escrava da plantação – tornou-se a base de várias peças de teatro, romances, poemas e panfletos em inglês, alemão, holandês e francês. A abordagem da história deste processo complexo interligar-se-á com o debate, que então decorria, sobre a abolição do comércio de escravos e da própria escravatura. A segunda questão responde ao desafio lançado por Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak no seu ensaio pós-colonial ?Can the Subaltern Speak?’ no qual a autora afirma não ser possível dar uma voz aos oprimidos¹. Na sua busca de idiomas apropriados para a Narrative, Stedman descreve os Maroons rebeldes (escravos foragidos) em termos heróicos e neo-clássicos, Joanna é uma heroína pastoral e o próprio autor descreve-se como um homem de sentimentos. Será que esta procura de conceitos literários é bem sucedida na descrição da escravatura no Suriname de então, ou será que apenas se limita a enquadrar os escravos num discurso patriarcal, europeu e colonial? Será que Joanna foi explorada igualmente por ‘both the phallus and the pen?’² Ou será que o problema reside na incapacidade do perito pós-colonial de ouvir? Esta questão abrange as metamorfoses da história de Stedman, os poemas e ilustrações de Blake e as peças de teatro, romances e poemas a que deu origem, incluindo alguns de minha autoria. Esta tese, tal como o seu título indica, pretende ser uma contribuição aos Estudos Ingleses e Americanos, na Especialidade de Estudos Americanos (Literatura Inglesa, século XVIII). Os Estudos Americanos constituem uma área multi-disciplinar. A Narrative de Stedman seguiram o modelo dos relatos publicados em Captain Cook’s Voyages e surge contextualizada no âmbito do crescente interesse pela Literatura de Viagens, nas suas dimensões literária, científica e imperial. Ao procurar um estilo adequado, Stedman adquiriu um conhecimento profundo da Literatura Inglesa do século XVIII, e os capítulos 3 e 6 desta tese assumem-se como uma contribuição para esta área de saber. Mas a Narrative está localizada no Suriname e, tal como os textos derivados de escritores europeus, representa uma tentativa de descrição de alguns aspectos da vida neste território sul-americano. Os ramos dos estudos literários envolvidos, portanto, entendem-se além da literatura inglesa e europeia dos séculos dezoito e dezanove para incluir estudos americanos e pós-coloniais com os seus componentes feministas. As pesquisas efectuadas abrangem também a história do comércio de escravos e a abolição do mesmo, em Inglaterra e na Europa, e a história e antropologia da escravatura no Suriname entre outros países. Finalmente, foi necessário trabalhar com textos holandeses, alemães (em tradução) e franceses, além de fontes inglesas e holandesas. Capítulo 2 apresenta o enquadramento histórico dos temas focados em Narrative. Em primeiro lugar, o Suriname e as revoltas dos Maroons que Stedman deveria esmagar, em segundo lugar, a Grã-Bretanha e a longa campanha para a abolição da escravatura. Capítulo 3 problematiza os géneros literários: o heróico, o pastoral e os sentimental tal como eram entendidos no final do século XVIII, recorrendo aos muitos exemplos da literatura dos século referido citados na ‘Narrative’ de 1790. Capítulo 4 analisa a escrita do Journal de Stedman (1962) para delinear o processo de criação em alturas e níveis diferentes, ao mesmo tempo que examina o primeiro relato de Stedman sobre a escravatura no Suriname e sobre a sua busca de meios de expressão apropriados. Capítulo 5 estuda a apresentação dos rebeldes Maroons, de Joanna e de Stedman em ‘Narrative’ de 1790 no âmbito dos conceitos de heróico, de pastoral e de sentimental. Capítulo 6 aborda o impacto que a obra de Stedman teve na pintura, na poesia e nas gravuras de William Blake. Tentaremos provar que Blake desempenhou um papel mais importante do que se reconhece em Narrative de 1796. Capítulo 7 analisa as alterações introduzidas pelo revisor na edição de Narrative de 1796. Apontaremos o argumento que os cortes levados a cabo pelo revisor, posteriormente corrigidos por Stedman com auxílio de Blake, não resultaram num texto inferior ao original. Capítulo 8 examina as variadas obras que surgiram no rasto de Narrative de 1796 desde as peças e romances de Frank Kratter, Thomas Morton, Anónimo, Lydia Child, Eugene Sue, Herman Ridder, Johan Hokstam, Beryl Gilroy, até os poemas de minha autoria sobre o tema. Capítulo 9 aborda a questão proposta anteriormente, a saber: Can the Subaltern Speak?. Apresentaremos o argumento seguinte:’Sim, podem, desde que não sejam silenciados pela crítica pós-colonial’. A tese contém quatro apêndices incluindo uma tradução das ‘Endechas a bárbara, escrava’ de Camões, o texto dos poemas referidos no capítulo 8, o relatório do Col Fourgeoud sobre a captura da arringa de Boni, e o texto de Stedman sobre ‘The Execution of the Breaking on the Rack’.The subject of this thesis is John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana (London, 1796). Two basic questions are raised about this text. The first concerns its making, as it evolves through previous versions, and its extensive influence in plays, novels, poems and pamphlets by English, German, Dutch, French and Guyanese authors. These include William Blake in whose poems and engravings Stedman’s story is creatively transformed. My second question takes up the challenge of Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonial essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in which she effectively denies that the oppressed (the ‘subaltern’) can be given ‘a voice’. In his search for appropriate idioms, Stedman cast the rebel slaves in neo-classical heroic terms, Joanna his mulatto ‘wife’ as a pastoral heroine, and himself as a ‘man of sentiment’. What do these self-consciously literary idioms succeed in telling us about slave life in Surinam at the period? The question extends to the metamorphoses of Stedman’s story, in Blake’s poems and engravings, and in the various plays novels and poems it has generated, including some of my own. Two kinds of scientific enquiry are employed. The first involves a close reading of the evolution of Stedman’s Narrative, from his Journal to the 1790 manuscript and to the published text of 1796. Each stage involves significant changes in the idioms of representation. This textual scrutiny continues with the study of the works based on the Stedman story. The second enquiry is into the relationship of these texts to history, in particular to the contemporary debate over slavery and abolition. More recently, the context for interest in the Narrative has been the post war rise of nationalism throughout the former European empires, bringing Stedman’s work back into print as a valuable historical and anthropological source, and as the inspiration for further fiction and poetry

Evolving the Genre of Empire: Gender and Place in Women\u27s Natural Histories of the Americas, 1688-1808

In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who physically and figuratively toiled on the peripheries of transatlantic institutional science, and reimagine the early republican novels of Leonora Sansay and Susanna Rowson as hybrid natural histories. I explore how women’s complicated negotiations and performances of gender and genre (conventions) expose gender and genre’s dynamic interplay and this interplay’s role in crafting alternate visions of the Americas. I argue that women naturalists evolved the genre by disrupting imperial modes of knowledge production to arrive at these alternate visions. My first chapter pairs German entomologist Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717) with Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797), whose natural histories of Surinam underscore the genre’s radical transformations over the course of the eighteenth century and expose the fundamentally different investments of female and male naturalists (regeneration/production and consumption, respectively). I interrogate the gendered lenses through which Merian and Stedman narrate ecologic changes, especially in light of a Surinamese topography that enabled the “stable chaos” of constant slave marronage, a condition that paradoxically preserved parts of the pre-colonization landscape. In Chapter Two, I trace the parallel career trajectories of two colonials, Jane Colden (1724-1766) and William Bartram (1739-1823), who begin as gender-marked objects in their fathers’ transatlantic correspondence, but become subjects through their botanic practice. My chapter probes how Colden and Bartram differently channel ecologic impulses through their depictions of the upstate New York wilderness and the Southeast; I argue that Colden’s ecologic sensibility is more highly developed than Bartram’s, whose proto-nationalism compromises this sensibility. Chapter Three compares republican mother and indigo planter Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) with surveyor and statesman William Byrd II (1674-1744). I argue that Pinckney and Byrd engage a “colonial regionalism” to creatively “map” both the regional instability of the South Carolina lowcountry and the Virginia/North Carolina borderlands and their own fluid creole identities. The autobiographical nature of their work enables proto-national readings and marks an evolution of the genre toward narrative, and ultimately, toward even greater hybridity. Chapter Four explores how the early national “novels” of Leonora Sansay and Susanna Rowson, set fully or partly in the West Indies, appropriate the natural history in order to navigate what Sean Goudie calls “the creole complex.” I argue that neither Sansay nor Rowson is able to successfully mark the West Indies as distinct from the new nation; while Rowson attempts to disavow “paracolonial” relations, promoting a narrative of white American “creole regeneracy,” Sansay’s work is more ambivalent, suggesting that U.S.-Caribbean economic relations and the further creolization of whites may be unavoidable, and even necessary for the Republic

A Caribbean Coupling Beyond Black and White: The Interracial Marriage of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard and its Implications for British Views on Race, Class, and Gender during the Age of Reform

<p><i>*Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15 </i></p>British Army colonel, Edward Marcus Despard, and Catherine Despard, a woman from the Caribbean and most likely of African descent, were married some time during the late eighteenth century. Their marriage was quite unusual for its time, yet their union appears to have been successful and went unchallenged by the government and many individuals they encountered. This project explores the social and political environment that made their unlikely union possible and demonstrates how their interracial marriage serves as a marker of the more fluid and tolerant character of racial attitudes in the Age of Reform. An examination of the Despards’ political activity in London also offers insight into multiple social and political issues affecting Great Britain and its colonies during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, including race, class, gender, freedom, and human rights.Thesi

The Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection at Hamilton College: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, Prints, Maps, and Drawings, 1521-1860

This distinguished catalogue of the Lesser Antilles provides extensive, precise descriptions of approximately one thousand printed books and one thousand manuscripts that Walter Beinecke, Jr., collected over several decades and donated to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he was a trustee. The collection includes hundreds of rare original documents, fifty maps, plantation reports, correspondence, and oil paintings and watercolors. The catalogue of the Walter Beinecke, Jr., Collection describes unique manuscript material and many rare books more fully than previously available in bibliographies. The Houghs have applied advanced bibliographical knowledge to this work and in some instances have added cogent historical annotation. The collection\u27s content addresses issues of broad international significance. Full understanding of the early history of the United States can best be achieved by studying interaction among the European states and the Antilles, as well as the commercial connection between the continental colonies and the Antilles. During the century and a half represented in this collection, England grew from a northern European power to a dominant world power, its growth largely funded by wealth provided from the Indies. This work will be invaluable to libraries with holdings in Caribbean material, slave and slave trade material, economic history, American cartography, early American history, and general American travel books. It will be useful to all historians writing on the history of the region or on the history of colonialism and the slave trade generally. 414 pages : illustrations ; 29 cmhttps://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/books/1063/thumbnail.jp

Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices.https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allfacultyother-bookschapters/1015/thumbnail.jp

The Mizuta Library of rare books in the history of European social thought : a catalogue of the collection held at Nagoya University Library

edited by Eriko Nakai & preface by Tatsuya SakamotoExclusively distributed in Japan by Far Eastern Booksellers (Kyokuto Shoten, Ltd.)電子化にあたり、ErrataファイルとErrataを反映させた本文ファイルを作成（2021.1）boo

Respectable Folly

Originally published in 1975. The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenarians—prophets of the millennium—attempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least for the faithful. Political events became eschatological events, and dangers and misfortunes became simply the chastisements that a fallen world must undergo before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can redeem it. Although some of the beliefs may now seem bizarre, Garrett shows that, at the time, they attracted many followers for whom these ideas were both reasonable and respectable. Focusing on the careers of three millenarians—Suzette Labrousse, Catherine Théot, and Richard Brothers—Garrett tries to understand these prophets as persons rather than dismiss them as fanatics. Their prominence resulted from their success in transmitting a new political consciousness through familiar religious imagery. While the Revolution gave urgency and tangible reality to millenarian convictions, Labrousse, Théot, and others were convinced, well before the Revolution, that they were the bearers of divine revelations and thus welcomed the Revolution as confirmation of their own missions

Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795-1800

From 1795 through 1800, a series of revolts rocked Curaçao, a small but strategically located Dutch colony just off the South American contintent. A combination of internal and external factors produced these uprisings, in which free and enslaved islanders particiapted with various objectives. A major slave revolt in August 1795 was the opening salvo for these tumultuous five years. While this revolt is a well-known episode in Curaçaoan history, its wider Caribbean and Atlantic context is much less known. Also lacking are studies sketching a clear picture of the turbulent five years that followed. It is in these dark corners that this volume aims to shed light. The events discussed in this book fall squarely within the Age of Revolutions, the period that began with the onset of the American Revolution in 1775, was punctuated by the demise of the ancien régime in France, saw the establishment of a black state in Haiti, and witnessed the collapse of Spanish rule in mainland America. All of these revolutions seemed to converge by the late eighteenth century in Curaçao. The seven contributions in this volume provide new insights in the nature of slave resistance in the Age of Revolutions, the remarkable flows of people and ideas in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean, and the unique local history of Curaçao. Wim Klooster is Associate Professor at Clark University in Worcester (MA), USA. His most recent book is Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (2009). Gert Oostindie is Director of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and Professor of History at Leiden Universit

Exercising virtue: the physical reform of the leisured elite in eighteenth-century France

This PhD project examines changing conceptions of physical exercise and bodily health in eighteenth-century France. Enlightenment culture in Europe provided an atmosphere of reform within which both society and individual were viewed as malleable. A new criterion of social utility governed discussions of health and education, and highlighted the unreformed status of certain sections of society. There was an understanding in France that urban life generally, and the urban elite in particular, had degenerated. The idleness of the gens du monde was considered a significant factor in the corruption of modern French society; the physical languor it produced was seen to render people useless to the nation. Fears surrounding depopulation and military weakness gave further impetus to calls for reform. Good health and the physical strength associated with it were perceived to key to the reversal of both urban decline and military fragility. The mother-to-be, the child and the noble officer were targeted in the drive to produce healthy, virtuous citizens. The thesis argues that a transformed conceptualization of physical education, emerging from a preoccupation with preventive medicine, was central to ideas regarding the health and strength of the nation. Drawing on manuals concerned with health and education, discussions of health in the press, polemics on the function of the nobility, and the correspondence of the Société Royale de Médecine, a distinct shift is traced in the ways in which exercise was discussed in the second half of the century. This was characterised by a view of exercise which focused upon adding strength and vigour, in contrast to earlier accounts which defined movement as a means of balancing or stabilizing what entered or exited the body