Papers by Victoria Barnett-Woods
Pirates, Slaves, and Profligate Rogues: Sailing Under the Jolly Roger in the Black Atlantic, 2019
The age of piracy in the Atlantic world spanned nearly a century, beginning in 1650 and ending in... more The age of piracy in the Atlantic world spanned nearly a century, beginning in 1650 and ending in the late 1720s. The rise of Atlantic piracy coincides with the rise of the increasing maritime trade, particularly with the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade between the African continent and the American colonies. There are multiple accounts of pirate ships that have attacked slavers along the littoral states of either side of the Atlantic. In these moments of piratical enterprise, the “thieves and robbers” of enslaved Africans themselves become themselves the victims of robbery and violence. Also, in these moments, the very embodiment of liberation (the pirate) encounters the distillation of oppression and disenfranchisement (the enslaved). This chapter will discuss the significance of these encounters through the lenses of both transatlantic commerce and the human condition. At the intersection of piracy and the slave trade, there are dozens of stories to be told, and with their telling in this chapter, a new vision of the maritime world demonstrates what it may cost to truly be free.
In a series of case studies, this chapter will examine an arc of Atlantic piracy during its golden age. I will establish piratical views toward the enslaved with a close reading of Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World specifically focusing on his time on the Bachelor’s Delight (1697), to then discuss the accounts of four pirate captains at the height of piracy’s “golden age.” These men—Hoar, Kidd, Roberts, and Teach—all gained significant notoriety during their exploits, but also represent the ways in which pirate captains viewed men of African descent within their framework of being “gentlemen of fortune.” For Bartholomew Roberts, for example, one-third of his crew was composed of formerly enslaved men. Both Hoar and Kidd, with unique visions of the capacity of the formerly enslaved, had black men as their Quartermaster-- one of the most critical administrative positions of any vessel. The stories of these men and pirates will be at the heart of this discussion, hopefully illuminating the raw and powerful intersection of trade, slavery, and freedom on the high seas in the early eighteenth century.
This is the defendable complete version of my dissertation. In it, I argue that the historical ev... more This is the defendable complete version of my dissertation. In it, I argue that the historical events of the eighteenth-century Caribbean had a direct influence on the rise of the novel. Each chapter is broken down by generic influence and historic event: 1. Piracy and the maritime picaresque 2. Women of Color and female Republicanism in the Bildungsroman 3. Rhetorical Silence in the Slave Narrative and 4. Vodou and Obeah in the Caribbean Gothic.
This essay won a prize for best research paper written by a graduate student at the 2017 ASECS co... more This essay won a prize for best research paper written by a graduate student at the 2017 ASECS conference. It is a close examination of a well-known court case in Berbice, British Guiana, against the slave Willem. It not only closely reads the trial of murder and obeah, it also frames the trial within a literary and historical context. The argument rests on the idea that slave formations of justice are mediated through obeah.
This is the fourth chapter of my completed dissertation. It argues that the Caribbean gothic, as ... more This is the fourth chapter of my completed dissertation. It argues that the Caribbean gothic, as a genre, developed out of pro-slavery anxieties about slave emancipation. Specifically, this chapter considers obeah and Haitian vodou in its examination. Original argument with extensive research.
Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, whil... more Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate." --Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
This article examines the interdependency of three ostensibly separate phenomena that occurred du... more This article examines the interdependency of three ostensibly separate phenomena that occurred during the late-seventeenth century which, in tandem, informed the metropolitan consciousness of the English Enlightenment: the transatlantic slave trade; the rising incorporation of sugar into daily metropolitan life; and the rise of the urban coffeehouse. Though the transatlantic slave trade and the importation of sugar has been widely recorded, a further discussion of the triangulated relationship with the rise of the coffeehouse will further elucidate the metropolitan attitudes toward slavery, sugar, and the public sphere during the early Enlightenment.
Elizabeth Hamilton"s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) purports to be the accou... more Elizabeth Hamilton"s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) purports to be the account of an anglophilic Indian rajah travelling through England and the northern countryside. Set in a series of epistles, the rajah Zaarmilla writes to his colleague, Mandaara, about cultural, linguistic, and social differences between a colonizing England and a colonized India. "Seeing through the eyes of the Oriental other," as Hamilton does in this faux translation, stages a series of colonial anxieties during a time when England is transitioning from nation to empire. i Though a great deal of scholarship has focused on the various implications of this work in its colonial context, there are still questions that remain regarding Hamilton"s "letters" and the function of translation in this historical moment. Her deliberate deployment of the façade of translation distances Hamilton from her critique of not only domestic issues, such as on women"s education, but also larger global issues, such as the attempt to further cement a colonial relationship between India and England. However, at moments within the text translation falls into transculturation, as social and cultural constructions of India and England are collapsed. As Tejaswini Niranjana notes, late-eighteenth-century orientalist translation "form[s] a certain kind of subject in presenting particular versions of the colonized," with representations of the colonial subject "producing strategies for containment." ii Indeed, while Hamilton"s work is not an actual translation in the strictest sense, the text reflects a moment when translation and comparative literature are coming into their own, contextualized and historicized by the works of Sir William "Oriental" Jones. As an iconic figure to and acquaintance of Hamilton"s, Jones" orientalist labors shed new light as to how Hamilton"s Translation may be interpreted. In both Jones" writings and in Hamilton"s Translation, there are multiple moments of contradictory discourses, not only raising questions about cultural similitude and difference, but also about philology as an imperialist enterprise. Further exploration of the linguistic and cultural interpretations and translation within Hamilton"s work will reveal the intensely ambivalent construction of the relationship between England and India. In addition, it reveals the dialectic of the two communities that Hamilton situates herself within: the one community of her reality as an English woman; the other the Indian culture as it is projected by the colonial imagination.
In Gayatri Spivak's Politics of Translation, she remarks that "[t]he politics of translation take... more In Gayatri Spivak's Politics of Translation, she remarks that "[t]he politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning-construction" (369). Translation as a mode of constructing a new representation of a cultural epistemology for a targeted audience has been heavily discussed within the realm of postcolonial studies. 1 We also understand that more than language is translated through these mediating acts. Cultures, ideas, perception and imagination fall to the will of the translator's interpretation. In the colonial and postcolonial socio-historical contexts that shape translation there is a formation of a "certain kind of subject," and irrevocably, questions of alterity and authority enter into the foray of understanding a translated cultural reality or representation of that reality (Niranjana 2). The translator becomes a recreator of sorts-interpreting and evaluating both target and source audiences. This is particularly true when dealing with translated works framed within asymmetrical political power relations, and this dimension of understanding translation has also been heavily theorized in this context. What has yet to be theorized is the function of the untranslated word within a translated text given the socio-historical lenses of colonial and postcolonial discourses. In the colonial and postcolonial contexts there are two overarching functions of the untranslated word. The first is, the untranslated word serves as an active mediating agent of cultural representation even more so than the translated word. It is a heavy and many other postcolonial scholars have dissected and theorized over the political underpinnings that contextualize translation within asymmetrical relations of power.
Postcolonial studies critique the asymmetry of power established by European and
Conference Presentations by Victoria Barnett-Woods
In this conference paper, I argue that the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, as a work of generic e... more In this conference paper, I argue that the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, as a work of generic experimentation, complicates existing models of domestic fiction in making its heroine polite and genteel, but also heavily invested in the politics of the day.
This conference paper examines the political renegade of the maritime frontier--the pirate--and h... more This conference paper examines the political renegade of the maritime frontier--the pirate--and his literary transformation and representation in the western world.
This conference paper examines the rhetorical operation of silence within the slave narratives of... more This conference paper examines the rhetorical operation of silence within the slave narratives of Prince and Equiano.
Conference paper about plantocratic religious anxieties at the end of slavery in the West Indies.... more Conference paper about plantocratic religious anxieties at the end of slavery in the West Indies. This paper looks at Hamel, the Obeah Man and the way that plantation owners envisioned Methodist missionary work and Obeah practices.
Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) is an early English treatise designed... more Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) is an early English treatise designed for those interested in the then new and highly profitable sugar trade. Within its pages, he expounds greatly upon the cultivation, distillation, and refinement of sugar for the benefit of interested metropolitan readers. More importantly, however, Ligon also describes what could only be a colonial predecessor to the Industrial Age’s notion of the factory assembly line. Though he doesn’t articulate it as such, what he describes is a multi-unit complex where each slave subject has his or her own “position” on the production line, and mechanically maintains that position indefinitely, from Monday to Saturday. It was due to these ossifying labor practices that Bridgetown rose to be the “wealthiest city in the world” at the height of England’s imperial and economic power. Sugar plantations were not just large farms, but more closely resembled the factories that developed in Britain in the nineteenth century. If the sugar plantations in the West Indies served as the model for the labor practices of the metropole one hundred years later, then a number of implicit connections between labor, power and race could be made, influencing alternative readings to works like William Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper” and “Little Black Boy.” Beginning with Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History, I will trace the connections between his work, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), and Karl Marx’s evolving views of slavery in Capital (1867). The tracing of these three economic and social critics over the three centuries in which they were writing, will then be considered in the works of the early Romantics, particularly in Blake, who astoundingly connected race, class, and labor in relevant ways in his collection of Songs of Experience (1789). Integrating the works of Eric Williams and Ian Baucom, I will argue that not only did the slave trade finance the industrial revolution of nineteenth century England, but also provided the template for the labor politics that the revolution proponed.
The constellating studies of linguistics and literature intersect at fascinating points of inquir... more The constellating studies of linguistics and literature intersect at fascinating points of inquiry that are typically left undisturbed. Linguistics incorporates methodological surveying of language patterns in specific communities, and contextualizing these patterns at a local, national or global scale. Literary studies, on the other hand, observes and argues cultural, political, and social underpinnings to a given text-locating it within a cultural and historical moment. There are a number of instances where language and literary studies collide, creating fields that seek to glean out theoretical and concrete connections between literature and the language that produces that literature. As an example, the languages that interweave themselves into disparate, yet tangential, cultural identities have had a long history with various assertions of hegemonic authority; these assertions and reactions to these assertions are found in the genre of postcolonial literature. Language, and the manipulation of language in postcolonial literature, such as incorporating bilingual code-switching, carves out a space of research when considering the function of language in literature. This paper will briefly highlight key components of linguistic code-switching; its definition and multivalent applications. Secondly, connections between codeswitching and postcolonial theory and literature will be observed, utilizing theorists from both sides of this discussion. Textual evidence from Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, and Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle, will further elucidate these connections. Though each author represents a unique and disparate part of the globe, both authors incorporate bilingual codeswitching in their novels, which, at the level of mutual intelligibility, dismantles Eurocentric and monolingual views toward authoritative readership. I argue that postcolonial writers such as
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Papers by Victoria Barnett-Woods
In a series of case studies, this chapter will examine an arc of Atlantic piracy during its golden age. I will establish piratical views toward the enslaved with a close reading of Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World specifically focusing on his time on the Bachelor’s Delight (1697), to then discuss the accounts of four pirate captains at the height of piracy’s “golden age.” These men—Hoar, Kidd, Roberts, and Teach—all gained significant notoriety during their exploits, but also represent the ways in which pirate captains viewed men of African descent within their framework of being “gentlemen of fortune.” For Bartholomew Roberts, for example, one-third of his crew was composed of formerly enslaved men. Both Hoar and Kidd, with unique visions of the capacity of the formerly enslaved, had black men as their Quartermaster-- one of the most critical administrative positions of any vessel. The stories of these men and pirates will be at the heart of this discussion, hopefully illuminating the raw and powerful intersection of trade, slavery, and freedom on the high seas in the early eighteenth century.
Conference Presentations by Victoria Barnett-Woods
In a series of case studies, this chapter will examine an arc of Atlantic piracy during its golden age. I will establish piratical views toward the enslaved with a close reading of Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World specifically focusing on his time on the Bachelor’s Delight (1697), to then discuss the accounts of four pirate captains at the height of piracy’s “golden age.” These men—Hoar, Kidd, Roberts, and Teach—all gained significant notoriety during their exploits, but also represent the ways in which pirate captains viewed men of African descent within their framework of being “gentlemen of fortune.” For Bartholomew Roberts, for example, one-third of his crew was composed of formerly enslaved men. Both Hoar and Kidd, with unique visions of the capacity of the formerly enslaved, had black men as their Quartermaster-- one of the most critical administrative positions of any vessel. The stories of these men and pirates will be at the heart of this discussion, hopefully illuminating the raw and powerful intersection of trade, slavery, and freedom on the high seas in the early eighteenth century.