Conclusion to the Exhibit
By Bakary Diaby, Skidmore College
In this brief coda of sorts, I hope to take stock of the exhibit, treating it as a snapshot of present-day scholarly currents and an opportunity to speculate on Romanticism’s future.
These exhibit entries each call for a re-vision of a dominant historical assumption. Namely, they insist we move beyond the traditional center-margin discourse of Romanticism and the Caribbean. By switching these two terms, they invite not only new perspectives on Caribbean history, but also the ideological practices of how Romanticism obscures its violence towards and reliance upon the Caribbean world. In one sense, then, vision and obfuscation are one of the many underlying logics at play here. The ableism inherent in the logic mirrors its exclusionary nature. These pieces each explore ways the Caribbean has been hidden, ways it has become just another venue for the exercise of visionary Romanticism. But, to paraphrase C. L. R. James, the Romantics could see so much because they saw so little.
Vision as episteme is most overtly covered in Thom Van Camp’s pieces. The language of obscurancy, then, proves ironic, as Van Camp touches upon the history of the Enlightenment rhetoric of transparency. This notion obscures a history which in fact was modernity’s conditions of possibility. Van Camp shows how the Enlightenment benights and how the acquisition of knowledge structures the organization of life, fueling the “mathematics of the unliving,” Katherine McKittrick’s description of “historic blackness.”[1] In short, transparency can obscure.
Indeed, Shaub’s exhibit reveals the simultaneous abundance of “news”—the period was notable in the development of contemporaneity and, as Yohei Igarashi has argued, the march towards today’s information age—and the dearth of discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Shaub’s piece directs us to Romantic-era media and what a common reader would see when first encountering Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” in the newspaper where it was published. In effect, he disrupts the typical presentation of Romantic poetry, re-situating the sonnet in a socio-historical context often overlooked.
Romanticism’s historical context is sometimes taught as the Age of Revolutions. The discourse of liberty permeates Romantic thought. Its counterpart is the discourse of enslavement. Sinanan tackles these discursive elements, demonstrating how Romantic notions of liberty are constrained, enabled by human enslavement and global colonization. How, then, can Romanticism center the life of a figure like Yarico, a figure instrumentalized by white abolitionists for over a century by the start of the Romantic era? Can it?
With Milsom’s contribution, we attend to silences engendered by the loud repetitions of Coleridge’s presence on Nevis. The poet—who, as we learn, “never visited Nevis, let alone the Caribbean”—acts as a kind of cover, obscuring the long history of colonial violence and exploitation across the Caribbean. While we confront the diminishing presence of Romantic scholarship in higher education, it is important to remember the power its central figures may still hold elsewhere. Milsom’s exhibit tasks us not with advocating for Romanticism, but to be better stewards of its study going forward.
A publicly accessible exhibit like this also helps us be better stewards of history. These pieces each offer a kind of counter-history of Romanticism, accounting for its past and asking for accountability in the future. But more importantly, they proffer histories of the Caribbean that are concurrent with the rise of Romantic thought but not defined by it. I hope there are future plans to continue this kind of shift in focus. Not to abandon the study of Romanticism but to situate it as one of many historical formations that have helped build the modern world.
[1] Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 17.
About the Author
Bakary Diaby is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. His research interests include the Black Atlantic, Romanticism, and aesthetics. His current book project explores the tensions between historicity and Blackness in the late Romantic period and their effect on literary critical method.