Introduction to the Exhibit
By Kacie L. Wills, Allan Hancock College
A New Map of the West Indies for the History of the British Colonies By Bryan Edwards, Esq. Published May 28, 1793 By I. Stockdale, Picadilly.David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.
This exhibit was developed in collaboration with Kerry Sinanan and the other contributing authors. Some questions that drove the development of this online exhibit are:
How has Romanticism silenced the past, specifically in regard to the Caribbean?
What occlusions must be addressed and how must the discipline, scholarship and culture of Romanticism be rethought?
In responding to these questions, the authors will put Romantic authors and Romantic ideals in proximity with their research on the Caribbean. The goal is not to create a sense of harmony, which too often happens in Romantic scholarship, but, instead, to reveal how the Caribbean and Romanticism move in opposition to one another, and to reflect on the sorts of questions that this opposition prompts.
Through these short pieces and their accompanying images, we hope to show how Romanticism (and too often Romantic scholarship) is, in many ways, oblivious to its own whiteness. In what follow, the authors consider and illustrate how scholars of this period might be, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney urge in The Undercommons, “within but not of” the university.
Following this introduction, there will be four pieces of content for the exhibit and a conclusion. Pieces will be posted weekly.
Thom Van Camp’s piece begins the series. In a short essay excerpted from a larger examination of the poet Charlotte Smith and the parallels between rhetorical and colonial organization in 19th century British poetry, Van Camp interrogates Romantic colonial knowledge production by analyzing the figure of the moving sun in a poem by Smith and in the work of 20th century Jamaican journalist Roger Mais. Van Camp’s essay is accompanied by images of the sun that highlight these connections to empire.
Following Van Camp’s contribution, Kiel Shaub analyzes a page from the London Morning Post with a poem written pseudonymously by William Wordsworth about the Haitian revolution, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture.” In a short essay that complements his forthcoming work in the Keats-Shelley Journal, Shaub closely reads the page of the newspaper on which Wordsworth’s poem appears through the lens of Julius Scott’s 1986 dissertation, The Common Wind (published in 2018), in order to interrogate Romantic authorship and explore the potential for reading news from a Haitian center.
Kerry Sinanan’s piece asks what it would mean to center the life of Yarico, a Taino woman who lived in the first half of the 17th century, and the South American and Caribbean places she inhabited, rather than the white Romantic retellings of her story. Sinanan asks us to situate our focus away from the extractive European modes of presenting Yarico’s story and, instead, turn to Yarico herself in order to see how she exposes the myths of English mastery through her “resistant Indigenous humanism.”
In a short essay that develops her longer piece in the journal, Alexandra Milsom considers the Nevis hot springs in the Romantic imagination and the enduring mythos that surrounds the landscape today. This “myth of history,” as Sylvia Wynter calls it, obfuscates the history of enslavement and poverty as well as local attempts to re-claim this site.
Finally, in a conclusion to the series, Bakary Diaby responds to the various pieces, speculating on Romanticism’s future and calling for a revision of the historical assumptions that place Romanticism at the center and the Caribbean at the margins.
In the conversations surrounding this exhibit, the authors and editors discussed how scholarship seems to conflate colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean with feelings of exile and acts of colonization in Europe, what is really becoming a settler colonial appropriation of Caribbean-specific texts and experiences. This exhibit seeks to shed light on this problem and model better, anti-racist, and decolonial ways of talking about the Caribbean in relation to Romanticism.
About the Curator
Dr. Kacie L. Wills is Assistant Professor of English at Allan Hancock College and is the 2022-2023 Keats-Shelley Journal+ Fellow. She is the recipient of research grants from both the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Huntington Library and is co-editor of the book, Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2020). You can find her recent publications in English Studies, Romanticism on the Net, and The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts.
Acknowledgements
The Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Keats-Shelley Journal are grateful to these scholars for generously contributing their work and their voices to this project. I am especially grateful to Dr. Kerry Sinanan whose scholarship and vision really shaped the aims and scope of this exhibit.