Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ian Baucom is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity and a coeditor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, also published by Duke University Press.

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"A fantastically stimulating read, "Specters of the Atlantic" will be an extremely significant book. Its core strength is that it deals in such detail and in such an imaginative way with the primary texts associated with the case of the "Zong." Nobody has read those texts in such a careful and stimulating way before, and nobody has used the case to construct such an ambitious historical schema."--Peter Hulme, author of "Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998"

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Specters of the Atlantic

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................ix1. Liverpool, a Capital of the Long Twentieth Century........................................................................................32. "Subject $"; or, the "Type" of the Modern.................................................................................................353. "Madam Death! Madam Death!": Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of Capital Accumulation............................................804. "Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikon": Modernity and the Truth Event.......................................................1135. "Please decide": The Singular and the Speculative.........................................................................................1416. Frontispiece: Testimony, Rights, and the State of Exception...............................................................................1737. The View from the Window: Sympathy, Melancholy, and the Problem of "Humanity".............................................................1958. The Fact of History: On Cosmopolitan Interestedness.......................................................................................2139. The Imaginary Resentment of the Dead: A Theory of Melancholy Sentiment....................................................................24210. "To Tumble into It, and Gasp for Breath as We Go Down": The Idea of Suffering and the Case of LiberalCosmopolitanism.....................26511. This/Such, for Instance: The Witness against "History"...................................................................................29712. "The Sea is History": On Temporal Accumulation...........................................................................................309Notes........................................................................................................................................335Index........................................................................................................................................377

Chapter One

The minute book for the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty for the month of July 1783 contains an absence, an item of business unattended to, a petition unacknowledged, an appeal for justice unaddressed. The petition came in the form of a letter and a bundle of accompanying documents that were sent to the Lords Commissioners sometime in the first few days of that month. There is, to be sure, no contemporaneous record that the letter was ever opened or read in the surviving log of correspondence to and from the Commissioners assiduously kept by the Admiralty's clerks, nor in the equally fastidious minutes of the Commissioners' daily meetings. That the letter was indeed sent is, nevertheless, attested to by its author, who mentioned it to several of his other correspondents at the time it was dispatched. It is a harrowing document.

This book is a history of that unacknowledged letter, the events it recounts, the appeal it makes, the business the Lords Commissioners left unfinished in not responding to it, the silence it writes into the histories of empire and the modern, and the efforts that have been made to broach that silence. A history of a gap in the archive, this book also assembles a counterarchive, an archive that, over the past two hundred years, has collected itself around this piece of writing and the event whose history it attempts to write. This is, as might be expected, a variegated archive: a convoluted assortment of letters, bits of journalism, court documents, financial records, snippets of biography, speeches in Parliament, obituary notices, novels, insurance contracts, collections of poetry, pieces of art, nineteenth- and twentieth-century essays in art history, and a wide range of treatises in social, cultural, and political theory-all of which have, in some way or another, been party to, born upon, or found themselves haunted by the event whose news that initial, unacknowledged letter sought to communicate. That this counterarchive constitutes more than an effective history of that event, that secreted within it are the trace elements and perhaps also some of the secrets of our own contemporary experience of history and the modern, that the materials assembled within it might be to a long twentieth century what Walter Benjamin discovered the artifacts gathered within the Parisian arcades to be to the nineteenth, is also, as the title of this chapter suggests, part of my argument. As is it my argument that to read this archive so-to read it as worth reading, worth uncovering, worthwhile, because the utterly singular history it assembles can be seen to find its general equivalent in a reassembled history of the modern-is to risk repeating in abstract form (and in the form of abstraction) the profound human damage it so convolutedly documents.

But those arguments come later, not only after the process of assemblage is complete (or, at least, after I have completed my own necessarily particular, necessarily partial, acts of assemblage), but after one or more of the pieces have begun to fall into place. Perhaps, then, these are not so much arguments that come after the archive as ones that can begin to articulate themselves only after the work of archiving has begun, arguments that can situate themselves, or discover themselves, only in the interstices of the elements assembled here, arguments that can enact themselves as aftereffects of the work of assemblage, arguments, thus, that will find themselves serially disassembled and reassembled as that archive unfolds itself.

* * *

To begin then: with silence. But also with chatter, with the endless business of an empire that in 1783 found itself passing from what historians identify as its first to its second stage, with the phenomenal busy-ness of the naval masters of a global military power that was just on the point of losing thirteen of its colonies on the American mainland even as it was exerting a broadened hegemony over the Caribbean. Indeed, the reader's first impulse on encountering the Lords Commissioners' silence on the matter of a civil dispute arising from the voyage of a Liverpool slave ship some two years earlier (a civil dispute that had already been taken up and, apparently, settled at trial earlier that summer) is to attribute that silence to the many, infinitely more pressing matters of state that must have occupied the Commissioners' attention during that decade of great defeats, victories, and uncertainties. The minutes, however, do not support that reading. The dominant sense they convey is not of epic history or the grand narrative but of the minutiae of imperial management, the trivial daily business of global rule, the submemorable chatter of sovereignty by committee. The Lords Commissioners do not emerge from these records as the architects of history, but as its petty clerks, accountants, and small claims adjusters. They did, certainly, find time to direct the movement of ships from one Caribbean, Mediterranean, or North Atlantic port to another, but they seem to have spent the better part of their days paying bills, awarding pensions, managing personnel,...