Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery

Introduction

The controversies over the Atlantic slave-trade and slavery itself can be usefully understood as what Catherine Hall has termed a 'war of representation'. At stake was 'the question as to the truth about the system of slavery' and, from 1823, in particular, both supporters and opponents of slavery were 'interested in mobilising public opinion, that increasingly powerful phenomenon'.¹ This 'war' took place over a variegated terrain: the 'truth' about the nature of the enslaved African and Afro-Caribbean subject was clearly of great importance, but so was that of the enslaving white creole subject.² In this paper, however, the focus is not on the subjects of the slavery controversy, but its sites and spaces. Hall notes that the war of representation 'took place on many sites: in the press, in pamphlets, in fiction, in poetry, in paintings and engravings, in public meetings'.³ Yet beyond these textual, visual and performative sites were a series of worldly spaces over which the truth about slavery was fought. As Hall has demonstrated, the main worldly focus was the Caribbean itself, but other spaces – the East Indies, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and West Africa more broadly – featured too, and hence the war of representation over slavery was fought across multiple theatres, some lying far beyond the Caribbean.

Politically and ideologically motivated comparisons between different worldly sites were common currency in the war of representation. For instance, abolitionists sought to establish and emphasize the cultural and moral difference of Caribbean slavedom from metropolitan British society, whilst their opponents asserted the essential unity of the British Atlantic world, the loyalty of the West Indies, and the duty of care that Britain owed to its colonies. This differentiation between a ' "slave-world" aberration' and a metropolitan ' "free-world" norm' – asserted by humanitarians, contested by defenders of slavery – was one of the key spatial features in the war of representation.⁴ More fine-grained distinctions were also made. For example, supporters of slavery contrasted supposedly ordered and productive West Indian colonies with Haiti, which was made to serve as a portent for what might happen after emancipation. On the other side of the Atlantic, the West African colony of Sierra Leone was represented by humanitarians as a kind of anti-Caribbean space – a free African labour experiment and an anti-slavery colony – and, thus, it attracted the ire of their opponents.

The cartography of the war of representation deserves more systematic attention than it has hitherto received. This involves examining how arguments about slavery were articulated through the representation of worldly spaces in and beyond the Caribbean. It also means studying the spatial strategies employed in this war – such as the comparisons and contrasts made between different sites – as well as the tactics that were used, including the forms of representation through which these places were depicted. These tactics were deployed in Hall's textual sites of the press, pamphlet and the individual page. Their importance is underlined by Ian Baucom's astute observation that the 'way in which that struggle [over the slave-trade] was waged suggests that it was not only a struggle between competing theories of right (the slaves' right to human dignity and the slavers' right to trade), but one between competing theories of knowledge'.⁵ Baucom's remark suggests that central to the war of representation were not only ontological questions as to the 'truth about the system of slavery', but also epistemological questions about how that 'truth' could be established.⁶ For example, what forms of knowledge about slavery were trustworthy and how did authors seek to establish this through particular practices of writing? How were the textual, tabular and visual spaces of the page used to make credible claims about, and, ultimately, to try to effect policy towards, the worldly spaces of West Africa (and the West Indies)? How, in short, was the war of representation fought out simultaneously on the sites of the page and the world? To help understand the former, this paper addresses what Gé rard Genette terms 'intertextuality' and 'paratextuality'.⁷ Genette uses 'intertextuality...