EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN
2012; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502386.2011.644573
ISSN1466-4348
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoAbstract This article examines the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 and situates it as the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly links corporeal identifiers to the right to travel. I do this to argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. I explore surveillance technologies of transatlantic slavery, namely lantern laws, and I examine arbitration that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1783 between fugitive slaves exercising mobility rights claims by seeking to be included in The Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as property. Coupling the archive of The Book of Negroes with a discussion of rituals and practices engaged by free and enslaved blacks, I suggest that these interactions with surveillance served as both strategies of coping and critique, and in so being represent acts of freedom. This article begins with a story of black escape by taking up the surveillance-based reality television programme Mantracker to question how certain technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property anticipate the contemporary surveillance of the racial body. Keywords: The Book of NegroessurveillanceslaverypassportsAmerican RevolutionBlack Canada Acknowledgements Special thanks to Katherine McKittrick, and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am grateful for the generous support of the John L. Warfield Centre for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin that enabled me to visit the National Archives in London, the National Archives in Washington, DC, as well as Fraunces Tavern in New York City. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Ottawa in February 2010 and the University of California at Santa Barbara in October 2010. I would like to thank those audiences for their questions and comments. This paper was work-shopped at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in October 2010. Thank you to all those in attendance for their fierce commentary and contributions: Cathy N. Davidson, Jennifer D. Brody, Sharon P. Holland, Mark Anthony Neal, Mark Olson, and Maurice O. Wallace. All shortcomings, however, are mine. Notes 1. Coined by Thomas Mathiesen (1997 Mathiesen, T. 1997. The viewer society: Michel Foucault's panopticon revisited. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2): 215–234. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), the synopticon, in counterpoint to the panopticon (where the few watch the many) allows for the many to watch the few, often by way of mass media in a viewer society, for example, reality television watching. 2. This quote is taken from the pair's application video in which contestant Al St. Louis states incredulously: 'two black men being chased by a white man on a horse?' While it could be said that St. Louis and Thompson are framed in this episode through a narrative of upliftment and self-making as redeemed, it could also be argued that a certain element of minstrelsy or 'hamming it up' for the camera are engaged by the two: losing the defective compass leaving Mantracker to find it, paying homage to another reality television programme that also makes use of surveillance footage of evasion and capture, Cops, by singing the lyrics to its theme song 'Bad Boys', or beat-boxing Negro spirituals. 3. A 'breeder' or foundation document is used to support one's identity claims in the application process for a more secure status document, such as a passport. In our contemporary moment, breeder documents, such as birth certificates and in some cases baptismal certificates, are said to be more easily forged and weak in terms of security (Salter 2003 Salter, M. B. 2003. Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 4. On 7 November 1775 John Murray, the fourth Lord of Dunmore and Governor of Virginia issued a proclamation that promised freedom for male slaves who voluntarily fought with British forces. After the defeat of his forces in Virginia, Murray arrived in New York City in the summer of 1776 to occupy the city, establishing its military headquarters there. With Dunmore's Proclamation, and later Howe's 1778 Proclamation and Clinton's Philipsburg Proclamation in 1779, this guarantee was extended to women and children, bringing about the 'largest black escape in the history of North American slavery' with fugitives estimated at 25,000–55,000 in the 'southern states alone' (Hodges 1996, p. xiv). Sir Henry Clinton served as Commander-in-Chief of all British Forces of North America from May 1778 until February 1782 when Sir Guy Carleton took up the post. 5. Now that The Book of Negroes is digitized and searchable on-line (http://www.blackloyalist.info/), it could be argued that this inventory bears some of the hallmarks of contemporary centralized traveller databases, complete with a 'no-sail' list. 'No-sail' list here is a play on post-September 11th 'no-fly' lists, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) maintained by the US Transportation Security Administration, and Secondary Security Screening Selection (SSSS) that subjects 'selectees' to additional scrutiny at US and Canadian airports. For a detailed accounting of the inventory that is the Book of Negroes see Hodges (1996 Hodges, G. R. 1996. The Black Loyalist Directory, New York, London: Garland Publishing, Inc. [Google Scholar]). Hodges' appendix includes tables, by colony and gender, of 'All Negroes Who Claimed to Be Born Free', 'All Negroes Who Claimed to Have Escaped', 'All Negroes Who Were Free By Proclamation', those who were indentured, enslaved and emancipated. 6. Here 'black city life' was intricately tied with 'Indian city life', as laws regulated the mobility of both Negro and Indian slaves. The descriptions in The Book of Negroes of those who left New York also gesture to the intimate relations within the black and Indigenous populations: 'born free, her mother an Indian'; 'better half Indian'. Many thanks to Sharon Holland for pointing out this connection. For detailed discussions of the events of 1712 and 1741 in New York City and their effects on the regulation of the city life of black subjects see Doolen (2005 Doolen, A. 2005. Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), Lepore (2005 Lepore, J. 2005. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]), Harris (2003), Burrows and Wallace (1999), Davis (1985 Davis, T. J. 1985. A Rumor of Revolt: The "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York, New York: The Free Press. [Google Scholar]). For seventeenth and early eighteenth century laws regulating free and enslaved blacks see Hodges (1999 Hodges, G. R. 1999. Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey 1613–1863, Chapel Hill, London: The University of North Carolina Press. [Google Scholar]). That fire (candle lantern) was employed to deter fire (burning the city down) is not without irony. 7. Provision ground ideology names the slave's relationship to the Earth as one concerning sustenance through the growing of produce for survival, rather than that harvested for the profit of the plantation. Where the 'official ideology', that of the plantation, as Wynter explains, 'would develop as an ideology of property, and the rights of property, the provision ground ideology would remain based on a man's relation to the Earth, which linked man to his community' (Wynter 1970, p. 37). The idea of 'Earth' here is not one of property or of land, but of the formation of community through spatial practices 'concerned with the common good' (p. 37). For Wynter, dance is one form of ceremonial observance by which the black subject 'rehumanized Nature, and helped to save his own humanity against the constant onslaught of the plantation system by the creation of a folklore and a folk-culture' (p. 36). Here we see the centrality of folk practices, including dance, to the emancipatory breaching necessary for a liberatory remaking of humanness (Wynter 2009 Wynter , S . 2009 'The ceremony found: Black knowledges/struggles, the color line, and the third emancipatory breaching of the Law of Cognitive Closure', keynote lecture delivered at the 8th International Conference of the Collegium for African-American Research , Bremen , Germany , March 28 . [Google Scholar]). 8. What was to become Fraunces Tavern was built by a member of the Delancey family in and around 1706. In 1762, Samuel Fraunces or 'Black Sam' took ownership of the building, opening a social club, tavern and inn and named it The Queen's Head. There is some disagreement surrounding Jamaican-born Fraunces' racial identity, which reveals the then and continued anxieties around race, and blackness in particular, in America.
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