Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.
The Cambridge companion to Aphra Behn
Chronology Mary Ann O'Donnell 1. Aphra Behn: the documentary record Mary Ann O'Donnell 2. Behn, women and society Susan Staves 3. Aphra Behn and the Restoration theatre Derek Hughes 4. The political poetry of Aphra Behn Melinda S. Zook 5. Behn's dramatic response to Restoration politics Susan J. Owen 6. Tragedy and tragicomedy Janet Todd and Derek Hughes 7. Behn and the unstable traditions of social comedy Robert Markley 8. The Cavalier myth in The Rover Helen M. Burke 9. 'The Story of the heart': Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister Ros Ballaster 10. Oroonoko: reception, ideology, and narrative strategy Laura J. Rosenthal 11. 'Others', slaves and colonists in Oroonoko Joanna Lipking 12. The short fiction (excluding Oroonoko) Jacqueline Pearson 13. Pastoral and Lyric: Astrea in Arcadia Jessica Munns 14. Aphra Behn's French translations Line Cottegnies Further reading.
The Politics of Truth: Power in Nietzsche’s Epistemology
This article concerns first a curiosity found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In the midst of a heated attack on Christianity, Nietzsche detours into a discussion of epistemology. I argue that this turn indicates the importance of epistemology, and illustrates its political and moral character. The weak, who cannot tolerate uncertainty and shades of gray, seek to impose an epistemology of clarity and certainty. At the same time, the strong, who revel in ambiguity, seek to enjoy the richness and subtlety of a non-dichotomous view of the world. This is a political struggle because the weak cannot allow the strong’s epistemology to exist, let alone prevail. It is not surprising, then, that Nietzsche talks about epistemology in the midst of attacking Christianity: its view of truth is essential to its mission of taming the nobles. Here, I consider Nietzsche as a political thinker in a different light. Political battles are fought far beyond the halls of government. Nietzsche is a political thinker; one, however, who looks at politics in an uncommon way.