Stage III
“The book remained silent”
Or, Scripturalization as White Violence on Black Flesh
- Exhibition--Welcome >
- Orientation to Exhibition >
- Stage I >
- Stage II >
- Stage III >
- Stage IV >
- Stage V >
I was astonished at the wisdom of the white people in all things…
I had often seen my master Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.
Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa
And he desired to know where Valverde had learned things so extraordinary. In this book, replied the fanatic Monk, reaching out his breviary. The Inca opened it eagerly, and turning over the leaves, lifted it to his ear: This, says he, is silent; it tell tells me nothing; and threw it with disdain to the ground. The enraged father of ruffians, turning towards his countrymen, the assassinators, cried out, To arms, Christians, to arms; the word of God is insulted; avenge this profanation on these impious dogs.
Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1791)
Among other contrivances (and perhaps one of the most innocent) to interest the national humanity in favour of the Negro slaves, one of them here writes his own history, as formerly another of them published his correspondence. . . . These memoirs, written in a very unequal style, place the writer on a par with the general mass of men in the subordinate stations of civilised society, and prove that there is no general rule without an exception. The first volume treats of the manners of his countrymen, and his own adventures till he obtained his freedom; the second, from that period to the present, is uninteresting; and his conversion to methodism oversets the whole.
Richard Gough, Review of The interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Gentleman's Magazine, June 1789)
Stage III casts a light onto the disturbing nature of the violence that “white men’s magic” in the form of the regime of the fetish of the scriptural (scripturalization) is made to do. Traditionally analyzed in terms of the “talking book” trope by which Black Atlantic figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—mostly slaves or ex-slaves—recognized the magic of white men’s books and announced their desperation and anxiety over at first not being able to read these books, in this Exhibition the concluding part of the traditional expression as found in The Interesting Narrative is understood to function differently: notwithstanding the fact that some Black Atlantic individuals learned to read the book the silence persists. The silence here signifies veiling/masking—keeping black-enfleshed persons from being represented as and experiencing their full humanity. Various expressive practices and ideologies in the maintenance of such masquerade make the history of modernities.
He was southern Mississippi planter--his journal casts light on and details relations of power including performances between plantation slavers and enslaved. Shows how both parties lived and at least provokes imaginings about sentiments.
- Exhibition--Welcome >
- Orientation to Exhibition >
- Stage I >
- Stage II >
- Stage III >
- Stage IV >
- Stage V >