Virtual Representation Theory

"Chapter 1"


The Interrogation Begins

Her naked body sits on a block which directs the spectator's eye immediately at the sign of "Africa" located below her left thigh. She appears to have a masculine physique depicted in the image of her sturdy and strong-looking arms. Her expressionless face, the tilt of her eyebrows, her disproportional head, and her hair - short, curly and black like her skin - are also somewhat masculine in feature. But she is a woman; she wears earrings, she touches the beads on her necklace with her fingers, and there is a piece of white cloth that drapes, weaves and wraps itself around her body, behind her back, under her buttocks, and in between her thighs - she is a female African object sketched for the European spectator to view, and depicted to represent the images evoked by the word "Africa" (Figure 1).

She is a part of the largest cartouche on the map, and her figure - her body - sits in the foreground of the picture. Animals indigenous to Africa surround her: an elephant with small tusks and stern eyes walks towards her back, a lion stands to the left with its head turned away (distracted by a snake or perhaps by the white man), a snake raises its head and seems to look at the woman's eyes (her eyes are highlighted in white), and a scorpion opens its claw-like arms below the block she sits on named "Africa." Behind her and to the right of her, however, a scene indicative of an "African" place reveals the images which the cartographer has privileged as being "African." Two elephants walk around a clump of trees, a mountain-like plateau is sketched in the far background, and off to the upper-right of the African woman is an African man wearing a cloth around his waist. He wrestles with a crocodile and jabs a stick in the fierce animal's mouth. To the right side of the African woman is a light-skinned man with a long beard who seems to be shielding himself either from the hot equator's sun, or from the wild animals around him. Three different scenes sketched in this cartouche, but there is only one meaning: "Africa."

Why did the cartographer chose these images, these emblems, and this cartouche to represent Africa? Or more importantly, what was the affect of these depictions - these distinctions - of Afrca on the minds of Europeans who only read about the scenes, the culture and the African people in travelers', merchants' and slavetraders' narratives writing during the eighteenth-century? Edward Said's critical study in Orientalismasserts that distinctions - drawn from the dominant images of a culture - made between "cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races" and made perhaps by the cultures in power are drawn "usually towards not expecially admirable ends" (45). Categories are delineated and cultures are segmented by the major features - either favorable or not - which highlight the weakness of one and consequently the power of the other, or the primitive nature of one and the civilized nature of the other. Ultimately, prejudiced images become "naturalized" as the indigenous features of a region, a culture, and an individual - either the "African" or the "European." What happens, according to Said, when those in power want to "survey" the world - the European wants to survey Africa - two countries and cultures become polarized and "[limits] the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies" (46, emphasis added). "Human" is italicized because the encounter between cultures only occurs through images found in books or in magazines or in paintings or on maps, and these images are oftentimes racist, false, and perpetuate and "inferior" image of a culture that lacks economic, social, and political power that enables the reversal of "naturalized" distinctions of inferiority. As Stuart Hall claims, "racism operates by constructing impassable symbolic boundaries between racially constituted categories, and this typically binary system of representation constantly marks and attempts to fix and naturalize the difference between belongingness and otherness" (167). The images not only found on a few maps of Africa published by British cartographers during the eighteenth century, but in travel narratives, abolition propaganda and fictions will reveal, according to a European gaze, those who belong and who are Other.

These distinctions to which Said refers fall into categories of power: who is weaker or stronger, more primitive or civilized, human or barbaric, enslaved or free? If the images of Africans depict individuals who are dangerous, less civilized, in need of religious, moral and social guidelines, then the imperialistic ideology in power can successfully enslave Africans without questions from the inside or the outside. The "harmoniously working machine," to borrow Said's metaphor (47), is the African slave-trade between Britain, African and the West Indian colonies, and the machine would be destablized if Africans are portrayed as human and civilized, and deserving rights and liberties. The British imperialist machine successfully polarized Africa and the British state during the African slave-trade with images that distinguished Africans as Other. Said illustrates the possibility of this separatism with the example of Henry Kissinger who polarized the United States and the world when he tried to establish the differences in foreign policy between countries. Kissinger, according to Said, with his analysis first separated the countries, and then provoked "the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other" (47-8). We can make a similar analogy with the British imperialists who determined the difference between Africa and Europe first, by creating images of separation and distinction through the travelers' and explorers' words, and second, through the visualized sketch of Africa and the African. When the visual perspectives of African barbarism became knowledge, these divisions would remain intact in order to contain, control, and govern Africans during the eighteenth-century imperialist expansion in order for European countries to continue to accrue wealth and power. As early as 1563, the first group of "Africans [were sold] into slavery" by a British merchant (Walvin 8), and in 1675 the first substantial slave revolt occurred in the British West Indies by enslaved black Africans fighting to gain their freedom. Between the years 1675 and 1807, the struggle to emancipate African slaves gained force by both white and black British abolitionists, and yet two million slaves between the years 1680 and 1768 were moved into the British West Indies to help Britain's trade and commerce become more lucrative - two million African men's, women's, and children's bodies were controlled by British imperialists seeking to increase economic trade (Midgely 10). According to economic scholar Eric Williams, West African and the West Indies "[contributed] perhaps as much as one-third to Britain's total economic development" in the triangle trade during the move "towards an industrial society" (Walvin 8). Michael Craton, scholar of the West Indian slave trade, asserts that

[the] slave labor system involved a trade in blacks from West Africa that suddenly surged with the introduction of large-scale sugar cultivation and increased along with the expansion of plantations to reach an annual peak of around 38,000 before the abolition of the trade in 1807" (Craton 149).