Abstracts
Abstract
This article examines the role of sugar in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), arguing that, despite its relatively marginal position as an overt content, the commodity provides a felicitous means of understanding the formal dimensions of Lewis’s text, and its negotiation of racial violence, in particular. Throughout the Journal, Lewis figures the Caribbean sugar estate as a kind of utopia, divested of all that made slavery so anathema to its opponents and, in so doing, discursively echoes the processes of refinement entailed in the production of the very substance on which his wealth and status are predicated. Yet even as Lewis’s colonial record aspires towards a condition of discursive and ideological purity, it can never quite reach its goal: the material realities of racial conflict stubbornly obtrude themselves in stray moments, lingering on in fragmentary and vestigial forms, which vitiate the saccharine visions Lewis seeks to promote.
Appendices
Works Cited
- Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
- Bohls, Elizabeth A. “The Planter Picturesque: Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor.” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 63-76.
- Byron, Lord George Gordon. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 13 vols. London: John Murray, 1973-94.
- Craton, Michael. Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1978.
- Dubois, Laurent and John D. Garrigus. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2006.
- Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. Vol. 2. London: J. Stockdale, 1793.
- Grainger, James. The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes. The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane. John Gilmore. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone P, 2000. 87-198.
- Harkin, Maureen. “Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor: Surveillance and Space on the Plantation.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24 (2002): 139-50.
- Heiland, Donna. “The Unheimlich and the Making of Home: Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor.” Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment. Eds. Mita Choudhury and Laura Rosenthal. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2002. 170-88.
- Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. London: Pan, 2005.
- James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Introd. James Walvin. London: Penguin, 2001.
- Jones, Donald. Bristol’s Sugar Trade and Refining Industry. Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1996.
- Lewis, Matthew. Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. Ed. Judith Terry. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
- Ligon, Richard. A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. London: Frank Cass, 1970.
- Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2006.
- Nugent, Lady Maria. Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. Ed. Philip Wright. Foreword by Verene A. Shepherd. Barbados: U of the West Indies P, 2002.
- Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961.
- Sandiford, Keith A. The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
- Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings. Eds. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
- Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa. “‘Monk’ Lewis’s Journals and the Discipline of Discourse.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001): 59-88.