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.
Fictions of Obligation: Contract and Romance in Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
This essay reads the short romances of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn as complex responses to contract-based theories of obligation and the model of the political subject who enters into relatio...
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800
At the time when European powers colonized the Americas, the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive, why did they sponsor the construction of racial slavery in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought - successfully - to batten on this commerce, and - unsuccessfully - to regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, premised on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.