Idea Transcript
The
Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation
Volume 55
SUMMER/FALL 2014
NumberS 2–3
Special Issue The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century Guest Editors: Jordana Rosenberg and Chi-ming Yang
Introduction: The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century Jordana Rosenberg and Chi-ming Yang Dispossession and Civil Society: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment Political Philosophy Siraj Ahmed The Political Economy of the English Rogue Betty Joseph
137
153
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Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales 193 Ashley L. Cohen Natural Histories of Indigenous Resistance: Alexander Anderson and the Caribs of St. Vincent 217 Julie Chun Kim “A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage Ramesh Mallipeddi
235
The Transports of Lascar Specters: Dispossessed Indian Sailors in Women’s Romantic Poetry Humberto Garcia
255
“To see the Issue of these his exorbitant practices:” A Response to “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century” David Kazanjian
273
Transversing the Circuit of Dispossession Denise Ferreira da Silva
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Essay-Reviews 289 Contemporary Johnson Lawrence Lipking
291
Drawn Dry with Thanks and Compliments: Blake and the Gift Jennifer Davis Michael
295
Reading in the Round Shelton Waldrep
301
Mediated Performances: Negotiating the Theater of War on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage and Page Terry F. Robinson
307
Delectando Monemus: An Examination of the Books That Delighted and Instructed Young Readers 1700–1840 Sylvia Kasey Marks
313
Topography as History Denys Van Renen
319
The Science of Discernment in Early America Megan Walsh
325
Notes on Contributors
331
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The Transports of Lascar Specters: Dispossessed Indian Sailors in Women’s Romantic Poetry Humberto Garcia Vanderbilt University
I thank Jordana Rosenberg, Chi-ming Yang, and the anonymous reader for insightful commentary on earlier drafts of this essay. Political economy . . . does not recognise the unemployed worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside this labour relationship. The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain. —Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.1
Between 1794 and 1814, thousands of Lascar or East Indian sailors arrived annually in Britain as replacements for British sailors impressed by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.2 In meeting this labor demand, these working-class immigrants became paupers, beggars, and petty thieves when they arrived in Britain, where, according to Karl Marx’s analysis, they existed as useless and invisible figures who were nonetheless indispensable to capitalist modes of production on a global scale. As a low-cost workforce that fueled the English East India Company’s (EIC) east-west shipping network, Asian sailors were treated as an elastic and disposable supply that filled the maritime labor gap. Often subjected to slave-like conditions, these laborers became superfluous when callous captains abandoned them in British seaports and forced them into vagrancy amid a commercially prosperous nation. Besides doctors, judges, bailiffs, and gravediggers, Romantic writers also witnessed these specters as a haunting aesthetic excess. From William Wordsworth’s disorienting encounter with “Moors, / Malays, and Lascars” in London to Thomas De Quincey’s opium-induced nightmare of a Malaysian sailor begging at the The Eighteenth Century, vol. 55, nos. 2–3 Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
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door of his cottage in Grasmere, dispossessed migrants from the imperial periphery embody what Saree Makdisi analyzes as “the very unrepresentability of the abstract space of commodity and capital flows”—an invisible global economy that threatened the literary and national imaginary from within.3 By contrast, Romantic poets Mary Darby Robinson and Jane Taylor use the affective epistemology of sympathy to describe the plight of Lascarswhile neutralizing their presence in the name of female-oriented philanthropy. While previous scholars have shown how English women co-opted the trope of black slavery to reposition themselves in the public sphere, I extend their analysis to show how female sympathy for black Asians promoted women’s political causes by facilitating the deportation rather than the legal protection of an Indian maritime workforce, the “forgotten seamen” who have yet to receive sustained scholarly attention in literary and cultural studies of racial enslavement.4 As women robbed of their rights and civic identity under the English law of coverture, Robinson and Taylor—unlike their male counterparts—strongly identify with Lascars’ oppressive working conditions under discriminatory English legislation. Michael Fisher and Rozina Visram have documented how the exploitation of Indian migrant laborers—which persisted until World War II— was enabled by protectionist English laws that excluded them from the right to settle and work in Britain.5 To prevent these underpaid foreign workers from overwhelming the British maritime labor market, the Navigation Acts, dating from the 1660s, required crews to be three-quarters British-born for outgoing ships from Britain to count as ethnically “British.” This requirement did not apply to incoming ships from Asia and to African and West Indies sailors (legally considered “British”). As a result, England witnessed a rising surplus of unemployed Asian sailors as ship owners evaded their legal responsibility to secure their safe passage home. This labor surplus is integral to primitive accumulation, in which the free worker divorced from traditional means of land subsistence (the seller of labor power) and the owner of the means of production (the buyer of labor power) confront each other as immobilized wage slavery and mobilized free capital. In Marx’s account, capitalist accumulation is “primitive,” not only because free labor precedes capitalist production, but also because the surplus labor set into motion by the worker’s freeing of capital into production constantly threatens to replace necessary labor, a source of pressure on the working class that maintains overall wages low. In other words, competition between employed and unemployed workers renders all labor relatively superfluous.6 Because the shortage of European sailors was exacerbated after England’s 1793 war with France, the EIC had to rely on a corrupt system of indirect labor recruitment— the ghat serangs or Indian intermediaries who were moneylenders, lodgers, and contractors—in order to create a “stagnant” labor reserve of semi-employed Asian seamen; they were used irregularly on Atlantic voyages to produce capital at low cost from the growing demand for export cotton and sugar, especially
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after the 1807 abolition of the African salve trade.7 Even though Parliament outlawed Lascar-crewed ships west of the Cape of Good Hope as late as 1802, they relaxed the enforcement of the Navigation Acts in order to allow the EIC to rehire Indian sailors in British-designated ships without paying them their due wages. The racialization of the surplus labor pool entailed the pauperization of Lascar immigrants. The decline of the Lascar surplus population into pauperism is poignantly dramatized in Mary Robinson’s “The Lascar, in Two Parts,” published in her Lyrical Tales (1800). Illustrating Marx’s keen observation that the “accumulation of wealth . . . is . . . at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of the labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation,”8 Robinson’s compassionate poem bears witness to the misery of a “wretched Indian Slave,” a young victim of imperial avarice who worked as a sailor on a Britain-bound ship from India to be repaid only with scorn after arriving in an inhospitable foreign land. He questions metropolitan readers who consume the imported luxuries his coerced labor made possible: Was it for this, that on the main I met with the tempest fierce and strong, And steering o’er the liquid plain, Still onward, press’d the waves among? Was it for this, the LASCAR brave Toil’d, like a wretched Indian Slave; Preserv’d your treasures by his toil, And sigh’d to greet this fertile soil? Was it for this, to beg, to die, Where plenty smiles, and where the Sky Sheds cooling airs; while fev’rish pain, Maddens the famish’d LASCAR’s brain?9
The “br” consonant rhyme in “brave” and “brain” signifies the psychic internalization of external corporeal labor, reflective of the rhythmic but discordant dialectical process by which the accumulation of capital transforms a healthy indentured laborer into a sick, crazy, and alienated pauper. According to Marx, pauperism, which he dubs “the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army,” marks the condition of capitalist accumulation; the sheer uselessness of the lowest sediment of the surplus labor population—children, the sick, the invalid, the elderly, and the demented—is actually a useful economic lever by which capital controls workers’ movements in and out of the stagnant labor pool of the industrial reserve army.10 Pauperized Lascars assumed this economic function, depressing the wages of their employed counterparts even as the former proved expensive to feed, house, and maintain in London’s barracks, to await repatriation to India. A human en-
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closure akin to “the hospital of the active labor-army,” these barracks incurred capital’s “faux frais”—incidental expenses defrayed by lowering wages.11 Unconfined by the barrack, Robinson’s underage vagrant demands his share of the capital he helped produce, imploring his sympathetic English readers to pay him in a different economic currency—in tears-as-money, what Marx calls “the incarnation of exchange value” as symbolic of the capital-labor relationship.12 David Harvey’s observation about the U. S. reliance on foreign labor reserves is also relevant to eighteenth-century British trade: capitalism “perpetually creates its own ‘other’ in order to feed upon it,” and, in doing so, “provokes a revolt against the system that creates it.”13 In “The Lascar,” this revolt converges with a progressive feminist pathos. The “br” near rhyme encodes another overlapping layer of psychic internalization: the distressed racial pauper as mediated through the voice of a female “wretch,” who “tell[s] / The transports of the Indian Boy” (II.267–68). Indeed, the feverish Lascar’s “brain” mirrors Robinson’s wretched experience as a disfranchised Englishwoman who moved between aristocratic Whig circles and debtors’ prison, suffering from bad health while writing to support herself and her family. Nicknamed Perdita after her star role as an actress in the revivals of William Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Robinson lived a scandalous and tragic life offstage as a celebrity sex worker: she suffered for her fidelity to a profligate unfaithful husband, Thomas Robinson, who married her under the false pretense of his wealth only to drag her into abject poverty after amassing huge debts. She also suffered as the neglected and underpaid mistress of the Prince of Wales, who reportedly gave the actress a £20,000 bond for her sexual labor after she quit the theater at his request. Instead, he paid her £5,000 in exchange for the love letters he wrote to her, with a non-binding promise of a future annuity (irregularly paid in £500 installments) when he came of age. Robinson was emotionally and financially devastated by this economic transaction: his payment was not enough to discharge the extravagant debts she had incurred due to his assurances, nor could it compensate for her lost career as a highly paid actress.14 Assuming the role of a professional mistress in her illicit affairs with powerful wealthy men like Col. Banastre Tarleton and Charles James Fox, Robinson registers in her poetry deep-seated anxieties about alienated labor under a heartless economic system that turns rights-bearing subjects into commodities.15 She died of a chronic rheumatic fever or stroke—alone, dejected, and ostracized, like the self-alienated Lascar she wrote about. Because she experienced unsettling shifts among waged labor, surplus sexual labor, and pauperism, Robinson, as the fallen Perdita, inhabits a unique perspective from which to judge a commercial nation that treats impoverished female sex workers and Indian sailors as disposable things rather than actual people. I focus on female sympathetic representations of Lascars in order to trace two phases in the expansion and contraction of a relative surplus of Lascar seamen, from 1800 to 1814 and from 1815 to 1823. Robinson’s poem records
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the first phase: the pauperization of migrant Indian laborers, who demand sympathetic payment from female wretches eager to possess socioeconomic agency by buying/stealing the outcast’s surplus misery with tears. This sentimental exchange is reconfigured in a parliamentary discourse that, by 1815, casts Lascars as a public-relations problem solvable only through Company initiative, preferring to protect national reputation rather than reform unjust legislation. Jane Taylor’s poem, “The Shipwrecked Lascar a True Tale” (1817), records the second phase: the expulsion of Indian vagrants from the nation to accommodate disbanded British seamen returning from the Napoleonic Wars. In her poem, compassionate Englishwomen serve as exemplary national stewards who transform sick Indian sailors from subjects entitled to legal protection into objects of Christian charity ready for deportation. These poets explore the affective economy of labor value by blending antislavery tear- jerking genres such as Thomas Day’s and John Bicknell’s bestselling “The Dying Negro, a Poem” (first published in 1773) and Thomas Cooper’s “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788) with the romantic interiority expressed in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), poems in which the speaker depicts his melancholic self-consciousness through his emotional engagement with dispossessed vagrants.16 Hence, Robinson’s and Taylor’s generic hybrids exhibit an ideological tension between an abolitionist form and a self-serving feminist content, a tension that the poets attempt to resolve in their respective stories about the “transports” of Lascar specters. THE EXPANSION OF SURPLUS INDIAN PAUPERS, 1800–14 By deploying defamiliarizing literary techniques, Robinson’s “The Lascar” highlights the violence and injustice entailed in the first phase of accumulation by dispossession: the expansion of the Indian maritime surplus population in England. In part I of the poem, the beautiful English landscape appears unfamiliar—an exotic and barbaric “sultry waste”—through the eyes of the pauperized Indian immigrant (I.108). Alone and helpless, the Lascar boy leaves London in search of hospitality in the countryside but instead encounters the “taunting Scorn” of “Christian Savage[s]” (I.7, 36). Because he is excluded from the Poor Relief laws, which apply only to settled citizens of a parish, the landed gentry and church officials do not have to relieve the vagrant when he begs at their parish door; the “house of luxury” rejects him with “pamper’d scorn, and tyranny,” and “the proud pastor” ignores his “trembling” tears while hypocritically preaching Christian charity for the poor (I.130, 138, 155–56, 167–68). Part II of the poem concludes with a melancholic scene: fleeing an oncoming flood not far from the safety of a rural cottage, the boy is accidentally stabbed by a “night-bewilder’d Trav’ller” (II.228). Bleeding and dying, he seeks protection atop a “tall Elm tree” (II.308). After falling from the tree, his slain body becomes a spectacle for the villagers blinded to the moral truth reflected in the final
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couplet: “But, ere the sufferer they behold, / His wither’d Heart, is DEAD,—and COLD!” (II.311–12, italics in original). The villagers’ insensitivity to the Lascar’s plight implies two subject positions examined in Adam Smith’sThe Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): the selfish partial spectator who is unable to identify with distressed strangers, especially with self-pitying beggars and criminals whose excessive sorrow is too improper and effeminate to deserve sympathy; and the impartial spectator as a moral conscience that—from a distant third-person perspective—elicits an “illusive sympathy” by which shame is cast on the partial spectator’s apathy toward another’s unjust suffering. For Smith, propriety disdains the poor wretch “sunk in sorrow and dejection upon account of any calamity of his own,” yet creates resentment against offenders who harm the sufferer.17 As a means of promoting civic virtue, the impartial spectator’s illusive sympathy corrects the partial spectator’s self-love through an imagination haunted by oppressed specters, a reanimated murdered body: But as we put ourselves in his [the murdered victim’s] situation, as we enter . . . into his body, and in our imaginations, in some measure, animate anew the deformed and mangled carcass of the slain, when we bring home in this manner his case to our own bosoms, we feel upon this, as upon many other occasions, an emotion which the person principally concerned is incapable of feeling, and which we feel by an illusive sympathy with him. The sympathetic tears which we shed for that immense and irretrievable loss, which in our fancy he appears to have sustained, seem to be but a small part of the duty which we owe him.18
For Smith, the imagination pierces “the deformed and mangled carcass of the slain” by reanimating it, creating an imaginary resentment in the spectator’s “bosom” that the zombie-like body cannot feel. “Sympathetic tears” reposition the spectator as a morally haunted subject, a historical witness to a gruesome crime that requires recompense. Propriety thereby allows the sympathetic subject to share the victim’s resentment, real or imagined, thus prompting retaliation in the form of justice.19 The final couplet rhyme “behold/COLD” favors this sentimental outcome: the slain body’s dead and cold heart not only satirizes the spectators’ callous disregard, but also mirrors an illusive sympathy in the interpenetration of bodies—does this “COLD” heart belong to the Lascar or the villagers? This question compels another group of beholders—impartial spectators/readers—to identify with the pain of a human being who deserves compassion and justice. The cosmopolitanism invoked in this second-order sympathy transports the English self into the unrecognized racial other’s slain body. Most important, this impartial spectatorship is routed through the agency of a female poet-speaker who is absent from the poem yet speaks through the Lascar’s voice. In Specters of the Atlantic, Ian Baucom argues that Smith’s account of sympathy’s melancholic transports is best understood as a call for the spectator to inhabit imaginatively the animated corpse than as an invitation for these
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specters to reside within the haunted living. “By encrypting itself within that other,” Baucom writes, the spectator can confiscate another’s misery as property, a “plagiaristic sentimentality” in which the subject assumes the sufferer’s agency. In late-eighteenth-century legal and sentimental discourses on African slavery, the racial other’s sorrow is bought/stolen with tears, a currency that symbolically appropriates “the nominal rather than the real value of the ruined, lost, or degraded thing”—in short, miserable labor. As such, “affective theft” produces a split subject: the melancholic cosmopolitan witness who, by indulging in an imaginary resentment, wants to retaliate against an unjust murderer and the impartial speculator who, as the judge of disinterested reason, values British propriety over distant suffering. Baucom argues that this split subject is emblematic of a conflicted capitalist modernity since the legal case of the 1781 Zong massacre, a tragic event in which African slaves were thrown overboard to secure insurance claims on damaged property. He shows how this split subject collapses Smith’s distinction between an interested partial spectator and a disinterested impartial one, resulting in an ethical plea to make the nation better through such actions as the abolition of the slave trade.20 Such a split subject appears in Robinson’s poem, but in a different social context: her status as an abandoned and impoverished author and as an underpaid sex worker places her in the same stagnant surplus reserve as Lascars. Thus, the spectator seamlessly blends into the victim to generate a self-pity equally shared by women and indigent Indians, because both groups inhabit the racial and sexual subdivision of a disposable population sinking into pauperism. Both embody what Michael Denning calls “wageless life”: “a living labor capacity” that (for Marx) is neither employed nor unemployed, in or out of the production cycle, an organic bare life already dead, accidental or indifferent to the standpoint of capital’s constant transformation of necessary labor into superfluous labor.21 Robinson relies on Smith’s haunting “fancy” to shock an English public desensitized to the domestic and imperial violence underpinning the plight of Lascars. In part II, the Lascar boy dreams of his murdered mother: And now, in fancy’s airy dream, The LASCAR Boy his Mother spied; And, from her breast, a crimson stream Slow trickled down her beating side: And now he heard her, wild, complain, As loud she shriek’d—but shriek’d in vain! And now she sunk upon the ground, The red stream trickling from her wound,
And near her feet a murd’rer stood, His glitt’ring poniard tipp’d with blood! And now, “farewell, my son!” she cried, Then clos’d her fainting eyes—and died! (II.181–92)
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His nostalgic yearning for India’s maternal comfort is reworked into a lurid nightmare: his mother sheds blood instead of milk from her breasts through a wound inflicted by a mysterious murderer’s “poniard tipp’d with blood.” Back-to-back near rhymes, “ground/wound” and “stood/blood,” suggest that this murderer targeted the means of subsistence freely provided by the Indian mother. Thus, the symbolic imagery of a blood-pouring breast juxtaposed to a blood/semen-stained phallic poniard figures the imperial expropriation of organic labor capacities as a perverse rape of the pauperized migrant laborer and of the unpaid female worker who supported him. Aesthetically, wageless life is a source of delight, which emotionally transports the sympathetic spectator/ reader into the misery of the alienated sick pauper. As Jacqueline Labbe has argued, Robinson’s unusual poetry borrows Gothic motifs and sensational plots to stage obscene dream visions that heighten the delight in violence and resist a happy romantic ending that suppresses it.22 In her haunting metropolitan vision, the Indian mother’s raped body is a metaphorical substitute for economic violence in British India and a metonymic foreshadowing of the Lascar’s murder by a mysterious traveler who stabbed his “bleeding breast” (II.243). This dual figuration conflates surplus Indian paupers with surplus female caregivers. In doing so, it sublimates a critical feminist narrative that aligns colonial violence with domestic dispossession. Robinson uses Gothic conventions to grant sympathetic readers access to the Lascar’s deranged mind, revealing the historical logic by which British exploitation in the colonies engenders precarious wageless life in the metropolis. THE ENCLOSURE OF SURPLUS INDIAN PAUPERS, 1814–15 By 1815, Robinson’s sympathetic critique of Lascar enslavement was co-opted by parliamentary discourses to conceal the sight of pitiful Indian vagrants whose presence in London’s streets and the surrounding countryside vexed legal definitions of metropolitan citizenship. A mostly apathetic Parliament was compelled to take action when a philanthropic organization, the Society for the Protection of Lascar Sailors, accused the EIC of providing Lascars with inadequate subsistence. Allegedly, the barrack supervisor contracted by the Directors had violated the 1814 East India Act, which held the EIC accountable for owners who failed to feed, house, maintain, and return Indian sailors as required by law. An outcry of public sympathy in reaction to the Society’s publication of these controversial findings in The Times prompted an official investigation. In 1815, the House of Common’s Committee on Lascars and other Asiatic Seamen confirmed these findings, even though they favored the EIC over the Society. They concluded that the Lascars’ poor living conditions were a product of their deplorable lifestyle and unsanitary customs, and that only one serang, and not the barrack supervisor, physically abused them. The Committee proposed non-legally binding “humane suggestions”: Lascars should
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be moved from the Shedwell barracks to the East End docks, beyond public view and under stricter supervision; the serangs were to be solely responsible for administering corporeal punishment, operating outside the scope of English common law; and the Company should expedite Lascars’ transportation home.23 In response, Parliament amended the Navigation Acts, reasserting that all incoming British ships post bond for each of its Asian crew as guarantee for their return.24 Hoping for the day when “we shall no longer see Lascars begging about the streets,” the report preferred to promote a racist policy of strict segregation rather than to redress unethical exploitation (as in Robinson’s poem). The Committee insisted that metropolitan spectators should be spared from seeing Lascars’ pitiful state because such witnessing calls into disrepute “the honour of the country.”25 A periodical review of the report adopted a selfish conservative pity to protect national reputation rather than reform unjust legislation. Published in The Literary Panorama in 1815 and appended with excerpts from the report, “Lascar Seamen” naturalizes Parliament’s racist policy in the language of moral sentiment. The anonymous reviewer decries cold selfish reason in favor of the warm selfless heart, for Englishmen have “a common duty” to offer charity to “the stranger in distress” over “suffering countrymen” capable of obtaining relief. The “spectacle” of the Indian sailor too distraught to “tell his tale” should compel citizens to adopt an impartial moral perspective and temporarily set aside nationalistic biases.26 But instead the reviewer indulges in a self-consumed pity stripped of humanitarian feelings. The Lascar ceases to be a stranger in need of charity and becomes a “heart-rending nuisance” in need of discipline, as if his public visibility is somehow blameworthy for “our national want of feeling”: The public eye was shocked some years ago with the sight of numbers of Lascars and Negroes, begging about our streets, in every stage of human misery: scarcely a publicpassage was free from the afflicting, the heart-rendering nuisance. The Government, very properly, interfered, and those disgraceful exposures were abated. The India Company, in whose ships many of the men came over, concurred in rendering the measures enacted effectual . . . [which] has subsequently prevented the recurrence of similar occasions of reproach on our national want of feeling, and avaricious insensibility to suffering humanity.27
The invisibility of these pitiful strangers is necessary for avoiding “occasions of reproach” against the host nation’s “avaricious insensibility.” This ostensibly benevolent position is self-interested, seeking recourse in theories of racial difference: just as Britons cannot handle the heat of India’s sweltering sun, “natives of the Torrid Zone” cannot withstand England’s moist air and cold winters.28 The reviewer offers a commonplace justification for the ethnic division of British maritime labor, echoed from the Committee’s racist report: tropical heat has weakened Indian sailors morally and physically, so these poorly
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acclimated aliens need to be segregated and deported for their own good—out of sight, out of mind.29 As Smith points out, sympathy meets its natural limit in the stagnant labor reserve, especially in the self-pitiful pauper whose public visibility disturbs the happiness of the partial (affluent male) spectator. Although he condemns disdain for the poor as “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiment,” he argues that class hierarchy helps maintain civil order, which is cemented by spectators who naturally sympathize with the rich over the poor.30 Conversely, sympathy for paupers, beggars, and poor orphans is improper because their visibility affronts upper-class spectators privileged by the existing economic system. Smith writes, “the fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness.” These spectators “turn away their eyes from him [the poor man], or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object among them.” Likewise, the poor desperately seek to remain “out of the sight of mankind,” beyond the eyes of a public that shuns their undignified appearance.31 The periodical review, as well as the Committee’s report, incorporates Smith’s aesthetic of invisibility to contain, manage, and remove the threatening presence of surplus Indian paupers. After 1814, the spectacle of disfranchised Lascars raised inconvenient, vexing questions about conflicting versions of metropolitan and imperial governance, for English liberty was extended to well-paid white British seamen but not to disposable “non-British” Indian seamen. The latter was deprived of legal protection against corporeal punishment.32 As propaganda for Parliament’s public- relations campaign, the periodical review wants to conceal this contradictory mode of governance by sequestering Lascars and transporting them out of the “public eye” under the cover of a nationalistic self-loving pity. To feel for these distressed paupers is therefore to reverse the logic of visual confrontation prevalent in Robinson’s poem. Such parliamentary pity, ironically, demanded the enclosure of pauperized Lascars. In 1814–15, the racial division of maritime labor was legally codified by a coalition of British-born seamen, including those recently discharged from the navy and seeking employment. They successfully improved their working conditions by promoting a racial difference between “white” Englishmen and “black” Asians; the former were deemed emotionally receptive to English liberty, while the latter were emotionally able to withstand flogging and slavery.33 Backed by self-serving British seamen, Parliament legitimized Lascar dispossession and demanded that these “black” Asians be controlled, surveilled, and disciplined. The EIC therefore secured the barrack enclosure, where Lascars existed in a legally unprecedented limbo state—an invisible black hole between non-British subjects no longer residing in Asia and potential British citizens confined to a short stay in England. The barrack not only lowered the cost of
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the food, housing, and provisions necessary for maintaining these inmates, but also prepared a segregated surplus workforce for remobilization.34 It assumed the regulatory function of the modern prison complex, a panoptical institution that, for Michel Foucault, “solves the problem of the accumulation of men” through “the growth of an apparatus of production capable of sustaining them and using them.” As in the prison, so in the barrack: “the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.”35 Parliament and British sailors helped the EIC fashion these techniques—borrowed from a nationalist version of Smith’s account of the invisible pitiful poor—in order to facilitate the exploitation of Lascars beyond the serene view of metropolitan spectators. The aesthetic of enclosure enables a capitalist biopolitics. Although parliamentary and philanthropic discourses frequently refer to London’s “black poor,” an elastic ethnic category that encompassed Africans as well as East Indians, its aesthetic of enclosure applied only to the latter group. Of course, African immigrants experienced frequent discrimination in the British workforce. But they were not forcefully segregated in a particular region of the country or a section of city, nor were they stigmatized as a public nuisance in need of relocation.36 Africans existing outside the EIC’s legal ambit moved to the barracks, but they did so voluntarily. Moreover, the Navigation Acts legally considered African and West Indies sailors “British,” and, as such, they were better paid and supplied than Lascars. On British soil, escaped African slaves had a legal right to defy their master’s claim over them by resisting deportation to America and the West Indies. Moreover, metropolitan spectators felt a greater compassionate duty to redress African Loyalists exiled from revolutionary America than to recompense Lascar paupers for their unjust mistreatment, as evident in this anonymous letter to The Public Register (1786): the Lascars . . . demand our pity only; but . . . the African Negroes have an actual claim on our justice:—They, or the greater part of them, have served Britain, have fought under her colours, and after having quitted the service of their American masters, depending on the promise of protection held out to them by British Governors and Commanders, are now left to perish by famine and cold, in the sight of that people for whom they have hazarded their lives, and even (many of them) spilt their blood.37
Invisible objects of a self-protectionist English pity, poor Lascars are not worthy of metropolitan justice; by contrast, poor Africans (the majority being exiled Loyalists) deserve, according to a nationalist sentimentality, legal compensation for their valuable patriotic service. Rooted in Smith’s conflicted theory, this twofold distinction between the visible and invisible poor assigned some Africans (and not the East Africans hired under the EIC’s purview) to a second-class British citizen status but consigned Lascars to an extralegal social oblivion: a
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bare life defined by state-sanctioned enclosure, forcefully segregated from metropolitan spectators. Only in Robinson’s poem is this aesthetic of enclosure repudiated, but even here moral sympathy is limited: her radical critique of economic racism consolidates female national identity at the expense of the abolitionist politics she explicitly articulates in her other poems on enslaved African vagrants. She satirizes the climate-based racial theories that justified the ethnic division of British maritime labor. The Lascar boy suffers from exposure to England’s alien weather, a hyperbolic parody of EIC Britons complaining about South Asia’s harsh tropical sun: “‘Another day, Ah! me, a day / Of dreary Sorrow is begun! / And I loathe the temper’d ray, / And still I hate the sickly Sun!’” (I.1–4). Mentioned fifteen times in the poem, the temperate northern sun looms over the boy as if it were the cause of his sorrow. It colors the skin, for, as he laments, “No cheek so dark as mine, I see; / For Europe’s Suns, with softer dyes / Mark Europe’s favour’d progeny! / Low is my stature, black my hair, / The emblem of my Soul’s despair!” (I.74–78). The pun “Suns/Sons” implies that climatic and geographic differences determine racial lineage. Since the seventeenth century, natural philosophers had argued that the sun’s heat was a crucial factor in the transmission of blackness, and that East Indians’ “dark” skin/hair color symbolizes the laziness, effeminacy, and immorality of the Torrid Zone.38 In Robinson’s parody, skin color is a superficial marker of identity, an accident of geography that the boy falsely internalizes by convincing himself that metropolitan Britons are irresponsive to his plight because of his outer and inner blackness. Nevertheless, climate does not play the same role in her description of the “dark Sons of pain,” enslaved Africans who suffer under the sun’s rays but who do not naively accept their masters’ racist theories.39 In her poems “The African” and “The Negro Girl,” the black protagonists blame their misfortune on the slavery practiced by “the proud Lords of traffic” and sanctioned by “the proud rulers of the land.”40 By contrast, the Lascar never names the human agents responsible for his misery. Robinson invokes the blackness of enslaved Africans to make their suffering visible to metropolitan leaders, inciting abolitionist feelings, whereas the blackness of exploited Lascars constitutes their suffering solely to and through her female poet-speaker, inciting feminist self-pity. After all, the female poet is the only witness who answers his sympathetic plea: “who, but such a wretch can tell / The transports of the Indian Boy?” (II. 267–68). The foreigner is incapable of telling his tale, and his naiveté and helplessness assumes the poet-speaker’s white female superiority. Hence, the illusive sympathy invoked in the question implicit in the final couplet—does the “COLD” heart belong to the Lascar or the English villagers?—is realized in the female poet’s self-pitying tears. As Moira Ferguson argues in the context of African slavery, “in externalizing their sympathy, female authors can mask and sublimate the anger they feel at women’s roles and simultaneously assert themselves.”41 This feminist sublimation subtends the poet’s sympathy for en-
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slaved Africans and Lascars, except that the latter group, like her, represents wageless life. Although this self/other identification does not elicit a conservative nationalistic pity, it relies on the racial discourse of climatic difference to subordinate ethical concerns about Indian maritime labor to a national agenda dear to Robinson’s feminist heart: women’s slave-like disfranchisement under English common law.42 She prioritizes the cause of British female citizenship and African emancipation over the abolition of Indian indentured slavery. But the fact that abolition is never broached in her poem does not imply that her representation of the raped Indian mother is self-indulgent. On the contrary, the shedding of feminist tears undercuts the aesthetic of enclosure with an illusive sympathy that dissolves the self into the marginalized other. Shocked readers are thereby forced to see eye to eye with the desegregated Lascar, an unenclosed public nuisance, even as the agents responsible for his miserable enslavement remain unscathed. Robinson’s anti-enclosure aesthetic reframes the Lascar problem as a crisis of national hospitality best tackled by impartial yet dispossessed female spectators. THE EXPULSION OF SURPLUS INDIAN PAUPERS, 1815–23 In this section, I briefly consider a literary counterexample: a poem by the children’s writer and outspoken dissenter Jane Taylor (1783–1824), who welcomes the conservative implications of Robinson’s anti-enclosure aesthetic. Rather than critique the economic system itself, Taylor uses this aesthetic to facilitate the expulsion of Indian migrant workers from the surplus maritime labor market post-1815. The influx of disbanded unemployed British seamen prompted the strict enforcement of repatriation as further codified under the 1823 Merchant Shipping Act, which called for the arrest and deportation of vagrant Lascars who declined to reside in the barracks and board voluntarily the next outgoing ship.43 Inspired by a historical event that Taylor allegedly witnessed while at Marazion in Cornwall near Mount’s Bay, “The Shipwrecked Lascar a True Tale” (published in the Weekly Entertainer in 1817) is told from the perspective of a saintly pathetic heroine who opportunistically yet benevolently capitalizes on the renewed policy of repatriation to promote female-empowering philanthropy.44 This short poem mourns and celebrates the fate of a “dark Asiatic” sailor abandoned in England but heroically rescued, nursed, and returned to India through the charitable intervention of a kind “Madame.”45 In this romantic tableau, a tempest causes a cargo-laden ship bound for England to crash on its shore, after which the crew is rescued except “one sickly stranger— unfriended—unknown,” left “to perish alone.” An Englishwoman approaches him with “kindness” after seeing his “dark face” and “reliev’d his distress” with her “fair” hands. Her charity transcends national, racial, and linguistic differences: they communicate nonverbally through “sympathy’s tone” given
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that “pity has language no words can supply.” The “gentle Lascar” soon recovers and returns home “to tell his dark beauty,” his Indian wife, “the tale of his woes.” The hostess is repaid with “the blessings and prayers of the grateful Lascar.” The importance of charity in spreading Christianity to India is the dominant concern of the poem, for “the knowledge she strove to impart” will be disseminated through the retelling of the Lascar’s tale. Indeed, the poem was also printed as a musical score by the philanthropic Baptist missionary George Charles Smith, nicknamed “Boatswain Smith,” who published patriotic songs and biblical hymns dedicated to distressed mariners in need of charitable alms.46 Reflecting the ethos of the 1815 parliamentary investigation, Taylor deploys pity not to spark metropolitan outrage against the Lascar’s exploitation, but to expedite his repatriation and conversion through an independent female agent who alone exemplifies British national virtue. This sentimental outcome is enabled by modeling the “Madame” and the black Lascar after two eighteenth-century stock characters: the white female philanthropist who ameliorates the horrors of African slavery while downplaying the message of abolition and the threat of black resistance, and the “grateful Negro” who nobly submits to racial oppression in order to uphold white privilege.47 More precisely, “The Shipwrecked Lascar” rewrites the popular Yarico and Inkle myth, an allegedly true tale of a shipwrecked English seaman, Inkle, who falls in love with and marries his sympathetic protector Yarico, a West Indies native, then sells her callously into slavery soon after a European vessel rescued them. This embellished and frequently retold eighteenth-century story encodes guilt-ridden anxieties over British trafficking in African slaves alongside Englishwomen’s entrapment in the English marriage market.48 Similar to Robinson’s defamiliarizing literary techniques, Taylor’s reversal highlights the selfless sympathy of the motherly female protector who rescues the grateful shipwrecked foreigner from the savage (male) British islanders. In return, she receives his spiritual blessings. This sentimental Christian exchange recalls the Countess of Hertford, Frances Seymour’s 1738 verse adaptation, which includes a two-part story set “before” and “after” Yarico’s betrayal into slavery: the first part dwells on her marital status as property belonging to Inkle, an ungrateful opportunist, and the second part recounts her conversion by a colonial-clerical protector. The West Indies woman now emerges as a martyr who offers Christian salvation as a viable solution to the English slave trade.49 Taylor’s poem adapts this solution as central to its narrative logic, in which the character of the pious native heroine is displaced onto two unpaid female workers: the English foster mother and the Indian wife. Nandini Bhattacharya and Martin Wechselblatt have argued that feminized spinoffs of the Inkle and Yarico story served, by the late eighteenth-century, to contain the threat of interracial contact within the civilizing narrative frame of the sympathetic female caregiver—a proxy of a domestic ideology favorable to English commercialism.50 Likewise, the com-
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plex imbrications of race, gender, and labor value in Taylor’s poem require, post-1815, a family-based Christian philanthropy, one the poet exalts as an effective, humane, and safe alternative to the harsh enclosure of Lascars and the reformation of discriminatory laws. Unlike Robinson’s gothic tale of the slain Indian mother, Taylor’s sanctification of the English foster mother conceals domestic and imperial violence in her tender caresses. The poet also differs from Robinson in using a female speaker who provides a personal solution to the Lascar problem. Amenable to the shared initiatives of the EIC, Parliament, and British sailors, Taylor’s poem implicitly calls for proselytizing mothers of the nation to spearhead the efficient deportation of Indian castaways under the guise of familial benevolence. When discharged Royal Navy sailors returned to their previous jobs after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Lascar labor surplus that had sustained the Company’s rising profits became a social liability. Robinson’s radical campaign against racial injustice was hijacked by a parliamentary agenda for deflecting the eyesore of pitiful Indian vagrants—a public nuisance that threatened to expose the contradiction between metropolitan and imperial law if allowed to roam freely, unenclosed. By focusing on this historical-literary transition, I have argued that the metropolitan witnessing of black Asians required a different moral-sentimental economy than that of black Africans, one committed to a strict policy of enclosure and repatriation rather than abolition, for exploited Lascar labor on the passage to Britain proved indispensable. By the early nineteenth century, mournful stories about destitute Indian sailors reinforced missionary discourses that, as in Taylor’s poem, replaced economic with spiritual salvation. Hence, sympathetic tears shed for poor Indian immigrants promote patronizing attitudes toward a static ethnic minority, as Lynn Festa has argued, yet these overflowing tears exceed the patriotic affect exalted by self-serving philanthropists.51 These tears resist the cold legalistic logic by which a sizable “non-British” working-class population has been expunged from the national record of transoceanic trade, as imperial apologists have tried to do for the last three centuries. Invisible in the eyes of political economy, in the past and even today, Lascar specters nonetheless haunt the expansion of the British Empire at the East End docks that occasioned their transports. NOTES 1. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 3: 1844–1853, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York, 1975), 284 (italics in original). 2. Rising Lascar populations in Britain between 1794 and 1814 are documented in Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002), 32. 3. On the haunting presence of London’s Lascars in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, see The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York and London, 1979), 238, ll. VII.241–42. For a critical reading of this passage, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998), 32. On Malaysian Lascars and xe-
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nophobia in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1821], see Rajani Sudan, Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720–1850 (Philadelphia, 2002), 65–95. 4. Feminist, racial, and antislavery discourses are deeply intertwined, particularly in women’s activism on behalf of London’s black poor population in the 1780s and 90s. See Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York, 1992); Clare Midgley, Woman Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London and New York, 1992; repr. 2002), esp. 1–42; and Eamon Wright, British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818 (New York, 2005), esp. 39–44. On Lascars as “Forgotten Seamen” excluded from histories of British maritime labor, see Conrad Dixon, “Lascar: The Forgotten Seamen,” in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1980), 265–81. 5. See Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi, 2006) and Visram. 6. See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 2 vols., tr. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1990), 1:783–89, 873–76. On the unintended surplus labor that accompanied the Navigation Acts’ suppression and reorganization of Indian maritime labor, see Fisher, 32–39. 7. On “stagnant” labor reserves, see Marx, Capital, 1:796–97. On Lascars as a stagnant labor reserve used irregularly for Atlantic trade, see Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain, 1780–1830 (London, 1996), 105–8. 8. Marx, Capital, 1:799. 9. Mary Robinson, “The Lascar, in Two Parts,” Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe (New York, 2000), **–**, ll. I.49–60. Subsequent references are to this edition, and will be cited parenthetically in the text by part and line number. 10. Marx, Capital, 1:799. 11. Marx, Capital, 1:793–94, 797. 12. On money as incarnated exchange value, see Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1973), 223, 225. 13. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2005), 151. 14. On Robinson’s status as an underpaid sex worker, in and outside wedlock, and her wrangled negotiations with the Prince of Wales, see Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (London, 2004), esp. 158–67, 230–31, 326, 387, and 390. 15. On prostitution narratives as emblematic of alienated labor under emergent capitalist relations in eighteenth-century Britain, see Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, 2006). 16. Stuart Curran has shown that Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800) is modeled after Lyrical Ballads, but that her poetic innovations animate outcasts into victims of oppression, not stereotypical nature folks, and are therefore more attentive to the systemic abuse of power than Wordsworth’s experimental poetry on dispossessed vagrants (“Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776– 1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner [Philadelphia, 1994], 17–35). 17. On the impropriety of self-pity, especially as publicly displayed by ignoble beggars and criminals, see Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th ed. [1790], ed. Knud Haakonsen (Cambridge, 2002), 60. On sympathy as dependent on the propriety of conduct, see 81, 86, and 156–58. 18. Smith, 82–83. 19. For Smith, the murder of a just person results in feelings for retaliation, which over time are naturally tempered into the virtue of justice in civil society (93). 20. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capitalism, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, 2005), 257 (italics in original), 259, 263–64. 21. See Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–91. His definition is based on Marx’s notion of the “virtual pauper”: the idea that all free wage labor “is merely a living labour capacity” (italics in original). See also Marx, Grundrisse, 604.
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GARCIA—THE TRANSPORTS OF LASCAR SPECTERS 271 22. Jacqueline M. Labbe, “Romance and Violence in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales and Other Gothic Poetry,” in “A Natural Delineation of Human Passions”: The Historic Moment of Lyrical Ballads, ed. C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam and New York, 2004), 137–56. 23. “Lascar Seamen,” The Literary Panorama, 1806–1819 2 (1815): **–**, 914. 24. See Fisher, 170–71. 25. “Lascar Seamen,” 914, 916. 26. “Lascar Seamen,” 904, 906. 27. “Lascar Seamen,” 906–7. 28. “Lascar Seamen,” 904–5. 29. See Fisher, 144. 30. Smith, 72. 31. Smith, 62. 32. See Isaac Land, “Customs of the Sea: Flogging, Empire, and the ‘True British Seamen’ 1770–1870,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2001): 169–85. 33. Land, 172. 34. See Fisher, 150. 35. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 221. 36. See Myers, 104–17, esp. 108–9, 113; and Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 (Liverpool, 1994), esp. 74–75, 80. 37. The Public Register (1786), quoted in Braidwood, 68 (italics in original). 38. On East Indian blackness and climatological theories of race, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), 24–25, 100, 160, 266–67. 39. Robinson, “The Negro Girl,” in Selected Poems, 234–39, l.33. 40. See Robinson, “The African,” in Selected Poems, 313–14, l. 33; and “The Negro Girl,” l. 49. 41. Ferguson, 111. 42. In her feminist writings, Robinson bemoans Englishwomen as “slaves” forced to labor for men without pay. See Thoughts on the Condition of Women and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799), 3; and A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799), 13. 43. See Fisher, 176. 44. In a letter to her parents dated 25 November 1814, Jane Taylor writes that she witnessed from her friends’ coastal house in Marazion “an Indiaman wrecked under the rocks almost under our windows,” and how a friend and resident committed to Christian charity, Anne Maxwell (the “Miss M” to whom the poem is dedicated), nursed to health one of the surviving Lascar crewmen (The Family Pen. Memorials, Biographical and Literary, of the Taylor Family of Onger, 2 vols., ed. Rev. Isaac Taylor [London, 1867], 1:290–92, and 298–300). 45. Taylor, “The Shipwrecked Lascar, a True Tale, Addressed to Miss M—,” Weekly Entertainer or, Agreeable and Instructive Repository 57 (1817): 100. 46. This musical score was printed several times between 1815 and 1820 and is entitled The Ship Wreck’d Lascar, A Narrative Founded on Fact. By the Rev. D. G. C. Smith. Illustrated in Poetic Verse, By Miss Jane Taylor of Ongar. The Music by Thomas Walker (London, 1815?). On the British missionary who sponsored this publication, see Roald Kverndal, “Smith, George Charles [Boatswain Smith] (1782–1863),” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 47. See Ferguson, 100–11; and George Boulukos, The Grateful Negro: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge, 2008). 48. On the importance of the Inkle and Yarico myth for Englishwomen’s abolitionist writings, see Ferguson, 69–90.
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49. See Ferguson, 79–85. 50. See Nandini Bhattacharya, Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism (Burlington, 2006), 25–59, esp. 48–49; and Martin Wechselblatt, “Gender and Race in Yarico’s Epistles to Inkle: Voicing the Feminine/Slave,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 197–223, 214. 51. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS SIRAJ AHMED is Assistant Professor English at Lehman College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (2012), and of articles in The Postcolonial Enlightenment (2009) and Representations. He is currently at work on a book about colonial law and critical method. ASHLEY L. COHEN is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University and a recent Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current work is on the imaginative geography of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and her publications include a forthcoming critical edition of Lady Nugent’s East India Journal. DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA is Professor and Chair in Ethics at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), and is co-editor of the Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, Economics book series with Routledge. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including most recently, American Quarterly, Social Text, and Theory, Culture & Society. She is currently preparing manuscripts titled No-Bodies: Raciality and Logic of Security in the Global Present, and A Critique of Racial Violence. HUMBERTO GARCIA is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (2012), and his work has appeared in venues like Journal of Religion and Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in Romanticism, and The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He is currently at work on a book about Indian authors and English literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. BETTY JOSEPH is Associate Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (2004), and has recently published articles Cultural Critique, and Routing Diasporas (2012). She is currently working on two book-length projects: one on representations of economic globalization in contemporary fiction, and the other on seventeenth and eighteenth century British Enlightenment intersections of language theory, anthropology and trade. The Eighteenth Century, vol. 55, nos. 2–3 Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
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DAVID KAZANJIAN is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), and has co-edited several works, including Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2002), with David L. Eng, and The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (2004), with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit. He is currently completing a manuscript titled The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. JULIE CHUN KIM is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. Her interests include colonialism and empire, science and botany, and food studies. She is currently working on a book about the St. Vincent royal botanic garden. LAWRENCE LIPKING is Professor Emeritus of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of several books, including The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), which won the Christian Gauss Award, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (1988), and Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998). RAMESH MALLIPEDDI is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. His book, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia, and his work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, and ELH. SYLVIA KASEY MARKS is Professor of English at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She is the author of Sir Charles Grandison: The Compleat Conduct Book (1980), and Writing for the Rising Generation: British Fiction for Young People 1672–1839 (2003). JENNIFER DAVIS MICHAEL is Professor of English at The University of the South. She is the author of Blake and the City (2006), and is currently working on a project about poetry and silence. TERRY F. ROBINSON is an Assistant Professor, CLTA at the University of Toronto, where she teaches eighteenth-and nineteenth- century literature and drama. Her articles on the novel, drama, and poetry have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism, among others. She is also co-editor of the essay collection Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780–1860 (2009), and editor of Mary Robinson’s Nobody (2013). DENYS VAN RENEN is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His most recent articles have appeared in SEL: Studies in
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English Literature and Philological Quarterly. He has an article forthcoming on Dorothy Wordsworth’s travels to Scotland in The Journal of Narrative Theory. JORDANA ROSENBERG is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion (2011), and co-editor, with Amy Villarejo, of Queer Studies and the Crisis of Capitalism in GLQ. Her current book in progress is on the form of dispossession in the ages of finance. SHELTON WALDREP is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. His latest book is The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity, and the Body (2013). MEGAN WALSH is Assistant Professor of English at St. Bonaventure University. Her current book manuscript is about the impact of book illustration on literary writing in the United States between 1770 and 1830, and she is co- editing, with William Huntting Howell, an edition of Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). Her work has appeared in Early American Literature, Common-place, and Literature in the Early American Republic. CHI- MING YANG is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-century England, 1660–1760 (2011), and her work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics. Her new work concerns race, chinoiserie, transatlantic slavery, and the cultural impact of global flows of silver between Latin America and East Asia.
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