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1. Introduction Bearing Witness: Memory, Theatricality,the Body, and Slave Testimony
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1. Introduction Bearing Witness: Memory, Theatricality, the Body, and Slave Testimony The chief concern of this book is mapping the rhetorical markers that constitute the terrain of abolitionist discourse. Recasting the abolition debate in terms of a discourse usefully places central significance on the issues of language, rhetorical strategy, audience, and the status and/or production of the “truth” about slavery. This recasting also broadens our considerations of abolitionist discourse to include not just anti-slavery writing but the various discursive forces that gave rise to and made possible, even necessary, such writing. This, in turn, provides a fertile ground on which further and ultimately more probing work in this area is possible. Additionally, this shift in focus has the effect of deepening our understanding of the transatlantic and cosmopolitan quality of abolitionist discourse, thereby complicating much of reigning historiographical wisdom, which historicizes abolitionism in narrow and often nationally delineated contexts. The primary site of contestation for slavery debates in the nineteenth century was African humanity. Theories such as Hegel’s description of Africa in The Philosophy of History as the “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit” or “merely isolated sensual existence” and the popular climatological theories disseminated throughout the eighteenth century, along with the obsession of 1 nineteenth-century anthropologists (fueled by the theory of evolution ) with the measurement of race differences,1 are examples of racial thinking that circulated widely in an effort to prove that Africans were fundamentally inferior to Europeans and were, therefore, especially fitted for slavery. Such ideas also served as moral justification for much of the treatment of Africans under slavery. From the content and rhetoric of the debates waged between the anti-slavery agitators and the pro-slavers, one can see that the major debates were not only over the nature of slavery as an institution but also over the nature of the slave. Indeed, these debates reveal much about the moral stakes involved for the slave master as well. It was Montesquieu who said, with irony: “It is impossible for us to assume that these people [Africans] are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians” (250). A preliminary understanding of the issues involved in the debates over slavery, then, provides a point of departure from which to explain the discourses that animate, as well as the context that both enables and limits, the testimony of slave narrators. Such an understanding further uncovers the complex relationship between the slave witness and those who would receive his or her testimony. The “reader” is not only constructed by the witness , but the imagined reader becomes completely discursive for the witness. The reader represents the fray of discourses, so to speak, into which the witness must enter to be heard at all. This, as we shall see, has far-reaching implications for slave testimony.2 My selection of the variety of texts discussed in this introduction and throughout this book has much to do with the variety of genres that anti-slavery argument itself assumed. The range included literary texts, political pamphlets, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, historical and scholarly treatises on both the institution and the morality of slavery, and, of course, slave narratives. This broad-ranging approach to understanding abolitionism, 2 Introduction [3.239.214.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:22 GMT) rather than assuming a hierarchy among these forms, is concerned with the production of meaning that is possible when one considers the interplay of these forms taken together in the terrain that is abolitionist discourse. Rather than observing generic and disciplinary boundaries, my approach requires a break with such observances in order to think more clearly about the narrative and rhetorical strategies and the figurative and philosophical language that create the discursive regularities of abolitionist discourse. I employ the metaphor of a “discursive terrain” to describe what is created by abolitionist discourse or the abolitionist debates . For the moment, I examine this metaphor of the discursive terrain in order to understand the situation of discourse into which the slave narrator enters when he or she takes pen in hand. If there is a discursive terrain created by abolitionist discourse, what exactly is the function of that terrain? What does that terrain do to the slave narrator? What does it mean to the slave narrator ? If the situation of the discursive terrain is that there is a language about slavery that preexists the slave’s telling of his or her own...