F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Ethnography or Epistolary? Questions of Genre, Authority, and Point of View

Obi; Or, The History of Threefingered Jack, by William Earle is an 1800 epistolary novel that blurs the line between fictional novel and ethnographic article. On several pages, the footnote comprises over three-quarters of the page. These notes range from extensive European reporting on the practices of Obeah and Caribbean landscape, flora and fauna in a way that clearly aligns with colonial interests of othering, cataloging, and objectifying dynamic aspects of human culture as complex as religious-medical rituals and remedies. The footnote appears mostly in dialogue from Edwards, &c, and examines “Obi” through a lens of legality, that maintains the plantocracy, and treats “Obi” as a political/cultural threat because it subverted power dynamics and the colonial authority.
            Are we meant to understand the footnotes too as an invented technique used here in order to influence the image of the West Indian enslaved African? Even if the footnotes are grounded in nonfictional research and encyclopedic information, I believe it is still important to question how peripheral texts/co-texts shape and alter how each is read. Because these footnotes appear in a work of fiction, I am inclined to believe the footnotes should be read as equally fictionalized notes, regardless of their implied authorial power granted them because of placing. In either scenario, the footnotes paint a picture of Caribbean diasporic cultural forms/practices as a threat to European values, traditions, and sensibilities. At the same time, Earle also readily supplies readers with highly sentimental, sympathetic, and emotional reactions to Amri’s narrative. Both genres, when juxtaposed, highlight abilities the other is struggles with to the same effect—both the sentimentality and the footnotes fundamentally ground Eurocentric experience as the pinnacle of success in terms of their emotional sensibilities and their advanced production of ethnographic knowledge. Ultimately, the merging or overlapping of these two white supremacist rhetorical strategies demonstrates that sympathizing with enslaved Africans is itself a paradoxical enterprise. In order of white men like George to better understand the cultural differences present between Europeans and West Indian—indigenous and African—he reverts to ethnographic study of peoples that privileges Western values and the economic viability of the plantation. So, in this way, authors like Earle blend genres that are at once sympathizing and advocating for an end to the torturous slave trade and simultaneously creating and emphasizing cultural differences in order to justify colonial dominion religiously, economically, civilly, culturally, and politically. In many ways, Earle’s text is a prime example of the generic discourses at odds in their continual push and pull creating the Other and saving the Other.
 

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