Résumés
Abstract
This essay takes up and practices related methodologies from Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: correspondence and “always progressing backwards.” The essay posits that Imperial Intimacies and The Woman of Colour correspond across time, both as works about the enfleshment of “imperial intimacies” and as formal articulations of Black being in/through contradiction. Anachronisms in the novel demonstrate the contingency of historical understanding that allows The Woman of Colour to be read necessarily as both an imperial and anti-imperial work. Correspondence in both works to invert Hegel’s configuration of self-other, thereby creating the possibility for unfixed intersubjectivity. Reading The Woman of Colour with Carby (ac)knowledges Olivia Fairchild’s taxonomic shifting from human to animal to plant and back not only as reiterating the Linnean/Enlightenment threshold of Black life’s creation/destruction but also, following Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, a rupture of humanist unity through/to the mutability of Black being.
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Anderson, Katherine. “Almanacs and the Profits of Natural Knowledge.” Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by Louise Henson et al. Routledge, 2016, pp. 97-111.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern W. McGee, U of Texas P, 1986. pp. 10–59.
- Barrett-Woods, Victoria. “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour.” Women’s Studies, vol. 45, no. 7, 2016, pp. 613–23.
- Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Johns Hopkins UP 2017.
- Bowen, B. P. “Old Moore’s Almanack.” Dublin Historical Record, vol. 3, no. 1, 1940, pp. 26-37.
- Brewer, John, and Silvia Sebastiani, “Forum: Closeness and Distance,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 11, no. 3, 2014, pp. 603–09. ProQuest, doi:10.1017/S1479244314000201.
- Buchan, Bruce. “Travels in Space and Time: Progress, War, and the Historical Mobilities of Scotland’s Enlightenment.” Global Intellectual History, vol. 8, no. 4, 2023, pp. 409-27. Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2022.2074504.
- Carby, Hazel. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. New York, Verso, 2019.
- Carby, Hazel. “Imperial Accounting.” 2021 Humanities Institute, Apr. 15, 2021, Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Virtual Public Lecture.
- Carpenter, Olivia. “‘Rendered Remarkable’: Reading Race and Desire in The Woman of Colour.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 50, 2021, pp. 247-63. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2021.0020.
- Césaire, Suzanne. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945). Edited by Daniel Maximin, translated by Keith L. Walker. Middletown, Wesleyan UP, 2012.
- Clymer, Lorna. “Noticing Death: Funeral Invitations and Obituaries in Early Modern Britain.” Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, edited by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall. U of Toronto P, 2012, pp. 265-305.
- Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2009.
- Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Fordham UP, 2016.
- Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden, Part II, Containing the Loves of the Plants, a Poem, with Philosophical Notes. vol. 2. J. London, Nichols for J. Johnson, 1790.
- Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia; Or, The Laws of Organic Life. vol. 1. London, J. Johnson, 1794.
- Dominique, Lyndon J. Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759 – 1808. Ohio State UP, 2012.
- Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton UP, 1983.
- Fielder, Brigitte. “Early Black Futures.” African American Literature in Transition, 1750 – 1800, edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas. Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 228-54.
- Fielder, Brigitte. “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement.” Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, edited by Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato. Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, pp. 171-85.
- Giglioni, Guido. “Touch Me Not: Sense and Sensibility in Early Modern Botany.” Early Science and Medicine, vol 23, 2018, pp. 420-43.
- Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton UP, 2011.
- Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011.
- Huang, Kristina. “‘Ameliorating the Situation’ of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, pp. 167-86.
- Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020.
- Jarvis, J. Ereck. “Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour— A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable).” Studies in Religion and Enlightenment, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 45-47.
- Kelley, Theresa M. “Botanical Figura.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 53, no. 3, 2014, pp. 343-68.
- Makonnen, Atesede. “‘Even in the Best Minds’: Romanticism and the Evolution of Anti-Blackness.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 61, no. 1, 2022, pp. 11-22.
- Manning, Susan. Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700-1900. Cambridge UP, 2013.
- Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Duke UP, 2017.
- Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1990.
- McKittrick, Katherine. “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor).” Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke UP, 2020, pp. 14-34.
- Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Ben Brewster, Alfred Guzzetti, Celia Britton, and Annwyl Williams. Bloomington and Indiana UP, 1982.
- Mignolo, Walter D. “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Edited by Katherine McKittrick. Duke UP, 2015, pp. 106-123.
- Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.
- Murray, Julie. “The Country and the City and the Colony in The Woman of Colour.” Lumen, vol. 33, 2014, pp. 87-99. https://doi.org/10.7202/1026566ar.
- Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. Grove Press, 1996.
- Mullen, Mary L. Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Edinburgh UP, 2019.
- Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. U of California P, 1999.
- Nicolazzo, Sal. “Another 1987, or Whiteness and Eighteenth-Century Studies.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 33, no. 2, 2020-21, pp. 233-48.
- Parker, Deven M. “Precarious Correspondence in The Woman of Colour.” Essays in Romanticism, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 135-51.
- “Pull Quote.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote. Accessed 26 June 2022.
- Rabbitt, Kara M. “Suzanne Césaire’s Significance for the Forging of a New Caribbean Literature.” The French Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 2006, pp. 538–47.
- Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Harvard UP, 1997.
- Roberts, Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807. Cambridge UP, 2013.
- Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.
- Sinanan, Kerry. Plenary remarks. “Citation, Appropriation, Abolition,” Plenary Collaboration with Eugenia Zuroski and Matt Sandler. Black Studies and Romanticism Virtual Conference, 24 June 2021, Mt. Holyoke College.
- Smith, Justin E. H. Nature, Human Nature, and Huma Difference: Race and Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton UP, 2015.
- Spadafora, David. The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Yale UP, 1990.
- Stoler, Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time. Duke UP, 2016.
- Temple, Christel N. “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States: A Modern History.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 127–50.
- Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Oxford UP, 1971.
- Wolfe, Charles T. “Vitalism and the Metaphysics of Life: The Discreet Charm of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism.” Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Susan James. Oxford UP, 2021, pp. 292–314.
- Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.
- Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick. Duke UP 2015, pp. 9–89.
- Yong, Ed. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life. New York, Ecco, 2016.

