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4. Erotic Interventions: The Political and the Intimate in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
- University of Virginia Press
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4 Erotic Interventions The Political and the Intimate in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother A fetish is a story masquerading as an object. —Valerie Steele, Fetish, Fashion, Sex and Power Sex has consistently been used as a metaphor for the colonial encounter. In the case of the New World, Europeans framed their endeavors in terms of sexualized fantasies according to which Otherness was embedded in a code of eroticism. Eroticism, which had long been used to shape European visions of the Orient, offered “natural” imagery through which to perceive the Caribbean at the time of the conquest of the Americas .1 An example that is often adduced to show how even the landscape was eroticized relates how Christopher Columbus, on beholding the mouth of Orinoco River during his third voyage, concluded that he had found the fountain of eternal youth and that the earth must therefore be shaped not as a sphere, as he had previously supposed, but rather as a woman’s breast, with Paradise located at the nipple. A vision that compiled eroticism, tropical exuberance, Edenic fantasies, and the promise of colonial gains, Columbus’s fetishistic fantasy very tellingly demonstrates for us the place the tropics held in the European imagination at the end of the fifteenth century.2 It seems appropriate to view Europe’s obsession with the lures of tropical riches in terms of erotic desire, for not only does desire imply an attraction for that which is foreign to us but it also entails in its very emotional makeup a fear of loss of self, of losing one’s ground. It should not be surprising, then, that the sexual act itself offers an apt representational tool for portraying the dominance-subjection pattern at play in the colonial situation (Stoler 2002, 46). This is especially true when considering that conquest consists of a relation between self and Other that is based on interest. While the notion of interest resembles the investment (either libidinal or emotional, but also social or economic) that is usually at play in the intimate encounter between two bodies, 145 Erotic Interventions it also evokes many of the potential power struggles that animate such interactions in the private realm. After all, much like conquest itself, sex often seeks to justify appropriation on the basis of knowledge of the Other, or at least on the basis of the desire for such knowledge. Sex can also be said to function as a pertinent metaphorical device for the workings of imperialism thanks in part to an actual connection between the intimate and the political in colonial history. Indeed, as Ann Laura Stoler explains, sex is “foundational to the material terms in which colonial projects were carried out” (2002, 14). According to Stoler, if colonialism was so invested in the practices of sexual life in the contact zone, it was mainly due to two contradictory needs on the part of the imperial forces in their ever-changing efforts to secure power. First, European male settlers were able to improve their odds of survival and acculturation through domestic arrangements with native women, who were able to provide them with invaluable access to local food and medicines, in addition to granting both unpaid domestic care and sexual services (the latter being greatly appreciated by metropolitan institutions, as they helped prevent “unnatural” male-to-male liaisons) (2002, 48). This type of arrangement lies at the heart of many of the narratives of romance and betrayal that have helped shape the historiography of colonialism. Tales of interracial heterosexual love produced foundational legends such as that of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche in Mexico, which served as the mythical and romantic origin of mestizaje. They also helped create legal fictions such as the “marriage” of John Stedman to his slave Joanna in Surinam, which, as a marriage between an (ex-)slave and a European man, was recognized as legitimate only in the colony and for a limited period of time.3 Whether the product of true devotion or of a more utilitarian arrangement , interracial couples had as an unintended consequence the added cultural burden of creating mestizo offspring. While this was not a setback in itself, it became clear that, as Stoler notes, these children “posed a classificatory problem” in the eyes of colonial institutions (2002, 68). In fact, the children of mixed unions had “claims to privilege, whose rights and status had to be determined and prescribed” (2002, 48), hence the second need of the colonial...