| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | HOMEPAGE | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |
The images of African women found on maps of Africa that were mass produced for the public in eighteenth-century England further commercialized the image of these women, and the accumulation of these images that were created through a European male gaze continued to construct and solidify a prejudiced and racist view of African women. John Stedman writes a Narrative Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) about his journey to a colonized island owned and operated by European plantation owners. He not only focuses on constructing images of flora, fauna, and the state of affairs of the European army there to defend against slave rebellions, but he also gives sporadic accounts of the brutal treatment of slaves, both female and male, by the overseers of the plantations. Stedman also describes his multiple sexual encounters with mulatto, Negro, and quadroon maids and servants - women who are all slaves -- and he sketches their portraits later to be engraved and published in his book. Through a masculine, racist, and European gaze, Stedman crosses ethnic and gender borders and never once questions how he constructs the identity of a female person named African, slave, and Other for his European audience. Ultimately, Stedman had, as Eugene Genovese claims the slave owner and ultimately all travel narrators, illustrators, and map makers of the African culture had as well, "a private source of character making and mythmaking -- his slave" (Patterson 11) - in this case, the African woman whom he loved, the African women whom he objectified, and the African women whom he exploited sexually and visually.
His journey was instigated by the death of his father, but Stedman also left Holland for Surinam on December 24, 1772 with the rank of captain "in a response to a call for volunteers to serve in the West Indies, . . . and arrived in Surinam on 2 February 1772" (xxi). According to Richard and Sally Price, Surinam "was a maximally polarized society - some three thousand European whites, who must have sensed that their world was coming unglued, living in grotesque luxury off of the forced labor of some fifty thousand brutally exploited African slaves" (Price xiv). It would seem obvious that Stedman was not traveling to Surinam to engage in abolition politics, for he was going to fight in the local army and defend the plantation owners against the revolting "maroon" slaves on the island. However, the motive of Stedman's narrative becomes unclear as he places emphasis on retelling accounts of the extreme brutality and inhumane treatment of the slaves with a clear anti-slavery slant although the narrative continues to construct a racist and prejudiced image of African women and men on the island.
When Stedman came to Surinam to defend his European culture against the slave rebellions and the political space that demarcated Africans as slaves, he crossed cultural borders where an imbalance of power allowed him to control and define the representation of African women. Both he and the European plantation owners exerted their power over African women who were from another culture with different political terms and unjustiably controlled the spaces around their bodies. These engravings in Stedman's narrative give evidence of the fact that the depictions of African women were now a part of the commercial industry, for "engraving, as it reproduces painting, makes painting commercial" (Eaves, 68). The metaphor that art is eaten and consumed is significant to this section because the African woman is objectified and examined, then illustrated and engraved, then published and consumed by a European audience who perhaps desires the object of commodity - the African woman's body - or the knowledge of the Other or both. Morris Eaves states that "the artist's work is a crop that, having been cultivated, in turn cultivates as it feeds the mind of the audience. The image assimilates forms of communication and education to forms of transporting goods to market and eating" (69). The African woman's fetishized image proliferates as her identity is dehumanized and commercialized. Furthermore, emphasizing that which is Other or not European strengthens the regimes of power who own and disseminate the images and portraits of the Other - the African woman - and place the African woman at a cultural, social, economic and political disadvantage.
Eighty engraved illustrations filled the pages of Stedman's published book, and the relationship between the visual and verbal meanings, very similar to the emblem tradition discussed earlier, are important to the symbolic effect of these illustrations of African women. There is a "visual/verbal complexity" between Stedman's words, the portraits he sketched that represented his experience with these African women, and the borders he crossed to create the "African" woman. Being the original painter, Stedman participated in a process that constructed signs to serve a purpose of communication; the process was cultural and social that would ultimately serve to obstruct accurate pictures of African women. These visual illustrations brought a sense of literalness to the meaning of the words on the page and the images already instilled in the culture's mind.
The narrative begins with the month-long ship voyage to Surinam, and Stedman narrates brief passages about the dolphins, the colors of the sea, and the winds he observed from the deck of the ship; he informs his readers about his daily activities, and he offers engraved sketches of various fish he saw. After an almost two-month passage, Stedman steps off the ship onto Surinam, and the first thing he notices and mentions to his reader
was a most miserable Young Woman in Chains simply covered with a Rag round her Loins, which was like her Skin cut and carved by the lash of the Whip in a most Shocking Manner. (39, sic.)
This young female slave (Figure 1) is of course the property of her master - she is subject to the brutality and degradation to which her master chooses to subject her; she is an object to be gazed at for consumption and to be sketched by Stedman for the reading public.
Orlando Patterson defines the slave as being "a person without power, natality, and honor" (22-27). Slaves are without power to change their position; they are removed from their native birthplace and culture, and they are not given respect and privileges as would be accorded if they were considered equal to those who enslave them. This young African woman's portrait (Figure 1) is evidence that she is without privileges, for she shields her face with her hands either in a gesture of misery from carrying the chains of slavery, or wiping her brow from the exhaustion of carrying the three 3-pound weights, or even shielding her identity from Stedman, the spectator. The fieldworker in the background is naked, and his image is small; both representations symbolize that he is as powerless as the slave woman and that there is no one to help her; she is subject to the gaze and disrespect of her master and European audience. Her clothes are tattered, and the chain is a real and symbolic instrument of power -- one that informs her of her own position on the plantation and informs the European audience of the African woman's position in society as one of subordination and punishment.
Stedman admits to his reader that he found this Negro Maid "beautiful," and he "nearly escaped being riveted by Fascination" at the sight of the "Load of her Irons" (39). Being affected or riveted perhaps by human empathy, Stedman's fascination invokes him to sketch her portrait while naming her a "wretched Creature" (39). She becomes an object of pity that captures Stedman's gaze long enought for him to sketch her image but not long enough to engage him in any moral attachments that would perhaps induce him to have to speak with the poor "creature." His discourse rejects the African woman; she is undeserving of a symbolic space or an identity. For Stedman she is nothing more than an interesting object that fascinates him and his would-be readers, and his voyeuristic gaze begins to eroticize images of African women throughout the rest of the narrative.
According to Patterson, the symbolic instruments of power such as the slave girl's chains will constitute her social death and will allow the master to use the slave's isolated position as an instrument of power" (37-8). The first phase in the process of social death was the slaves' natal alienation; slaves were desocialized and depersonalized when they were violently taken from their native birthplace and social community and then placed in their masters' strange and brutal environments (38). This next illustration (Figure 2) reveals the importation of the slaves and their natal alienation -- notice the outlines of the ship in the background representing the vessel that brought them from Africa as enslaved labor. Stedman's attention was "attracted" by this group of slaves, and he paid particular attention to the physical state of their bodies. He describes them as "a set of living automations, such a resurrection of Skin and bones" and compares them "to walking Skeletons covered with a piece of tanned leather" (166). However, the sketches of the women appear more sexualized and eroticized than Stedman will admit.
Immediately taken from the ship and put on the island of Surinam, the appearance of this group of Africans inscribes them, marks them as "slaves" and as "inferior" to their European masters and mistresses. Stedman claims there were about 60 coming off the ship, and they were led and followed by sailors carrying bamboo sticks and a dog -- both instruments of power were used to keep the slaves from "[wandering] from the blisted flock" (168 sic). Representing the slaves as sheep needing a "Shepherd" to lead them is not a flattering picture nor one that gives them any power. Stedman actually claims that "[he} preceived not one Single down-cast look amongst them all, and that the bite of the bamboo was inflicted with the utmost moderation by the Sailor" (168) as if their importation from Africa had not stripped them of their culture and their social life, as if their enslavement on Surinam did not dispossess them of an identity of life that contains liberties and bodily freedom.
The second phase of the slaves' social death occurred when slaves were introduced to their masters' social sphere without an identity; Patterson defines slaves as nonbeings because they had no ancestry in their strange new places (38) and no place in their masters' symbolic order. For female slaves their identity as "nonbeings" created a dangerou space for their bodies to be exploited both sexually and economically. Once the female slave was alienation from her own family and culture she would be marginalized and assimilated into the master's culture in any way that pleased the master -- often in forced sexual acts and often in brutal whippings and lashings, as was the case in the next illustration (Figure 3).
To see the rest of the images:Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6, Figure 7, Figure 8
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
HOMEPAGE
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
This page was last updated on Dec. 7, 1998 by Lauren Kane
"THIS PAGE IS STILL"
"UNDER CONSTRUCTION"