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

Paternalism and its Discontents

Whether it’s the Christian religion, or the civil legal structure, or cultural attitudes surrounding family dynamics, it is clear that Europeans are heavily invested in maintaining hierarchical order (abstractly, politically, economically, etc) through the preeminence of a hegemonic God, state, or plantocracy. This is evident in “The Confession & Dying Warning of Katherine Garret.” Her confession reads, “I would Warn all Young People against Sinning / against their own Consciences; For there is a GOD / that Knows all things. Oh! Beware of all Sin, / Especially of Fornication; for that has led me to / Murder.” These lines reveal to me an eerie similarity to a language of surveillance, obedience, and punishment via rigid social/moral codes that appear increasingly legally codified. Just as the intervention of Calvinism transformed Christian theology so that it became increasingly understood through legal language (covenant = contract with God, limited elect, etc), Christianity too influenced legal codes, social structures, and political philosophy. Particularly, the notion of an all-seeing, all-powerful hegemonic God serves as a partial basis for the insidious ideology of paternalism. In Katherine Garret’s case, murder is not just a theological sin, but also a legal infraction. Here, the two are inseparably intertwined because each organizes a hegemonic power structure (God’s wrath, Judge’s gavel, Preacher’s condemnation) built around a single, unitary patriarch trusted with governing the public, saving their eternal souls, and inflicting punishments on wrong doers in order to command obedience. In each scenario, the patriarch demands complete subservience in exchange for protection. (In a way, I read this structure similarly to Hobbes’s theory of the hegemon in The Leviathan; however, I would disagree that a social contract undergirds this power dynamic in paternalist societies because, as these examples demonstrate, those contracts and other legal language to describe the relationship between hegemon and public, are continually broken and revised to maintain a hierarchy of power).

Additionally, as seen in The Narrative of Joanna, An Emancipated Slave, from Surinam, paternalist logics extend themselves beyond just the realm of legal structures and issues of religious morality. The logic also misinforms theories of biological essentialism, racism, and the notion of inheritance. All of these are clearly at play in this narrative as Captain John Stedman fathers a child with a 15-year old enslaved girl, Joanna, who remains in his possession. While this narrative complicates and outright disturbs modern ideas of abolitionism, consent, and subalterity, the narrative also demonstrates a subversion of paternalist values employed on behalf of a mixed-race child. Stedman goes above and beyond to seek the manumission of “his best friend” as she is referred to throughout the narrative, and her/his young son because, as is mentioned time and time again, Stedman can’t possibly bear the thought of either living in perpetual servitude. While on the one hand, Stedman maintains a sentimentalist approach to abolition, he also demonstrates that he is motivated by a paternalist impulse to keep his family together and have it recognized by legal and religious authorities.
 

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