The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic

Chapter i Christians, Savages, and Slaves From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Christianity has so long prevailed in these Parts of the World [Caribbean and American colonies], that there are no Advantages or Privileges now peculiarto it, to distinguish it from any other Sect or Party; and thereforewhatever Liberties the Laws indulge to us, they do it to us as English-Men, and not as Christians. — LORD BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711)1 ,N analysis of Daniel Defoe's Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its critical tradition exemplifies the way that a theory of multiplicity helps to recover the emergent character of race in the early eighteenth century. Because skin color became a more important racial category to the British only later in the eighteenth century, a color binary of black and white does not help to elucidate British reactions to other Europeans, Moors,West Africans, or native Caribbeans or, indeed, their representation of them. Of course, Robinson Crusoe does not perfectly reflect English culture or economic investment in the first two decades of the century, but it does present some fascinating ideological dilemmas conjured up by eighteenth-century articulations of human difference and colonial power relations. Because Robinson Crusoe marshals categories of difference, such as savagery , slavery, and Christianity, it appears to define precisely the boundaries between people in various racial terms and thereby elicits a picture of European superiority. Despite this apparent precision, the novel has fostered readerly confusion about the status of the Caribbean islander Friday, the Spanish Moor Xury, and even the English Crusoe in its many subsequent interpretations. Indeed, the novel's difficulty in situating Friday in a stable category of cannibal,slave, or servant reflects a cultural uncertainty about the signifiers of racial difference in the early eighteenth century and their significance , an idea seldom explored in critical assessments of Defoe's novel or other early eighteenth-century literature. Beginning with a recent interpretation of Robinson Crusoe emphasizes the problems that arise when an analysis seeks to confine an eighteenth-century colonial text to a color binary informed by current notions of race. In 1992, whenToni Morrison introduced Race-ingJustice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality and sought to make sense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's position in relation to racial politics in the United States, she chose a comparison to Robinson Crusoe. Morrison identifies Friday's subservience to Crusoe as a particularly appropriate analogy for Thomas's relationship to the Bush administration.2 Overall, because her attention is focused on Thomas, the effect of Morrison's comments is to homogenize race to a rigid binary that divorces the literary text from its cultural context. The result is a narrative about racial relations in Robinson Crusoe that seems remarkably contemporary. Morrison's "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac" juxtaposes Clarence A C H R I S T I A N S , SAVAGES, AND SLAVES 51 Thomas's Senate confirmation hearings with scenes from Robinson Crusoe. Her critique of Thomas and the Bush administration is first introduced in the epigraphs, which include comments by Thomas and Anita Hill as well as the scene in which Friday bends his head to Crusoe's foot. Arguing that the significance of the hearings is, in part, the interpretation of "history" and suggesting that the Hill/Thomas investigation was "the site of the exorcism of critical national issues" by being "situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people," Morrison's essay deftly unveils the way that U.S. racial politics played out in 1992, exposing the structure of racial discrimination in which both Thomas and Hill were placed by the media and other Americans.3 Morrison contends that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the media coverage of the hearings positioned the two main players within a discourse derived from slaverythat featured two stereotyped responses of slaves to their masters— codependency and rebellion — or the "torn" (Clarence Thomas) and the "savage" (Anita Hill). In her interpretation of the hearings and the aftermath, Morrison shows the ease with which this binary was adopted and claims that the hearings were a process "to reorder these signifying fictions ['natural servant' and 'savage demon']" (xvi). Not surprisingly, perhaps, these terms are the very terms in which Robinson Crusoe works out Friday's...