LITR 5731 Multicultural: Colonial-Postcolonial model assignments

LITR 5731 Multicultural Literature
Colonial-PostcolonialModel Assignments

Student Midterm Research Plan 2009

Weldon Mercer

LITR 5731

Research Journal

Dr. Craig White

October 4, 2009

Effects of Caribbean Slavery

I have always been sensitive to the effects of slavery and its state of oppression, the inhumane treatment of innocent people, just for lust for power and riches. On the onset of European new land exploration, the Europeans did not have the need for workers in mind because during that period slavery was insignificant. Besides, Africans and Indians were considered naked savages for European aristocratic use, and the Europeans soon realized their answer to complete their possession, mainly slave labor.

Europeans came into contact with the Caribbean after Columbus's momentous journeys in 1492, 1496 and 1498. The desire for expansion and trade led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, according to our sources mostly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for slave labor in the newly formed plantations, and they were quickly and brutally decimated. The descendants of this once thriving community can now only be found in Guiana and Trinidad.

In fact, the slave trade which had already begun on the West Coast of Africa provided the needed labor and a period from 1496 (Columbus's second voyage) to 1838 saw Africans flogged and tortured in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation economy. Slave labor supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce: the sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao of the Caribbean; the tobacco, rice and indigo of North America; the gold and sugar of Portuguese and Spanish South America. These commodities comprised about a third of the value of European commerce, a figure inflated by regulations that obliged colonial products to be brought to the metropolis prior to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New World made the Americas Europe's most convenient and practical source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The rate of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fabulous fortunes.

For example, an estimate of the slave population in the British Caribbean in Robin Blackburn's study, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848, puts the slave numbers at 428,000 out of a population of 500,000, so the number of slaves vastly exceeded the number of white owners and overseers. Absentee plantation owners added to the unrest. Rebellion was common, with the forms including self mutilation, suicide and infanticide as well as escape and maroonage (whereby the slaves escaped into the hills and wooded interiors of the islands and set up potentially threatening communities of their own.

As a result, even after Emancipation in 1838, the unequal and oppressed system

continued. With a doubt, slavery was too profitable to leave behind. Besides, who was going to work the vast plantations.

The first indication of this came with the awarding of some twenty million pounds to the planters by way of compensation, with nothing being awarded to the former slaves. The system tried to force them to continue the arduous work on the plantations by introducing high taxes on small holdings, high rates for licenses or small traders, and contracts to shackle the laborers to the large plantations. The shortage of available labor led to the introduction of indentured labor from another of Britain's colonies, India, in 1844. These laborers worsened conditions for the former slaves by undermining attempts to achieve improved conditions through strikes. By 1917, when immigration came to a halt some 145,000 Indians had come to Trinidad, and 238,000 to Guiana. The importation of Indians affected Jamaica, but not Barbados, as well, with 39,000 immigrants.

Slavery is a recurring theme in the literature of the Caribbean. Many writers feel the need to attempt a vocalization of all that was denied under the brutal system. Writers such as Derek Walcott in Omeros, and George Lamming in In the Castle of my Skin talk about the difficulty of moving forward from the feelings of injustice inspired by the slave system and the lack of improvement of life after slavery. The Caribbean moved from a place of glory in the British Empire, with Barbados nicknamed "Little England," to its present position of instability and reliance on tourism for the survival of the economy. Some writers, including Jamaica Kincaid, see tourism as an extension of the system of slavery, with the "natives" there for the tourist's amusement and comfort. Any study of the literature of this region must bear in mind the violent heritage of the place, and the fact that the indigenous population was almost totally destroyed and the present population brought them entirely against their will. Daniel Defoe makes reference to slavery in his book, ROBINSON CRUSOE. This journey too ends in disaster as the ship is taken over by Sale’s pirates, and Crusoe becomes the slave of a Moor. He manages to escape with a boat and a boy named Xury; later, Crusoe is befriended by the Captain of a Portuguese ship off the western coast of Africa. The ship is en route to Brazil. There, with the help of the captain, Crusoe becomes owner of a plantation.

Jamaica Kincaid reveals her sensitivity to oppressed slavery “In a Small Place” “But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love […] and worst and

most painful of all, no tongue.

The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid, who was raised during colonialism,

migrated as a teenager to the United States, where later she became a writer. Kincaid

spent her childhood and early adolescence in St. John's, the capital of the island.

Although she focuses on multiple issues related to her life in the Caribbean, the effects

of colonization are central to her works, and amongst them slavery is crucial, since

Kincaid descends from African slaves, like the majority of her island’s population

(Paravisini- Gebert, 1999:1). Being a former colonized subject (Antigua achieved its independence

only in (1981) Kincaid addresses different authority figures in her work by adopting an

aggressive writing style which fits post-colonialism. In order to justify the usage of the

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on a small island he called San Salvador. Columbus believed he had reached the Indies, or the islands southwest of India that include Indonesia and Malaysia. Columbus died believing he had reached the east by sailing west, but instead he had discovered a “new world.” San Salvador was one of the islands in the Caribbean Sea, a body of water between North America and South America. The islands of the Caribbean are part of the West Indies. The West Indies received its name because Columbus believed the native people of the Caribbean Islands were Indians.The Caribbean Sea is named for the Carib, nomadic sea-faring warriors who lived in the region when Columbus arrived.

The Carib drove out their enemies, the Arawaks. Only men spoke the Carib language, the women spoke Arawak. The Carib killed the men, but would keep the women as slaves. The Carib were believed to have eaten the flesh of the people Once slavery was abolished, the plantation owners hired hundreds of thousands of people from India and other places in Asia. In Trinidad, about forty percent of the population is Asian.

Many Europeans began to pressure their governments to abolish slavery. The first organized opposition to slavery came in 1724 from the Quakers, a Christian sect also known as the Society of Friends. Great Britain outlawed slavery in all of their territories in 1833, but the practice continued for almost fifty years on some of the islands of the Caribbean. Slavery has existed, in one form or another, through the whole of recorded human history — as have, in various periods, movements to free large or distinct groups of slaves. According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, Moses led Israelite slaves out of ancient Egypt — possibly the first written account of a movement to free slaves. Later Jewish laws (known as Halacha) prevented slaves from being sold out of the Land of Israel, and allowed a slave to move to Israel if he so desired. One of the first protests against the enslavement of Africans came from German and Dutch Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1688. One of the most significant milestones in the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world occurred in England in 1772, with British judge Lord Mansfield, whose opinion in Somersett's Case was widely taken to have held that slavery was illegal in England. This judgement also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions (such as the American colonies) could not be enforced in England. In 1777, Vermont became the first portion of what would become the United States to abolish slavery (at the time Vermont was an independent nation). In 1794, under the Jacobins, Revolutionary France abolished slavery. There were celebrations in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom through the work of the British Anti-Slavery Society. William Wilberforce received much of the credit although the groundwork was an anti-slavery essay by Thomas Clarkson. Wilberforce was also urged by his close friend, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, to make the issue his own, and was also given support by reformed Evangelical John Newton. The Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire, Wilberforce also campaigned for abolition of slavery in British Empire, which he lived to see in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. After abolition slave trade act 1807 was passed these campaigners switched to encouraging other countries to follow suit, notably France and the British colonies.

Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.

In the United States, abolitionist pressure produced a series of small steps towards emancipation. After January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited, but not the internal slave trade, nor involvement in the international slave trade externally. Legal slavery persisted; and those slaves already in the U.S. would not be legally emancipated for another 60 years. Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the Underground Railroad. Violence soon erupted, with the anti-slavery forces led by John Brown, and Bleeding Kansas, involving anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers, became a symbol for the nationwide clash over slavery. The American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of slavery in the United States.

In 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the Confederate States; the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865) prohibited slavery throughout the country. On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 states: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery