The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire

Notes

¹ All references to Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings will be included in the text. For an account of the success of the book and the fame of its author see Carretta ix-xxviii. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr have provided a bibliography of editions and printings of the text in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, 162-4. Sonia Hofkosh provides a summary of Equiano's political career in "Tradition and The Interesting Narrative: Capitalism, Abolition, and the Romantic Individual" in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, 333.
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² For related discussions of the complex substitutions which mediate between the production of affect and political action see Ann Cvetkovich's compelling readings of the problem of exemplarity in AIDS activism and in Marx's novelistic gestures in Capital in Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, 1-6 and 165-97 respectively.
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³ This is from Edmund Burke's famous definition of sympathy in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our idieas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 41.
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⁴ In this regard, this essay obliquely engages with Ann Laura Stoler's Race and the Education and Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995) in that it attempts to bring questions of sexuality and coloniality into constant reiteration through the reading of a single passage.
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⁵ See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. In this regard, I concur with David M. Halperin's recent admonition in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 24-47, that Foucault has been poorly served by many scholars who work in his name. This is especially evident when one recognizes that Foucault's engagement with questions of sexuality are deeply entwined with his attempt to offer a thorough account of the emergence of the middle classes that runs tangentially to Marx's account of cooperation in the first volume of Capital. Clearly articulated in Discipline and Punish, this project traveled through the analysis of sexuality and eventually culminated in the startling genealogy of biological state racism articulated in Society Must Be Defended. This complex historical assemblage of class stylization, sexual regulation and racial specification remains largely unexplored, and its future analysis arguably constitutes Foucault's "forgotten" legacy.
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⁶ The term circum-Atlantic is derived from Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, 4-5.
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⁷ Equiano's deployment of Christian discourse and his complex relationship to Methodism have been the subject of controversy in recent discussions of The Interesting Narrative.Adam Potkay offers an illuminating account of the secularization of Equiano's text while defending his own tropological reading of the narrative in "History, Oratory, and God in Equiano's Interesting Narrative." It is my implicit contention that attending to the erotic substrate of Equiano's Christianity not only allows one to develop a coherent account of the strangeness of his politics, but also allows one to recognize precisely how Equiano's practice diverges from the political desires of recent criticism.
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⁸ See for example Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies.
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⁹ Equiano, like most followers of Whitefield and Wesley, refers to himself as a member of the Church of England.It is important to remember Henry Abelove's persuasive account of the erotic substrate of Methodist practice in The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists.
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.¹⁰ Keeping the scheme out of the public eye was crucial for the success of the land monopoly.
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¹¹ What I am describing here is not that distant from the notion of "traumatic nationalism" recently articulated by Lauren Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, 1-4.
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¹² Martin Madan was also the author of an extremely controversial critique of The Marriage Act—which argued that polygamy was in accordance with Mosaic and Christian law—entitled Thelyphtora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, in its Causes, Effects, preventions, and Remedy; Considered on the Basis of Divine Law: Under the following heads, viz. Marriage, Whoredom and Fornication, Adultery, Polygamy, Divorce. Madan's close reading of the Bible opened him to charges of blasphemy, but his critical strategy of testing contemporary statutes and practices regarding marriage via typological readings of the Bible is not at all distinct from Equiano's own strategy of configuring his life in terms of the Old Testament. See Adam Potkay's analysis of this rhetorical strategy in "Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography."
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¹³ As Silverman argues, Reik's examples suggest that "his attention may be focused upon a different variety of moral masochism than that spotlighted by Freud—that his concern may ultimately be with Christian masochism, even when he is discussing more secular instances" (197).
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¹⁴In "History. . .", Potkay argues that Equiano's rhetorical strategies are very similar to the oratorical tactics of Whitefield: "Behind all of these [gestures] lies the promise of divine vengeance.In this context, the question "might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God" signals not so much the perspective of a cultural outsider as a confirmation that the Christian universe knows no outside; it is all inclusive, and is itself the surety of eventual justice" (605).For an illuminating account of the oratorical qualities of Equiano's text see William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865.
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¹⁵ See Reik, 304.
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¹⁶ What true prayer might mean in this instance may be impossible to define. Equiano may be distinguishing George's actions from the rules for personal conduct laid out by Wesley, or he may be referring to more traditional Protestant definitions of prayer. Equiano may be referring to specific doctrinal exercises, although the context does not explicitly support this view. I would like to thank Kim Michasiw for suggesting this possiblility.
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¹⁷ Equiano refers to ships as "little worlds."
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¹⁸ For a discussion of the ambiguous role played by the masochist's tormentor see Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty.
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¹⁹ Starting from Equiano's profession of similarity between the laws of the Pentateuch and the laws of Igbo society, Potkay's essay works through the progression from Genesis through Exodus in The Interesting Narrative. Potkay's reading however trails off after Equiano's conversion for reasons that are partially articulated in Srinivas Aravamudan's critique of Potkay's reading in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1668-1804, 239-46. Aravamudan suggests that Potkay's decision to focus only on the tropological leaves the question of the anagogical unaddressed, but, as Potkay has recently argued in "History. . .", 608-9, Aravamudan's reading of Equiano's Christianity is neither persuasive in itself, nor sufficient for dealing with the complex relationship between rhetorical performance and political incitement in The Interesting Narrative. As I hope my unraveling of the Judges allusion indicates, Equiano's deployment of the Bible cannot be contained in any straightforward fashion, for even at the tropological level the text works against itself.
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²⁰Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, "Introduction" Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 9. Potkay and Burr also draw attention to an inaccuracy in Equiano's claim to have seen Whitefield, see p.9.
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²¹ See Potkay, "Olaudah," 682-685.
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²² See Laura Brown, The Ends of Empire, 85. Brown's link between femininity and commodification is succinctly stated as follows:

As an extension of female sexuality, then, commodification also extends that constitutive passivity to the absolute emptiness of fetishization; that is, the stasis and the consequent lack of status of the female figure result in an emptying out of significance that coincides with the process by which fetishization empties bodies, beings, and practices of all significance except their exchangeability with objects" (85).

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²³ See Hofkosh, 337.
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²⁴ See Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1838, Deirdre Coleman, "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790's," and Ann K. Mellor, "Am I Not A Woman, and a Sister": Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender."
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²⁵ Felicity Nussbaum broaches the question of Equiano's gender identity in The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century, 191-206, but like much of the prior criticism regarding Equiano's unstable masculinity overlooks the possibility of strategic feminization as a figural and textual strategy of violent revenge. Nussbaum, like numerous other critics, assumes a disconnection between feminization and violent revenge that renders Equiano's deployment of Judges all but unreadable. Equiano's "femininity" has been a topic of some concern in Wilfred D. Samuels "Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African," and in Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano. However, much of this discussion not only diverges from Equiano's text, but also fails to adequately historicize gender and sexuality in both 18th century British and Igbo society. Katalin Orban raises a related question in "Dominant and Submerged Discourses in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa)."Attempts to excavate the roots of Equiano's femininity from his Igbo past may have been rendered moot by Vincent Carretta's recent suggestion that Equiano was a native of South Carolina in "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity." The problems posed by Equiano's gender identity demonstrates the complexity of thinking historically about sexuality in a trans-cultural context.
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²⁶ See Peggy Kamuf, "Author of a Crime" in The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 20.
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²⁷ The invocation of God's power is simply the corollary declaration of the oppositional relation between the invisible church and the visible state previously exercised through the masochistic scene.
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²⁸ Mieke Bal, in "A Body of Writing: Judges 19" in The Feminist Companion to the Bible, objects to the use of virgin in this instance in a fashion that underlines precarious task of paraphrasing or troping this passage in Judges (217).
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²⁹ The most important element in Equiano's romance with capital is his advocation for the Sierra Leone company.For an illuminating discussion of his relation to the project see Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804, 234-88.
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³⁰ In "Word between Worlds: The Economy of Equiano's Narrative," Joseph Fichtelberg has persuasively argued that Equiano's piety and his economic fantasies are thoroughly intertwined.
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³¹ Aravamudan emphasizes the generic quality of this recourse to the bible (271). See Henry Louis Gates, "The Trope of the Talking Book," in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, for the canonical reading of the talking books episode.
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³² At one level, this would seem to be at odds with Equiano's advocacy of intermarriage in an article published in The Public Advertiser in 1788. However, Equiano's refutation of James Tobin's pro-slavery writings focuses exclusively on ameliorating the exploitation of black women by white men in the plantation economy and thus stabilizes the scene of sexual exchange by eliminating not only other ethnicities, but also non-heterosexual sexual practices and identities. The problem posed by the drykbot is that its intensely hybrid form of sociability does not allow for easy discursive stabilization and thus Equiano's text opts for temporary containment. For a discussion of Equiano's writing on intermarriage see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, 284-5.
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