Leaving Home: Slavery and the Politics of Reproduction

Camille Barbagallo October 31, 2015



In fact, from one point of view, we cannot unravel one female’s narrative from the other’s, cannot decipher one without tripping over the other – Hortense Spillers1

We had driven straight through from Brisbane to Sydney, a nine-hour drive with your foot flat to the floor. We were on our way to a radical student conference, it was the very late 1990s and the WTO protests in Seattle had just hit the national papers. It was a time when some of us had started to get confident in naming the problem, saying it out loud: capitalism. We arrived sweaty, tired and sort of tumbled out of the car and into the front garden of a huge run-down student house in inner Sydney. A woman I had not met before, Natasha was at the front door. Noting my then boyfriend, she spat,

“So, you’re a breeder then.”

Standing there in the harsh morning sunshine, the word breeder did the job it was intended to do: producing a connection between my nineteen year old body, its assumed capacity for biological reproduction, patriarchy and normative heterosexual sex. A little taken back, I mumbled something while looking at my feet and spent the rest of the week thinking about what breeder sex would be like.

Conversation Piece, before a house in Monument Lane, Edgbaston (William Williams, 1780)

This essay offers a critical reflection on the history of reproduction at the intersection of slavery and capitalism in the Anglo-American context.2 In sketching this history I explore the relationship between capitalism, gender and slavery and how the invention of the two separate spheres of production and social reproduction was produced and maintained. What emerges is the highly contradictory nature of the home and family under slavery and that in some instances the household served as an important site of resistance for slave women. Exploring the complexities of the household and family structures under slavery challenges tendencies within feminist theory that assume a universal or “shared” experience of home, motherhood and the domestic sphere.

The problem of where to begin in unraveling the stories of slavery, feminism and reproduction is an interesting one. Particularly if one is not seeking to locate origins or founding moments, but is instead interested in asking how reproduction has come to be the problem that it is today. In the first instance, it is necessary to ask what is at stake in the history of reproduction, in part because the definitions and meaning of reproduction not only vary but also are often experienced in contradictory ways. The inequalities and disparities in how different racialized and gendered subjects experience the labor of making and remaking people under capitalism cannot be ignored and these gaps, silences and spaces of difference have long and complex histories. Considering the overwhelming location of reproduction is in the realm of the natural, the biological and that murky, under-theorized location of home, it is necessary to not only gesture towards what is at stake politically but to do so with the aim of “weaponizing reproduction.” The task is certainly a feminist project, one that takes seriously what it means to denaturalize reproduction, with the desire to grab hold of the problem and transform it.

From the outset it is clear that the story of feminism and reproduction is a complex and at times contradictory one. Of the many valid and necessary critiques of second-wave feminism that have and continue to be made, the notion that the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s was anti-mother is certainly a persistent line of attack. It is also a criticism that has been consistently challenged by those who were active in the movement, many of who were young mothers at the time. The idea that feminists were anti-child and anti-mother can in some ways be traced to how uncomfortable the original demand in Britain for “free 24-hour nurseries” made people feel. Critics claimed that the demand signaled women’s desire for “baby dumping.” People were horrified by the supposed unnaturalness of young children being looked after by people other than their mothers at irregular times. That a demand for accessible and affordable childcare could cause such panic tells us something about the organization of gender in post-war industrial economies.

Whilst the charge that second-wave feminist were anti-mother unravels under scrutiny, the family and the post-war family in particular was certainly the object of much feminist criticism and analysis. Shelia Rowbotham writes that the women’s movement erupted “in a literature of complaint which focused on the experiences of the family – both in the sense of life in the household and with kin.”3 It was less mothers and more motherhood that feminist saw as the problem. In a pamphlet entitled Women and the Family, written by three women, each with two kids, the authors write, “our window on the world is looked through with our hands in the sink and we’ve begun to hate the sink and all it implies.”4 Rowbotham continues that it was not that “every woman suddenly became unhappy, but that significant numbers of women felt entitled to a destiny which was not simply domestic.”5Considering that in the late 1960s, nearly 55 percent women in Britain did not work outside of the home, it is unsurprising that for significant numbers of women the family and women’s domestic destiny came to be seen as one of the central sites of female oppression. For many in the movement, women’s liberation meant an escape from the home – “in the home the woman is in the family, and the two are disturbingly synonymous.”6

All Things to All People?: Thoughts on Liberalism and Imperialism

THE DISORDER OF THINGS
JULY 18, 2017 / GUEST AUTHORS

This is the second post in our book forum on Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. The first post by Duncan can be read here. Dan Gorman is Associate Professor in History and Political Science at the University of Waterloo and Director of the PhD programme in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is currently working on a project which assesses the role of the UN as a venue for debates over decolonization from the end of WWII to the early 1960s.

Duncan Bell has packed a career’s worth of work on the intellectual history of Britain and its empire into the last dozen or so years. His recent collection of essays, Reordering the World, considers the intellectual attempts by British liberal thinkers (mostly, though not entirely, Victorians) to reorder the international system through empire, and the means by which they justified and rationalized their ideas. The essays republished in the volume have been updated to account for more recent scholarship and the evolution of Bell’s thought. They are joined by new essays on the “dream machine” of liberal imperial thought and on the Victorian imperial publicist J.R. Seeley, whose book The Expansion of England(1883) is the exemplar of Victorian liberal imperial boosterism. Reordering the World is not just a “scholarly greatest hits”; rather, its finely-grained and astute essays are united within a common field of interpretive focus on what Bell terms the “pathologies and potentialities of empire.” (2)

Despite imperialism’s central role in nineteenth century political discourse and world affairs, as well as its influence on the creation of the discipline of International Relations (IR), it has been conspicuously understudied by political scientists. In a discipline that continues to position the nation-state as its theoretical alpha and omega, an examination of the constitutive role of imperial variables such as race and “civilizational” hierarchies has been left to exceptional studies by scholars such as Robert Vitalis, David Long, and Brian Schmidt whose work seeks to “desegregate” IR and reveal its imperial origins. Yet, as Bell’s essays demonstrate, nineteenth century international relations was in many ways about imperialism, and empire remained (and, in the eyes of scholars such as Jeanne Morefield, remains) a salient category of international politics well into the twentieth century. The “imperial turn” in historical scholarship,[1]meanwhile, has in a rich irony colonized much of the historical discipline over the past several decades. Bell’s scholarship is so rewarding in part because he seeks to identify connections between imperialism and the disciplinary history of international relations.

In our ostensibly post-imperial age, imperialism would seem incompatible with liberalism’s core values of liberty and equality. As Bell’s carefully constructed contextual and summative essays demonstrate, however, liberalism has historically been a protean and reflexive intellectual tradition. While liberal thought on empire was united loosely by imperial imaginaries shaped by hierarchies of “civilization,” a conviction that technological progress was compressing space and time, and a historical sensibility, it was also highly elastic, and capable of containing contradictions (most importantly, concerning race) and hybrid ideas held in common with other intellectual traditions (for instance, liberals’ and socialists’ shared advocacy of strategies of indirect rule after the First World War). Imperium et libertas could thus as easily be complementary forces as mutually exclusive. Bell thus rejects the more canonical approach to the history of liberalism and imperialism adopted in key works by historians such as Uday Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, David Armitage, and Karuna Mantena. While not neglecting the (sometimes misunderstood) role of Mount Rushmore liberals such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, Bell’s focus is not the archetypical liberal thinkers is whose ideas the wisdom of the age is allegedly distilled, but the public moralists, essayists, and imperial ideologues whose often unsystematic and sometimes contradictory thought informed much of the intellectual cut-and-thrust of Victorian political discourse on imperialism.

Bell highlights two significant themes in Victorian liberal thought on empire: the largely overlooked significance of settler colonialism, and of the white settler colonies, to Victorian ideas of imperial world order; and the historical consciousness of liberal imperial thought. I’ll reflect only on the first theme in this post. Settler colonial studies has continued to grow since many of these essays were first published (see, for instance, Lorenzo Veracini’s Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview and the very active Settler Colonial Studies blog), but it remains the case that imperial history, and especially self-identified “new imperial” histories,” as a generalization, concentrate on India, and to a lesser extent, Africa and the Caribbean. One reason for this is the well-warranted “new imperial” focus on the history of race. With exceptions, the settler colonies are comparatively absent from such work. Instead, the imperial and racial histories of settler colonialism have emerged piecemeal from respective national historical traditions, and only in the last decade or so have historians begun to uncover the material and intellectual connections between them.[2]

What we need are more studies connecting the imperial histories of the settlement colonies with those of the dependent Empire (including India) and of Britain itself. Bell’s essays provide several suggestive avenues for such connective histories, including transnational intellectual histories of “the thought-worlds of the settler empire” (368), that would avoid centrifugal histories of imperial thought that presume ideas of empire emanated from the imperial “centre” and were disseminated to a captive and passive colonial audience. Here settler ideologies regarding indigenous peoples, property, progress, and competing cosmologies are particularly relevant. So, too, is the historical irony that while metropolitan liberals argued in the later nineteenth century for the merits of imperial unity, settler colonial governments pursued various forms of imperial exclusion through restrictive immigration policies.

Das koloniale Missverständnis / Dokumentarfilm

Die koloniale Vergangenheit Deutschlands ist im öffentlichen Diskurs kaum noch präsent. Jean-Marie Ténos eindrucksvoller Dokumentarfilm unternimmt den Versuch, dies zu ändern.

Afrika ist wieder in, zumindest im Kino. Zahlreiche diskursbestimmende Filme der letzten Jahre beschäftigten sich mit dem Kontinent, unter anderem Der ewige Gärtner (The Constant Gardener, 2005), Babel (2006) und Blood Diamond (2006), selbst eine Episode des letzten James-Bond-Abenteuers situierte sich dort. Mit The Last King of Scotland (2006) steht ein weiteres, explizit politisches Werk bereits in den Startlöchern. So unterschiedlich diese Filme ausfallen, eines haben sie doch gemeinsam: Keiner wurde von einem einheimischen Regisseur gedreht. Das afrikanische Kino selbst nimmt auch weiterhin eine äußerst periphere Position ein. Dem kleinen Dokumentarfilm Das koloniale Missverständnis (Le malentendu colonial) des Kameruners Jean-Marie Téno ist es jedoch gelungen, wenigstens einige wenige deutsche Leinwände zu erreichen.

Eine deutsche Karriere: Heinrich Vedder arbeitete lange Jahrzehnte in Namibia als christlicher Missionar. Er erwarb sich Verdienste um die Erforschung der einheimischen Kultur und zahlreicher afrikanischer Sprachen, setzte jedoch den rassistischen Praktiken der Kolonialverwaltung keinen nennenswerten Widerstand entgegen, nicht einmal während des Genozids an den Herero und Nama, dem zwischen 1904 und 1908 über 70.000 Menschen zum Opfer fielen. Wiewohl nie Mitglied der NSDAP, zeigte sich Vedder in zahlreichen Briefen als glühender Anhänger des Nationalsozialismus und war in den fünfziger Jahren Mitglied des südafrikanischen Apartheidsregimes.

Vedders Lebenslauf steht paradigmatisch für den Verlauf der Kolonialgeschichte in Das koloniale Missverständnis. Ténos Werk setzt sich mit dem vielleicht größten blinden Fleck der deutschen Vergangenheit auseinander. Die Beteiligung des Deutschen Reiches an der Eroberung Afrikas Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts ist bis heute wissenschaftlich vergleichsweise wenig aufgearbeitet, vor allem jedoch ist diese Problematik im öffentlichen Bewusstsein kaum präsent, obwohl immer noch Schadensersatzklagen der Nachfahren damals betroffener Volksgruppen gegen deutsche Unternehmen in amerikanischen Gerichten verhandelt werden.

Ténos Werk zeichnet – wie der Titel andeutet – eine Reihe von Missverständnissen nach, die den Blick auf die koloniale Vergangenheit erschweren. Unter anderem präsentiert der Film Fotografien aus den ersten deutschen Konzentrationslagern, die nicht während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, sondern im Zuge des oben erwähnten Genozids errichtet wurden. Bis hin zur Uniformierung der Wächter nehmen diese Bilder einzelne Elemente der Schreckensikonografie vorweg, die bis heute die Darstellung der Ereignisse in den späteren Lagern prägt.

Das grundlegende Anliegen des Films zielt jedoch auf die Tätigkeit der europäischen Kirchen in Afrika. Ausführlich beleuchtet Das koloniale Missverständnis die Rolle der Rheinischen Missionsgesellschaft, die 1828 gegründet wurde und in der afrikanischen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts eine wichtige Rolle spielte, und der unter anderem auch Vedder seinen Arbeitsplatz verdankte. Téno ist vor allem daran gelegen, die in öffentlichen Auseinandersetzungen präsente Unterscheidung zwischen bösen Kolonialisten und guten Missionaren in Frage zu stellen. In zahlreichen Interviews mit wissenschaftlichen Experten macht sich Téno daran, diese Legende zu dekonstruieren und zeigt auf, wie die Bekehrungsarbeit der Kirchen von Anfang an von der Politik als strategisches Mittel zur Eroberung des Kontinents eingesetzt wurde. Und nicht nur das Beispiel Vedders beweist, dass die Missionare der imperialistischen Ideologie der Kolonialisten oft sehr nahe standen.

Der Film endet mit einem Blick auf die Gegenwart. Das koloniale Missverständnis klagt nicht nur den Unwillen der ehemaligen Kolonialmächte an, die politische Verantwortung für die Folgeschäden zu übernehmen, sondern verweist auch auf eine beängstigende Kontinuität. Téno: „Jahrhunderte sind vergangen, und Afrika ist immer noch Missionsgebiet. Die ‚humanitären Helfer’ haben die Missionare von einst ersetzt. Die Kolonisation hat sich das Gewand der Globalisierung angezogen, und in Afrika ist nichts Neues in Sicht: immer noch ein bisschen mehr Hilfe und immer weniger Gerechtigkeit.“ Ob man sich dieser Diagnose – wie auch einigen anderen, ähnlich kontroversen Thesen des Films – in vollem Umfang anschließen möchte, bleibt jedem selbst überlassen. Ténos Film, der sich bei der Präsentation seiner Argumentation nie manipulativer Techniken bedient, möchte nicht um jeden Preis überzeugen und ist sich der Beschränkungen des eigenen Mediums bewusst.

Ein Dokumentarfilm kann historiografische Arbeit nicht ersetzen. Ténos Ziel besteht weniger darin, innerhalb einer geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskussion eine Position zu beziehen, als darin, eine – nicht nur in Deutschland – verdrängte Epoche wieder der öffentlichen Diskussion zugänglich zu machen und gleichzeitig auf die zahlreichen Lebenslügen hinzuweisen, die das europäische Selbstverständnis prägen.

conflict and skin: the persistence of victorian design in namibian women’s fashion

Catherine mckinley, gallatin ma

MARCH 11TH – MARCH 27TH, 2016

Curatorial Statement

In 1884, present-day Namibia was annexed under German colonial rule as part of what was to become South West Africa. Within a decade, German imperial troops were installed to enforce state rule, provoking formidable resistance by the dominant Herero and Namaqua people. The German army responded with a campaign to remove the groups from their ancestral lands, marking the start of the German-Herero War (1904-1907). By the war’s end, an estimated eighty percent of the population, including Himba and other peoples, had been killed by the Germans. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century and a chilling rehearsal for later Nazi atrocities.
The German-Herero War centered on the enormous profitability of both human bodies and cattle skins. What played out on the “native” body through acts of labor exploitation and racial cleansing also deeply implicated sartorial, social-cultural, and traditional religious values of the Herero and Himba, in particular. The cow, the human body, and God were considered to be one and the same. “Herero-ness” and other clan identities, the sustaining of cattle wealth, and custom were expressed in large measure by a literal embodiment of the cow. Cow ownership, as well as a particular wearing of skins, and a feminine ideal of “walking like a cow,” were set off by sartorial forms that celebrated the cow’s form and bored majesty and its associated dowry wealth.
In Namibia, fashions of the Herero and their closely related clan cousins, the Himba, become monuments to the genocide which has otherwise been almost entirely erased. Both groups—summoning the body of the cow—whether with Western imported cloth and notions, skins, and “nakedness,” express radically different relationships to Victorian colonial legacies. They also express pleasure in Western and contemporary design and form, while marking a decided resistance to colonialism and the violence enacted on women’s bodies through genocide and racial cleansing.
Conflict and Skin exams the politics and colonial legacies of Namibian fashion, particularly as iterations of “national costume” and notions of “indigeneity” —the practice of indigenous culture despite colonial impositions.
How does the legacy of genocide explain the staying power of these radically different but kindred forms? How do they radicalize, vulgarize, and provide distance from the genocide?
Engaging the work of the late award-winning South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala and Ghanaian-American couture designer Mimi Plange’s Herero-inspired collection “Flower in the Desert” (Spring 2012), Conflict and Skin examines contemporary African photography and dressmaking, as well as images and costume from the archive. Through these dresses and fashion, I hope to show the legacy of colonialism and to demonstrate the resistance and trauma of the Herero people.

-Catherine Mckinley

---

The Yellow Wallpaper

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/literatureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

Mental Illness in Literature: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper Updated on August 8, 2014
Mental Illness in American Literature

Gilman's most famous work, her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", published in 1892, is about a woman suffering from mental illness after of being confined to a bedroom in the attic of a vacation home by her husband, John, for the sake of her health. She becomes obsessed with the room's repulsive, yet alluring yellow wallpaper. Gilman wrote this story to bring light to women's role in society, explaining that women's lack of autonomy negatively affects their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. She used it as a call to action for readers to recognize the legitimacy and complexity of illness and benefit in therapies for treatment, namely in women, and to overcome sexism in treatment

The narrator explains the embodiment of the authors experience during her time being treated by Dr. Mitchell's "rest cure". The treatment, which includes no physical activity, mental stimulation, or hobbies, is in direct conflict with what the author needs to get well. This drives her further into madness until she descends beyond the point of getting better.

Left: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Right: "The Yellow Wallpaper" cover

Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies

Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, photographed by Camille Silvy, 1862 Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies was a child born into a royal West African dynasty. She was orphaned in 1848, when her parents were killed in a slave-hunting war. She was around five years old. In 1850, Sarah was taken to England and presented to Queen Victoria as a “gift” from the King of Dahomey. She became the queen’s goddaughter and a celebrity known for her extraordinary intelligence.