Slavery, Colonialism, and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism

210 Pages·2018·8.422 MB·English

by  Nandini Bhattacharya

SLAVERY, COLONIALISM, AND CONNOISSEURSHIP

Slavery, Colonialism, and
Connoisseurship
Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism
NANDINIBHATTACHARYA
University of Toledo, USA
First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-0-815-39710-6 (hbk)
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Family Jewels: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship 25
3 James Cobb and Colonial Cacophony: Doing the Enlightenment in
Different Voices 61
4 Sheridan’s Follies: Auctioning Ancestors in The School for Scandal 91
5 Transatlantic Flight: Phillis Wheatley’s Copies with a Difference 139
6 Postscript 169
Bibliography 175
Index 193
List of Figures
2.1 “The Royal Captain,” 1 April 1788, published in The Rambler s
Magazine, vol. 6, p. 104, British Library shelfmark Cup. 820.a.l2
p. 104. By permission of the British Library. 29
2.2 Wouski, by James Gillray. London, 23 January 1788, published by
H. Humphrey. British Museum of Prints and Drawings 7260.
Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. Produced by
permission. 31
4.1 Robert Baddeley as Moses in The School for Scandal, painted by
Zoffany. National Museums Liverpool (Lady Lever Art Gallery).
Produced by permission. 95
4.2 Title page of A catalogue of the Portland Museum: lately the property
of the Duchess Dowager of Portland, deceased: which will be sold by
auction, by Mr. Skinner and Co. on Monday the 24th of April, 1786.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 110
4.3 The Raree Show. London 1788, published by W. Moore and
W. Dickie. British Museum Prints and Drawings 7273.
Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
Produced by permission. 123
4.4 A Scene in The School for Scandal. London 1786, published by
S.W. Fores. British Museum Prints and Drawings 6968.
Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
Produced by permission. 124
5.1 Frontispiece. In Elegiac Poem, On the Death of... George Whitefield.
Boston: Russell and Boyles, 1770. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 149
5.2 Frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley. In Poems on various subjects,
religious and moral. By Phillis Wheatley, negro servant to Mr. John
Wheatley, of Boston, in New England. London, 1773.
Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 156
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to my transnational family, my inspiration for this book. Thank
you, Ma, Baba, Tuli, Paromita, Manu, Jona, Roktim, Lopa, June, Apurba, Babu,
Pipey, Dadus, Mashis, and the little ones. You have always believed in me when I
have wondered and wandered. To you this book is dedicated.
In addition, I have many people to thank for advice, editing, critical scrutiny,
feedback and reference help at various stages of progress of this manuscript. In
particular, I would like to thank Dr. Paula Backscheider, my dissertation advisor, for
her continued support of my scholarship. My heartfelt thanks go to colleagues and
librarians at Valparaiso University, who always read, discussed and critiqued my work
with enthusiasm. In particular I would like to thank Betsy Burow Flak, Renu Juneja,
Maire Mullins, Jon Pahl, David Morgan, and David Rowland for their friendship and
support. Several research grants from Valparaiso University - including a research
professorship leave - enabled the inception and evolution of this book. I would also
like to thank colleagues and mentors at the University of Toledo for their cooperation
and help in getting this book “done.” For generous travel and research support I
thank David Stem, and for their support and confidence and interest I thank Marietta
Morrissey, Joan Mullins, Sue Ott Rowlands, Roger Ray, and the Humanities Institute
seminarians - a great group on whom to try out unfinished ideas. The University of
Toledo gave me a Kohler grant, which enabled me to travel to complete research
for this book, and I thank the committee. My thanks also go to Asma Abdel Halim,
Renee Heberle, Pat Murphy, and Ashley Pryor, great colleagues in the University of
Toledo’s Women’s and Gender Studies department.
Friends and colleagues at other institutions have, naturally, been invaluable too. I
thank Kevin Berland, Mita Choudhury, Bidyut Chakraborty, Morris Eaves, Richard
Maxwell, Linda Merians, Kumkum Sangari, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Katie Tmmpener,
and Kenneth Warren for conversations, hospitality, and encouragement at critical
moments in writing. I can only attempt to suggest, moreover, the debt of thanks I
bear to Aijun Appadurai, leader of the Ford Foundation Project on Globalization at
the University of Chicago, where I had the good fortune to have a fellowship; his
ideas inspire and permeate this book. Thanks also go to Jacqueline Bhabha, Dipesh
Chakraborty, Prasenjit Duara, Steve Collins, Malathi de Alwis, Farhat Haq, and other
scholars and colleagues at the Globalization Project. Especial thanks to Homi Bhabha
for encouraging and inspiring me to an extent possibly unknown to himself, and well
beyond even the range of his cited works in this book.
For assistance with locating materials, hunting down images, and answering
various queries in general, I thank the staff and services of the American Antiquarian
Society, the Asiatic Society Calcutta, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library,
the British Museum, the British Library, the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library,
and especially the Harvard Theatre Collection staff, the Lady Level Gallery, and the
viii Slavery, Colonialism, and Connoisseurship
Oriental and India Office Collections. To the Huntington Library I am also grateful
for the Andrew Mellon postdoctoral research fellowship that jump-started this book;
many thanks to the director Dr. Robert Ritchie for his interest and hospitality.
To Ashgate’s anonymous reader of the manuscript, my heartfelt thanks for
broadening my scholarly reach and perspective on a project which, in four years of
continuous co-existence, had become sometimes too intimate a companion for me to
imagine alternative analyses of its intellectual challenges.
No one could have a better editor than Erika Gaffney at Ashgate Publishing. To
her, heartfelt thanks for discovery, encouragement, and guidance of my work.
Personal friends can never be thanked enough for the times that writing had me both
preoccupied and demanding of them. These friends, who must know but never remind
me that I owe them so much, are Marisa Garcia Verdugo, Alex and Jane Geisinger,
Jim Kingsland, Elizabeth Lynn, Irene Dhar Malik, Bill Marion, Zahra Nwabara, Lisa
Pahl, Marian Rubchak, Urmi Sen, Srilata Mukheijee, Sharon Rowley, and, last but
not least, my soul-sister Nelly Zamora Bello.
Audiences at many conferences have been dynamic and electrifying. I thank the
listeners who made wonderful suggestions at the East-Central American Society for
Eighteenth-century Studies conferences, the McMaster Taylor Conference, the North-
east American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies conferences, and the British
Society for Eighteenth-century Studies conferences over the years. If I had known
your individual names I would necessarily have included them, as your intellectual
contributions have enriched this book.
I thank Adam Myers for his counsel and support, and especially thank my son
Khoka for giving me the joy in life which made it possible to write this book.
Chapter 1
Introduction
muse that difference sing1
This book explores a nascent eighteenth-century diasporic and transnational identity
discourse by exploring cultural debates on value, taste, and commerce. These debates
expressed metropolitan desire to refigure the excesses and breaches of transnational
commerce and colonization as cultural surplus value. As strange things and stranger
people became commodities in European systems of value, a concomitant economy
and nexus of material collecting and connoisseurship provided a helpful analogous
schema for the revaluation and refiguration of the exotic and the unfamiliar - the
transnational curiosity - within eighteenth-century western culture. While examining
the debates on value, taste and commerce and their attendant discontents, this book’s
focus is upon eighteenth-century metropolitan and marginal voices speaking within
and across national territories in this age of empire, colonialism, and slave-trading.
The focus does not lead to articulating such “global uniformities” as C.A. Bayly argues
existed in the early modem world and modem worlds,2 but to emphasizing a particular
range of intercultural differentials of value, taste, and commerce as articulated by the
marginalized and the oppressed.
The experience of the marginalized, oppressed, and colonized, of the repeatedly
and involuntarily “translated” or “transnationalized,” is the original churning mud
of a transnational theory.3 In recontextualizing race, gender, and national sentiment
within nascent transnationalisms, the works discussed in this book offer suggestive
precursors to postcolonial discourse by foregrounding the fluid and resituated nature
of objects, people, and movements of debated or questioned cultural significance,
moral provenance, and commercial valence. Within the contemporary critical
discourse on transnationality, Paul Gilroy has captured the essence of such fluidity
by stating, “different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail
when confronted by the intercultural and transnational formation that I call the black
Atlantic.”41 have attempted to show that such a destabilizing of national boundaries
and categories operated in the literary domain and in everyday practices at different
points along the Euro-American imperial rim in the eighteenth century.
This pre-national or pre-transnational phase has been alternatively conceptualized
as “archaic globalization.”5 Within such archaic globalization, according to C.A. Bayly,
“Neither race nor nationality, as understood at the end of the nineteenth century, was
yet a dominant concept ... embodied status remained the key discriminator in the
interaction of peoples in the archaic and early modem diasporas. It operated at a
deeper level than nationality, which remained a flexible and rather indistinct category