What does the image represent?

  What does race have to do with colonialism and imperialism?

  How is the history of race and literature relevant today?

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  Can I take a look at previous required texts and assignments?

  How did this course get started?

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     Behn's novel is the story of Oroonoko, an African prince who is captured and taken as a slave to the South American colony of Surinam, where he is murdered for his role as the leader of an unsuccessful slave rebellion.

     When the rebellion fails, but before all the slaves are retaken by their "owners," Oroonoko kills his pregnant wife and fellow slave, Imoinda, rather than let her fall into white hands. As Behn knew, the children of African slaves were themselves slaves and became the property of the female slave's owner; and Behn's African heroine would rather die than provide another hostage to white commerce.

     It is this scene that the engraving portrays; or rather the analogous scene from Southerne's play because, as we immediately see, Southerne has changed Imoinda's race, and turned Oroonoko's African lover into a European one.

     Is this an improvement? Perhaps it is merely neutral as a plot device: in Southerne's version Imoinda must actually kill herself, because after Oroonoko raises the blade against her, he finds that he can't follow through. But the image of a black man preparing to stab a white woman is in and of itself highly inflammatory; and the illustrator clearly chose this particular moment, as Oroonoko prepares to strike, for its shock value.

     Southerne had Shakespeare's play Othello in mind when he changed Imoinda's race. But if the scene picks up an element of tragic resonance by echoing Othello's smothering of Desdemona, it also ceases to be a moment of black action and instead echoes the larger black-white conflict, almost as if these two were enemies rather than husband and wife.

     Perhaps another implication of the image is that Southerne turns from Behn's interest in how racist ideas arise within a colonial context, and instead assumes and perpetuates them (in this case, the idea from Othello of black African impetuosity).

     *** For more information on early women writers and representations of race, see Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 Back to FAQ

     After Columbus and the "discovery" of the "New World" in 1492, areas that were extensively colonized often became part of European empires, although many territories were politically assimilated without colonization. For example, in 1944 both India (where few Britons settled permanently) and Canada (a heavily colonized region) were units of the British Empire.

     Once begun, these colonial and imperial adventures put the inhabitants of the world into new relations of global conflict, and one of the results was the invention and elaboration of the pseudo-scientific notion of "race." Europeans knew for thousands of years, of course, that they had a different skin colour from the inhabitants of other regions, such as Africa--but this did not lead to the idea that skin tone was essential to the identity of either individuals or groups.

     As may be seen in the medieval work known as Mandeville's Travels, for example, religious differences between peoples were once considered far more important than physical ones. "Race" in the modern sense of inherited physical attributes did not exist during the middle ages or before--on the contrary, it is a recent construction that springs originally from the desire of Europeans to justify their attempts to dominate and subdue other peoples and cultures.

     Of course, just because "race" is a construction does not make it any less real or the racism it engenders any less violent than if "race" were a fact of nature. But it does mean that the modern belief in ideas of racial difference and identity is historically and culturally created; and, as a result, racism and racial prejudice remain open to change through history and culture--including, of course, through literature.

     *** For more information on how "race" is a historical and cultural construction, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference Back to FAQ

     Interestingly enough, even before modern ideas of "race" and racial prejudice emerged, the dark skin colour of sub-Saharan Africans was identified with the blackness of the devil in Christian iconography.

     In Mandeville's Travels, written in the fourteenth century, the narrator tells an amusing story of his travels in Africa: black Numidians think that white men look like devils because, as everyone knows, angels are black!

     Again and again, in the literary tradition after Mandeville--in Shakespeare, Phillis Wheatley, William Blake and others--this motif returns: to be perpetuated, challenged, or turned upside down. Today, in our increasingly visual culture, the motif has been used both as a provocative advertising ploy by Benetton in their "Angel and Devil" ad (an image of an angelic blonde girl and a black boy with his hair styled into horns), and in the regressive dress and cosmetic codes of the Spice Girls.  Back to FAQ

Can I take a look at a previous syllabus?

Can I take a look at previous required texts and assignments?

How did this course get started?

Where can I get more information?