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Notes notes to chapter 1 1. Thomas Gossett, in Race: The History of an Idea, reports that Darwin’s theory of evolution excited a movement which was already a major concern of many nineteenth-century anthropologists—the measurement of race differences. The search for such differences has been described by Ruth Benedict in Race: Science and Politics. Gossett also tells us that the eighteenthcentury idea of a correlation between color and climate was challenged in Europe by Peter Simon Pallas as early as 1780. Even so, the idea continued to have currency in the discourse on race well into the nineteenth century. See chapters 3, 4, and 7 in Gossett. 2. This book’s empahsis on the dynamics of power between the slave and the master and between the slave and his/her reader demonstrates the extent to which this work participates in what Lindon Barrett identifies as the “[attentiveness of] cultural studies to the exigencies of power and powerlessness and their subtle, pervasive insinuations” (Barrett, 3). 3. My understanding of Foucault is informed by specific texts by Foucault as well as select secondary readings. Primary references include but are not limited to: Discipline and Punish, The Archeology of Knowledge, and The Order of Things. The commentators that I rely on most heavily include but are not limited to: Paul Bové, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Taylor, Jon Simons, Herbert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow. I try to outline a way of theorizing the necessity for certain kinds of rhetorical strategizing and essentializing, given the restrictive discourses in which the speech act of the slave takes place. In brief, the slave has to make use of restrictive discourses that overdetermine , fix, and subject the terms available to the slave in order to describe or tell his or her story. If the only truth available is the truth enabled by the limits of the same restrictive discourses that subjugate, what, then, are the possibilities for resistance? The analysis in each of the subsequent chapters supports a hypothesis that tries to answer this question. For a further discussion of the problem of representation as it might relate to the issue of witnessing as I discuss it here, see also Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?.” 4. George Riley Scott, in The History of Torture, makes the distinction between penal and private punishments. For him, penal punishments are public and prescribed by law. Private punishments cover the various other kinds of beatings or torture that are not prescribed by law. This category of private punishments, for my purposes, would include what I am here calling the nature of corporal punishment, in that it was often conducted 177 purposely in the view of other slaves (as described by slave narrators) so as to function as a kind of negative conditioning. On the issue of the auction block, Mary Prince’s description of herself and her family on the auction block provides an interesting example of the staging of slavery. And all this still does not begin to account for the numerous images in the visual arts of the period that have been underanalyzed in terms of their participation in spectacularizing slavery. 5. For a broader discussion of the spectacle and the spectacularizing of slavery, see Saidya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (especially chapter 1, “Innocent Amusements : The Stage of Suffrance”) and Joseph Roach’s 1992 essay, “Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance.” 6. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Charles Davis tell us that these narratives were often spoken or performed publicly many times by the narrators before they were ever committed in writing. 7. Prince’s anthropomorphizing of the house might also be linked with a similar idea circulating in Romantic thought, expressed best by William Blake in his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” which begins: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour This is suggestive of one tenet of Romantic thought—that there is life and divinity in everything in nature. In a longer treatment of this particular issue, it might be interesting to discover how this idea is deformed by slavery, and how slave witnesses make use of this deformation of the Romantic ideal. 8. For a more extended discussion of slavery as primarily a shared condition , see Howard McGary and Bill E. Lawson...

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