Can Fiction “Do” Racism?

Can fiction “do” racism, does it only reflect it, or is the reflecting in itself a kind of “doing”? What role did the eighteenth-century novel play in developing racist ideologies during and after the era of transatlantic slavery? And how is it possible to tell what kind of influence fiction might have exerted on the minds of its original readers?

George Boulukos’s useful and thoroughgoing study of representations of the grateful slave in eighteenth-century British and black Atlantic texts addresses these and other questions, with varying degrees of directness. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Boulukos is also concerned with antebellum American prose works, but he focuses primarily on British and black Atlantic writers (he does not discuss poetry or drama). After asserting that the grateful slave was the dominant trope in eighteenth-century fictions about slavery, Boulukos goes on to analyze and historicize the notions of racial difference that, in his account, gave rise to colonial racism. The book’s argument is clearly laid out: the grateful slave trope marked a move away from assuming a generalized humanity, based on Christian monogenetic orthodoxy, towards seriously considering racial difference that took hold in metropolitan discourse as a response to the James Somerset case. Representations of grateful slaves, in other words, consolidate notions—we could say “ideologies” or “discourses,” although Boulukos does not—of racial difference, even as these representations purport to be sympathetic. From a modern standpoint, such texts probably will not seem like challenges to the political status quo because their idealistic representations of willing slaves and humane masters implicitly advocate ameliorating rather than abolishing slavery. Boulukos argues that the novels of the 1790s in particular contribute to ameliorative consensus while also bolstering ideas of racial difference. Perceiving a “transatlantic gap” between England and its colonies in legal and social practices of race around the middle of the eighteenth century, Boulukos believes “that novels representing the amelioration of plantation slavery through the sentimental manipulation of African slaves” bridged this divide between metropole and colony. They did so by developing a meaningful concept of racial difference in metropolitan discourse, and they also enabled colonials to generate a theory that justified their practices. According to Boulukos, such texts, which were “seemingly critical of slavery,” actually bolstered slavery and racial difference.

Boulukos’s corrective focus on amelioration is welcome, but the argument that fiction shaped what we might call racist ideology brings me back to the question of how it is possible to identify what the effects of these representations might have been. How were such texts received, and can we measure their effects on readers’ minds, on ideology and discourse? In a chapter that discusses the writings of Sancho, Equiano, and Cugoano, Boulukos points out the ways in which black people “wrote back” to such representational paradigms. And yet when he argues that black writers responded to “a pernicious literary trope,” demonstrating the flaws of the grateful-slave paradigm as these writers rejected “an increasingly powerful conception of race,” he seems to assume both a clearly contoured “conception” and a degree of cultural knowingness that some readers may not find in Sancho’s, Equiano’s, or Cugoano’s texts. We may want to believe that black writers “expose[d] colonial practices of race” as a betrayal of humanity and justice, but colonial practices did not appear as “race” or “racism” at the time, which must have made it difficult to “write back” to these in a direct way. In other words, the very notion of “writing back” in this context may be a postcolonial anachronism.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment at which “ideas of difference” began to cohere. When Boulukos asserts that “the idea of racial difference of a recognizably modern sort was first put forward in British writing in the early 1770s,” I wonder whether he is a little too quick at identifying such a beginning, a little too certain that the inchoate notions of the seventeenth century “stabilized” and...