This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy, dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.
Faith Smith's Creole Recitations offers a feminist critique and compelling alternative to the dominant narratives of Trinidadian and black nationalism. Smith's analysis of Thomas's participation in the anglophone Caribbean public sphere of the late nineteenth century makes visible that already in the 1870s, Thomas defined creole identity as normative and national in part by contrasting it to Indian and other ethnic identities. Smith illuminates the significant role women and womanhood played in the construction of creole identity and respectable middle-class nationalism. As importantly, Smith offers 'recitation' as a model for understanding social and cultural formation in the Caribbean. In contrast to the long-held view that recitation was necessarily an alienating act of mimicry, Smith reveals that recitation functioned as a creative process used both to resist and to appropriate colonial discourse. Through it, Thomas and other Afro-Caribbean intellectuals shaped the perception and material reality of their individual, ethnic, and national communities.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
158 p, Argues that engaging the Caribbean diaspora and the massive waves of migration from the region that have punctuated its history, involves not only understanding communities in host countries and the conflicted identities of second generation subjectivities, but also interpreting how these communities interrelate with and affect communities at home.
