Abstract
While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more memorable experiences in Victorian England:
During a visit to Blackpool many years ago, I went with some hospitable friends to the Winter Garden where there were several wild animals on exhibition. I noticed that a nurse having two children with her, could not keep her eyes from the spot where I stood, looking at first with a sort of suspicious, if not terrified curiosity. After a while she heard me speak to one of the gentlemen who were with me. Apparently surprised and reassured by this evidence of a genuine humanity, she called to the children who were interested in examining a leopard, “Look, look, there is a black man and he speaks English.“1
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Notes
Edward Wilmot Blyden, “West Africa Before Europe,” Journal of the African Society 2, no. 8 (1903): 363.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove Press, 1967), 36. As Fanon explains of the postcolonial Antillean, he “will be proportionally whiter - that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” (Black Skin, White Masks, 18).
For a discussion of Kingsley’s Travels in relation to ethnography and gender, see Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), primarily 78–80.
Julie English Early, “Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toiling in the Fields of Sensational Science,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (1995): 67–75.
Ulrike Brisson, “Fish and Fetish: Mary Kingsley’s Studies of Fetish in West Africa,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 3 (2005): 326–40.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 1837, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 94.
Ako and Fondo provide a valuable reminder of how much Kingsley’s irony targeted a predominately European audience. See Edward O. Ako and Blossom N. Fondo, “Alterity and the Imperial Agenda: Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa and Gerald Durrell’s The Bafut Beagles,” Jouvert 7, no. 2 (2003). 1 April 2008, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7i2/ako.htm
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 214.
Critics like Blunt observe how Kingsley’s landscape descriptions frequently occasion the questioning of individual and imperial authority. See Alison Blunt, “Mapping Authorship and Authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape Descriptions,” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies, eds Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 51–72.
Katherine Frank, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986).
For an alternative discussion of how the colonial sublime, rather than the uncanny, “bewilders colonial identities,” see Christopher Lane, “Fantasies of’Lady Pioneers,’ between Narrative and Theory,” Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, eds Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 90–114.
For a detailed discussion of the economic bases for the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).
John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws: A Brief Introduction to the Principles of the Native Laws and Customs of the Fanti and Akan Districts of the Gold Coast with a Report of Some Cases thereon Decided in the Law Courts, 1897, 3rd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1968).
Edward Wilmot Blyden, The African Society and Miss Mary Kingsley (London: John Scott and Co., 1901), 28.
Laura E. Ciolkowski, “Traveler’s Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa,” Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 344–5.
Salome C. Nnoromele, “Gender, Race, and Colonial Discourse in the Travel Writings of Mary Kingsley,” The Victorian Newsletter 90 (Fall 1996): 5.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” New York Review of Books 21, no. 16 (1974). Online.
On Conrad’s relation to English and to colonialism as a Polish-born imperial subject, see Alex S. Kurczaba, ed. and introd., Conrad and Poland (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 1996).
Wieslaw Krajka, ed., A Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland and East-Central Europe (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 2004).
Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 152.
Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the DoubleMapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
The value of Phoenician “Aggry” beads, as opposed to their cheap European imitations, was nothing to scoff at, since they fetched their weight in gold during Kingsley’s day. See John Edward Price, “On Aggri Beads,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 12 (1883): 64–8.
Petroleum was not discovered in the Niger Oil River region of present-day Nigeria until 1956. On the production and uses of palm oil, see K. G. Berger and S. M. Martin, “Palm Oil,” The Cambridge World History of Food, eds Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 397–410.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Letter to Mary Kingsley, 7 May 1900, Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. Hollis Ralph Lynch (Milwood, New York: KTO Press, 1978), 460.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. Hollis Ralph Lynch (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 266.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), iii.
Sydney Haldane Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour (London: Independent Labour Party, 1906), 116.
Black Skin, White Masks, 110. Fanon draws further on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: “We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A’corporeal or postural schema’ gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5. The notion of a traumatic, primal “scene” alludes to the onset of Freud’s Oedipus complex, in which a subject first encounters societal institutions and prohibitions related to sexual differences. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this scene marks the subject’s transition from the “specular I” to the “social I.”
Black Skin, White Masks, 111. Embedded quotation from Jean Lhermitte, L’Image de notre corps (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), 17.
According to Lacan, the subject at this level of development identifies with and feels alienated from a misrecognized, mirror image of the self - one that, contrary to the subject’s experience of bodily fragmentation, appears inaccessibly perfect, whole, and therefore other - and thus experiences the dual reaction of narcissism and aggressivity, recognition and alienation, that will characterize all subsequent encounters with others in society. On Fanon’s divergence from Lacan, see, for example, Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 59–87.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (1991): 457–70.
David Macey, “The Recall of the Real: Frantz Fanon and Psychoanalysis,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 6, no. 1 (1999): 98–107.
Kingsley cited in Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (London: Macmillan, 1932), 254.
Imperial Eyes, 213. See also “Mapping Authorship and Authority”; “Fish and Fetish”; and Catherine B. Stevenson, “Mary Kingsley’s Travel Writings: Humor and the Politics of Style,” Exploration 8 (1980): 1–13. For a critique of the political efficacy of irony and the significance of unconscious desire in Kingsley’s narrative, see “Fantasies of’Lady Pioneers.’”
See, for example, Hollis Ralph Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Thomas W. Livingston, Education and Race: A Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden (San Francisco: Glendessary Press, 1975).
See, for example, Richard J. Douglass-Chin, “Revisiting Edward Wilmot Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887): Islam and the Eastern Caribbean in the 21st Century,” La Torre 11, no. 41–42 (2006): 345–54; Pan-Negro Patriot; Apollos O. Nwauwa, “Empire, Race and Ideology: Edward Wilmot Blyden’s Initiatives for an African University and African-Centered Knowledge, 1872–1890,” The International Journal of African Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 1–22; Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Edward Wilmot Blyden, Précurseur de la Négritude” (Foreword), trans. David L. Schalk, Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden, xv-xxii; Boikai S. Twe, “Edward W. Blyden’s Lessons in African Psychology,” Liberian Studies Journal 21, no. 2 (1996): 169–202; Ngugĩ Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Curry, 1986).
On Blyden’s controversial position in African-American history, see Education and Race (especially 184–223); on the similarities between Blyden and Du Bois, see Michael J. C. Echeruo, “Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the’Color Complex,’” Journal of Modern African Studies 30, no. 4 (1992): 669–84.
For this issue as well as Blyden’s affinity with Washington, see Ross Posnock, “How it Feels to be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the’Impossible Life’ of the Black Intellectual,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 323–49.
Fanon’s parallel between racism and anti-Semitism, in which he quotes the following passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, further illuminates the potential limitations of Kingsley’s liberalism: “It is our words and our gestures - all our words and all our gestures - our anti-Semitism, but equally our condescending liberalism - that have poisoned him. It is we who constrain him to choose to be a Jew whether through flight from himself or through self-assertion; it is we who force him into the dilemma of Jewish authenticity or inauthenticity” (quoted with emphasis in Black Skin, White Masks, 182). See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (1946; New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1995), 135.
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© 2012 Deborah Shapple Spillman
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Spillman, D.S. (2012). The Uncanny Object Lessons of Mary Kingsley and Edward Blyden. In: British Colonial Realism in Africa. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378018_3
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