Imoinda's Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth Century British Literature, 1759-1808 by Lyndon J. Dominique (review)

The book analyzes the centrality of the Imoinda figure, from both Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave (1688) and Thomas Southerne's even more influential 1696 stage version to late eighteenth-century British literature; it also considers several strategic departures from the elite, tragic figure of Imoinda. Geography, it turns out, is key to politics: the overall tendency of the book is to explore the conservativism of representation tied to the Oroonoko story and its fictional location in Surinam versus the more progressive tendencies of the texts that "transcend the Oroonoko mold" because they "use fictional black women as abolitionist advocates in England" (140).

By focusing on the astonishing range of African female figures with regard to the marriage plot as well as antislavery and abolitionist goals, Imoinda's Shade participates in the tradition of Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1942); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (1992); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999); and George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (2008). A welcome contribution to a slowly expanding group of monographs that illuminates the various functions of African figures in eighteenth-century literary history, this book showcases Lyndon J. Dominique's talent for overall conceptualization of a creative literary project, finding new primary material, and alighting on salient textual details that others have neglected. A valuable resource in many respects, Imoinda's Shades is, however, flawed in its choice of critical terminology and its reliance on older research about the status of black people in Britain.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the book is Dominique's robust selection of literature, including, most importantly, several farces such as James Townley's High Life Below Stairs (1759) and William Macready's The Irishman in London; Or, The Happy African (1793); stage and textual versions of the rebel-slave Three-Fingered Jack story; August Von Kotzebue's drama The Negro Slaves (1796); Maria Edgeworth's moral tale The Grateful Negro (1804); and novels, including Edgeworth's Belinda (1801 and 1810 editions) and Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1805); as well as a return to the novel to which he created such an exquisite critical introduction, the anonymously authored The Woman of Colour (1808). Most memorable is chapter 4 in which Dominique attends to fictional female servants and antislavery sentiment in humorous stage plays, an important departure from the African heroines of sentimental poetry, the novel, or the Oroonoko industry.

Imoinda's Shade identifies a hitherto uncited imaginative text, the anonymously published "The Grateful Negro," in Rewards for Attentive Studies, or Stories Moral and Entertaining (1800); Dominique introduces, contextualizes, and gives ample analysis of this short story for children. One of the strongest sections of Imoinda's Shade examines a surprising number of Imoinda figures that appear independently of Oroonoko in poems, novels, letters, essays, and literary criticism of the long eighteenth century. Most intriguingly, Dominique discovers several instances of non-black, non-African Imoinda figures associated with Ireland, England, and even Italy rather than the Americas or Africa. Another thoughtful section situates the three stage revisions (and revival) of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko of the 1759-60 era in regard to the Marriage Act of 1753, making claims on the significant distinction between visual and textual Imoindas. Since so much hinges on Dominique's devotion to elucidating revisions of the original Imoinda figure and to his related claim that contemporary female audience members identified with the white Imoinda (54), this reader wishes that Dominique had engaged and even furthered the debate about reader/viewer relationship to protagonists from the unmentioned scholarship of Deidre Lynch, Catherine Gallagher, Lisa Freeman, and David Brewer, as well...