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ABSTRACT
According to Joseph Roach, ‘surrogation’ is a key mechanism for the reproduction of collective social memory within the ‘circum-Atlantic world’, a term he uses in Cities of the Dead (1996) to describe the oceanic system connecting the Americas, Africa and Europe that emerged in the sixteenth century and that was forged, in particular, through the trade in and enslavement of millions of African people. Surrogation consists of a process through which attempts are made to fill ‘cavities’ created by death or other forms of departure with replacements. While this idea has mainly been used to understand processes of cultural representation in the colonial circum-Atlantic world, it can also be applied to postcolonial contexts, such as the processes of nation-building in the formally decolonized Caribbean that rest on the articulation of history and memory. In Barbados, this process involved the creation in 1998 of a pantheon of ten National Heroes. First among these is Bussa, an enslaved man commemorated by politicians, academics and, to some extent, ordinary people for leading the largest revolt against slavery on the island in 1816. Bussa is a ‘surrogate’ in at least three ways: 1) his heroic reputation fills the space left by others who suffered the physical and epistemic violence of slavery, and about whom little is known; 2) he represents ‘Africa’ in a thoroughly creolized society searching for its pan-African roots; and 3) he makes good the (supposed) absence of a national tradition of radicalism on the island. Yet, surrogation is rarely successful in exactly replacing loss because substitutes invariably fail to meet—or even exceed—expectations. Symptomatic of this has been the controversy over Bussa's status as rebel leader and African, with angry exchanges taking place between and among local and foreign historians. Although issues of archival integrity and folk memory have been to the fore in these debates, Lambert neither considers ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ histories in antagonism, nor contrasts ‘Caribbean’ with ‘metropolitan’ historiographic traditions. Instead, he considers how the conflict and division surrounding the creation of this National Hero reveals the difficulties with surrogation and, hence, the problematic nature of the articulation of memory and history in the post-slavery/postcolonial circum-Atlantic world.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2005 annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies, the 2005 conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and at the University of Edinburgh and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2005 annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies, the 2005 conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and at the University of Edinburgh and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the organizers and audiences at these events for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Laurence Brown, Beth Cross, Felix Driver, Christer Petley, as well as the in-house and anonymous reviewers, for their advice and help during the writing of this paper.
Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2005 annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies, the 2005 conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and at the University of Edinburgh and Royal Holloway, University of London.
1J. R. Ward, ‘The British West Indies in the age of abolition, 1748–1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 421.
2 Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, 21 and 24 December 1805, 4, 7 and 14 January 1806.
3‘Some Nelson statues’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society Library, vol. 18, 1950–1.
4For a detailed discussion, see David Lambert, White Creole Culture: Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), esp. ch. 5.
5F. W. N. Bayley, Four Year's Residence in the West Indies, during the Years 1826, 7, 8, and 9 (London: William Kidd 1830), 30; Henry Nelson Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies, in 1825 (London: John Murray 1826), 44.
6Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), 320–2.
7Michael Craton, ‘Forms of resistance to slavery’, in Franklin W. Knight (ed.), General History of the Caribbean. Volume III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London: UNESCO/ Basingstoke: Macmillan 1997), 222–70; Gad Heuman and David V. Trotman (eds), Contesting Freedom: Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean (Oxford: Macmillan Education 2005).
8For a detailed discussion of the statue, see Laurence Brown, ‘Monuments to freedom, monuments to nation: the politics of emancipation and remembrance in the Eastern Caribbean’, Slavery and Abolition, vol. 23, no. 3, 2002, 93–116.
9‘Barbados national heroes: Bussa’, available on the Barbados Government Information Service website at www.barbados.gov.bb/bussa.htm (viewed 29 April 2007).
10Evelyn O'Callaghan, The Earliest Patriots (London: Karia Press 1986); Hilary McD. Beckles, Bussa: The 1816 Revolution in Barbados (Cave Hill, Barbados: Department of History, University of West Indies/ St Anne's Garrison: Barbados Museum and Historical Society 1998), 46. See also the chapters on the rebellion in Glenford D. Howe and Don D. Marshall (eds), The Empowering Impulse: The Nationalist Tradition of Barbados (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press 2001).
11The full list of National Heroes is: Sir Grantley Herbert Adams, Errol Walton Barrow, Bussa, Sarah Ann Gill, Charles Duncan O'Neal, Clement Osbourne Payne, Samuel Jackman Prescod, Sir Garfield St Auburn Sobers, Sir Hugh Worrell Springer and Sir Frank Leslie Walcott. See ‘Barbados national heroes’, available on the Barbados Government Information Service website at www.barbados.gov.bb/bdosnathero.htm (viewed 29 April 2007).
14Geoffrey Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000), 3.
12Richard L. W. Clarke, ‘Roots: a genealogy of the “Barbadian personality”’, in Howe and Marshall (eds), The Empowering Impulse, 303.
13Michael Craton, ‘Slave culture, resistance and emancipation in the British West Indies’, in Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle/ Oxford: James Currey 1997), 263–81.
15Diane Lumsden Brandis, ‘Bussa “Hero of all heroes”’, Daily Nation, 15 April 2000.
16Hilary McD. Beckles, History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990). Examples of Beckles's other scholarly publications include Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle against Slavery, 1627–1838 (Bridgetown: Antilles Publications 1984); Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1989); and Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle/ Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner/ Oxford: James Currey 1999). The description of Beckles comes from Woodville Marshall and Bridget Brereton, ‘Historiography of Barbados, the Windward Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana’, in B. W. Higman (ed.), General History of the Caribbean. Volume VI: Methodology and Historiography of the Caribbean (London: UNESCO Publishing/ Oxford: Macmillan Education 1999), 561.
17Beckles, Bussa. For work by Bajan historians other than Beckles on the 1816 rebellion, see Karl Watson, The Civilised Island, Barbados: A Social History, 1750–1816 (St George, Barbados: Caribbean Graphic Production 1979), ch. 7; Robert Morris, ‘The 1816 uprising—a hell-broth’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, vol. 46, 2000, 1–39.
18Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 3.
19Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 19.
20Stuart Hall, quoted in Alissandra Cummins, ‘Caribbean museums and national identity’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 58, 2004, 224–45 (227).
21B. W. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories (London: Macmillan Education 1999), 209. See also Howard Johnson, ‘Historiography of Jamaica’, in Higman (ed.), General History of the Caribbean, 478–530; Karina Williamson, ‘Re-inventing Jamaican history: Roger Mais and George William Gordon’, in Sandra Courtman (ed.), Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle 2004).
22Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983).
23Cummins, ‘Caribbean museums’, 236.
24Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 209–10.
25Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire’ (trans. from the French by Marc Roudebush), Representations, vol. 26, 1989, 7–25.
26For a review, see Steven Hoelscher and Derek H. Alderman, ‘Memory and place: geographies of a critical relationship’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 5, no. 3, 2004, 347–55.
27‘All invited to salute Heroes’, Daily Nation, 28 July 2005.
34Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation, 4.
28On the notion of ‘fabrication’, see Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell 2004), 17.
29For a US comparison, see John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1989).
30Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation (Kingston, Jamaica: Agency for Public Information 1977).
31Higman, Writing West Indian Histories.
32A similar conception of Jamaican history can be found in Sylvia Wynter's argument in favour of making Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley into National Heroes in 1969. This is quoted in Jackie Ranston, From We Were Boys: The Story of the Magnificent Cousins, the Rt Excellent Sir William Alexander Bustamante and the Rt. Excellent Norman Washington Manley (Kingston, Jamaica: The Bustamante Institute of Public and International Affairs 1989), 193. On the ‘models and metaphors’ used in Caribbean history-writing, see Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 171–201.
33Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation, 3.
35Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 18.
36Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press 1996).
37See Ian Baucom, ‘Spectres of the Atlantic’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 1, 2001, 61–82.
39Roach, Cities of the Dead. 5.
38Roach, Cities of the Dead.
40Roach, Cities of the Dead, 4. On the place of the Caribbean in the circum-Atlantic world, see Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘The “hub of empire”: the Caribbean and Britain in the seventeenth century’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 218–40; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking 1985); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: André Deutsch 1964).
41David Armitage, ‘Three concepts of Atlantic history’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2002), 11–27. For reviews of this field, see Donna Gabaccia, ‘A long Atlantic in a wider world’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 1, 2004, 1–27; Ian Baucom, ‘Introduction: Atlantic genealogies’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100, 2001, 1–13; David Lambert, Luciana Martins and Miles Ogborn, ‘Currents, visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 32, 2006, 479–93.
42Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. Roach describes the ‘process of trying out various candidates in different situations’, which surrogation involves, as a form of performance, and on this basis I think the idea is particularly apposite to conscious forms of commemoration. Indeed, in this paper I follow Bill Schwarz in circumventing ‘the approach to memory which has come heavily to be identified with the notion of trauma’. Schwarz is concerned that the field of memory studies in general may have been ‘too quick to move from the conscious to the unconscious domain’ and, hence, he questions whether ‘the analytical procedures which the study of memory offers can carry the full weight of coming to terms with the articulation of the past-in-the-present’; see Bill Schwarz, ‘“Not even past yet”’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 57, no. 1, 2004, 101–15 (103). For a discussion of problems with applying notions of trauma to collective, postcolonial contexts, see David Lloyd, ‘Colonial trauma/postcolonial recovery?’, Interventions, vol. 2, 2000, 212–28. On the Eurocentrism of some theories of memory, see Carrie Hamilton, ‘Memories of violence in interviews with Basque nationalist women’, in Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge 2003).
43Kay Dian Kriz, ‘Marketing mulatresses in the paintings and prints of Agostino Brunias’, in Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2003), 195–210. The quotation comes from Kay Dian Kriz, ‘Curiosities, commodities and transplanted bodies in Hans Sloane's Voyage to Jamaica’, in Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003), 89. See also Geoff Quilley, ‘Pastoral plantations: the slave trade and the representation of British colonial landscape in the late eighteenth century’, in Quilley and Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour.
44In a similar argument, John Roberts states: ‘A group may employ heroic creation to “cover cracks” in the basic structure of its culture’; see Roberts, From Trickster to Badman, 2.
47Baucom, ‘Spectres of the Atlantic’, 68.
45Turner's painting was renamed The Slave Ship; for a discussion of the image, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000).
46Fred D'Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London: Chatto and Windus 1997).
48Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997). On the historiography of Barbados, see Marshall and Brereton, ‘Historiography of Barbados, the Windward Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana’.
49Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Black people in the colonial historiography of Barbados’, in Woodville Marshall (ed.), Emancipation II: Aspects of the Post-Slavery Experience in Barbados: A Series of Lectures to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Emancipation (Bridgetown, Barbados: National Cultural Foundation/ Cave Hill, Barbados: Department of History, University of West Indies 1987), 131–43 (142, 143).
50James Millette, ‘Nationalism and imperialism in Caribbean history’, in Higman (ed.), General History of the Caribbean.
54Beckles, Bussa, 21.
51Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. from the Spanish by James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1992).
52Watson, The Civilised Island; Lambert, White Creole Culture.
53Watson, The Civilised Island, 70.
55Beckles, Bussa, 20.
56For example, in Table 3, showing the ‘Principal enslaved black organisers of the 1816 rebellion’, Bussa is identified as ‘African’ and appears at the top of a list of twenty-one other individuals who are identified as ‘creole’; see Beckles, Bussa, 28.
57For example, in Table 3, showing the ‘Principal enslaved black organisers of the 1816 rebellion’, Bussa is identified as ‘African’ and appears at the top of a list of twenty-one other individuals who are identified as ‘creole’; see Beckles, Bussa, 20.
58Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
59Rodney Worrell, Pan-Africanism in Barbados: An Analysis of the Activities of the Major 20th Century Pan-African Formations in Barbados ([Barbados]: Rodney Worrell/Gail Clarke 2002). For a discussion of the connections between the Emancipation Statue, the Barbadian government and the heroic reputation of Bussa, see Brown, ‘Monuments to freedom, monuments to nation’, 108–9.
60Quoted in Worrell, Pan-Africanism in Barbados, 124.
61Clarke, ‘Roots’.
62According to Rodney Worrell, the 1816 rebellion was a prime example of ‘proto-pan-Africanism’; see Worrell, Pan-Africanism in Barbados, iii.
63Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (London: Faber and Faber 1995), 289. See also Austin Clarke, Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (Havana: Casa de las Americas 1980), and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou 1974), 31.
64Curwen Best, Roots to Popular Culture—Barbadian Aesthetics: Kamau Brathwaite to Hardcore Styles (London: Macmillan 2001), 233.
65Howard Johnson and Karl Watson (eds), The White Minority in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle/Oxford: James Currey 1998), ix. See also Millette, ‘Nationalism and imperialism in Caribbean history’.
66Howe and Marshall (eds), The Empowering Impulse, ix.
67Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2.
68Jerome Handler, ‘The Barbados slave insurrection of 1816: can it be properly called “Bussa's Rebellion”?’, Sunday Advocate, 26 March 2000.
69Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘General Bussa’, Daily Nation, 5 April 2000.
70Quoted in Brandis, ‘Bussa “Hero of all heroes”’.
71Jerome Handler, ‘Evidence and dogma’, Sunday Advocate, 16 April 2000; Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Handler's property—part 1’, Sunday Nation, 23 April 2000. The dates of the various articles were as follows: Handler, Sunday Advocate, 26 March 2000; Beckles, Daily Nation, 5 April 2000; Beckles, Sunday Sun, 9 April 2000; Handler, Sunday Advocate, 16 April 2000; Beckles, Sunday Nation, 23 April 2000; Handler, Sunday Advocate, 30 April 2000; Beckles, Sunday Nation, 30 April 2000.
72Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2.
76Handler, ‘The Barbados slave insurrection of 1816’.
73Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 3.
74Baucom, ‘Spectres of the Atlantic’; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
75Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation, 6.
77For a detailed discussion of ‘Busso’ that points to his creole identity, see Morris, ‘The 1816 uprising—a hell-broth’, esp. 17–18.
78Beckles, Bussa, 20.
79This is a reference to a free man of colour (i.e. not a slave), Joseph Pitt Washington Franklyn (also spelled ‘Franklin’). Some of the confessions of captured rebels indicate that he was to be made governor of Barbados in the event of the rebellion's success. He is dismissed by Beckles as ‘only a figure head’; see Beckles, Bussa, 29.
80Leonard Shorey, ‘Truth needed about Bussa’, Barbados Advocate, 2 July 2000, emphasis in original.
81Jerome Handler, ‘More on the 1816 revolt’, Sunday Advocate, 30 April 2000.
82For another discussion of the idea of ‘too much’ memory in relation to Atlantic slavery, which draws on notions of trauma, see Christine Chivallon, ‘Bristol and the eruption of memory: making the slave-trading past visible’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 2, no. 3, 2001, 347–63.
83Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 8.
84Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation, 3–4.
85Cubitt, ‘Introduction’, 16. See also Williamson, ‘Re-inventing Jamaican history’.
86Handler, ‘The Barbados slave insurrection of 1816’.
87On colligation as a particular narrative mode in Caribbean historiography, see Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 212.
88Beckles, ‘General Bussa’. In response, Handler argued that Beckles ‘naively and imprecisely’ employed ‘such terms as folk tradition, folk memory, folk hero and the like’; see Handler, ‘Evidence and dogma’.
89Cummins, ‘Caribbean museums’, 240.
90Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People's Liberation, 6, 7.
91Don D. Marshall, ‘Gathering forces: Barbados and the validity of the national option’, in Howe and Marshall (eds), The Empowering Impulse, 269. In the same volume, Richard Clarke expresses great scepticism towards this nationalist moment and the essentialized forms of identity that it articulates: ‘At a time when the Eurocentric premises inherent in traditional conceptions of the “self” and “nationalism” are under increasing interrogation in academic institutions worldwide, it is perhaps ironic that these very concepts should have come to form an indelible part of the Barbadian collective (un)conscious and even Barbadian academe’; see Clarke, ‘Roots’, 306.
92Hoelscher and Alderman, ‘Memory and place’.
93Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso 1993), 221; Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Enduring substances, trying theories: the Caribbean region as oikoumene’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, NS vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, 289–311; David Scott, ‘Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz's Caribbean’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 58, no. 1, 2004, 191–210.