The Paratext and the Plantation: Technologies of Containment in Maria Gowen Brooks’s Zophiel

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Research for this essay was completed with the support of a Deutsch Fellowship in Women’s History from the Library Company of Philadelphia. I am grateful to the LCP staff, Kirsten Silva Gruesz for her encouragement at an early stage of this project, and to RJ Boutelle, Nick Bromell, the participants in the C19 seminar on “Caribbean Circulation and Region,” and the editors of this special issue for their generous suggestions.

² To honor the humanity of enslaved people and avoid language that perpetuates the value system of enslavers, I use the terminology suggested by Foreman et al.

³ On enslaved people’s subversive uses of space and cultivating of pleasure in the plantation South, see Camp, esp. 60–92.

⁴ Other accounts of travel to Cuba include Hawthorne; Dana; Abbot.

⁵ The poem also makes several passing references to the enslavement of Israelites in Babylon, and a note to Canto Fourth, about a storm; Brooks witnessed while a guest at San Patricio in 1823 or 1824, refers to a Black woman “who still slept soundly by the door of my apartment” (1833, 180 n. 5). Notably, Brooks chooses to describe an event from before she became an enslaver and does not mention the woman’s enslaved status.

⁶ On the uses of the paratext to assert white power over Black texts, see Sekora.

⁷ On how nineteenth-century women poets accessed authorship, see Loeffelholz, esp. 1–9; see also V. Jackson on the rhetorical gestures through which sentimental women poets established authority.

⁸ For a discussion of this Hegelian narrative of world history as a teleological progression through stages of civilizational development, culminating in the fully developed Europe, see Lowe 139–149.

⁹ As historians of Cuban enslavement point out, the majority of captive laborers on the plantations were African-born and belonged to the Congo and Yoruba nations (Singleton 185). Because the enslaved population was predominantly male, it did not reproduce itself and required enslavers to rely on trade in captive Africans (Bergard 102–103). According to Bergard, about 780,000 Africans were brought from Africa to Cuba between 1790 and 1867, when the trade ended on the island (112).

¹⁰ On the nineteenth-century concept of the Chain of Being as a racial technology, see Z. Jackson 48–51.

¹¹ See Rusert on paratext in James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane.

¹² On metonymy as a decolonizing tool see Chander, Dembicki. In Zophiel, however, the shift from Brooks’s Cuban scene of writing to the audience’s scene of reading in Britain or the northern U.S. disentangles the metonymy from its context, occluding the traces of forced labor.

¹³ See Gruesz on Griswold’s reception of Brooks (“Poe Circle”). Griswold described Brooks as “the poet of passion; her writings are distinguished by a fearlessness of thought and expression; she gives the heart its true voice” (148).

¹⁴ “The slave population increased from around 52,000 in 1792 to nearly 200,000 in 1827 in the Cuban western districts” – which included Matanzas – “and slaves accounted for over 48% of the total population” (Bergard 125).

¹⁵ On the “great African slave revolt” of 1825, see Barcia Paz. On the influence of the Haitian Revolution on the political consciousness of the enslaved in Cuba, see Ferrer.

¹⁶ The past decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the history and theory of the plantation. In addition to the work quoted above, see, e.g., Rusert; Burnard; Bates et al.; Thomas; and the special issue of American Literature 93.3 (Bergner and Nunes).

¹⁷ On Brooks’s self-fashioning as a poetess of the West, signaled by her pen name Maria del Occidente, see Gruesz, “Cafetal.”

¹⁸ See note 9.

¹⁹ On the decline of coffee production in Cuba in the 1840s, see Gruesz, “Cafetal” 53. Brooks died in 1845 at the age of 51.

²⁰ Tina Campt engages the work of Frantz Fanon and Darieck Scott to examine the muscular tension of colonized Black bodies as embodied resistance that anticipates action (50–52).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.