THE COLONIAL RELATION

NEW WORLD DRAMA AND THE COLONIAL RELATION

In the simplest terms, the "colonial relation" refers to the connection between the colony and the metropole in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. It concerns, then, the way in which far-flung territories become entwined with the central site of English political and economic power—namely, London. In more complex terms, however, the colonial relation names the centrality of colonialism to metropolitan modernity and denominates the representational strategies that simultaneously conveyed and masked this fact. Coloniality is not external and ephemeral with regard to the advent of metropolitan modernity (defined here specifically in relation to forms of popular political sovereignty and the economy of capitalism) but internal and constitutive as well as inimical to dearly held propositions concerning English liberty and the political authority of the British commons. More specifically, the colonial relation takes shape as a racialized segmentation of labor and a differential distribution of humanness across races from the seventeenth century forward: this racialization emerges in relation to the development of an Atlantic world economy shaped by European colonial appropriation of lands, peoples, and resources in Africa and the Americas. Importantly, the colonial relation is not a one-way vector of power (in which the metropole dominates the colony) but an assemblage of connections that shapes peoples and polities around the Atlantic littoral (including the metropole) in the form of colonial modernity.

The enduring and intractable contradiction of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world appears in the simultaneity of the growth of doctrines of political liberty and popular sovereignty, together with the advent of systems of enforced labor, enclosure, and violent dehumanization in the form of race slavery. The colonial relation, insofar as it informs both political freedom and race slavery, is at the core of this contradiction: perversely, an account of the colonial relation both is required to narrate the emergence of popular sovereignty and freedom in the Atlantic world, and must be erased in order to articulate this very story. Thus, we might think of the colonial relation as naming the interdependence of two seemingly separate scenes: one of the extraction of land and labor in the colonies and a second concerning the establishment of political liberty and parity among Europeans and, later, among white creoles in the Americas. And it is on the stage itself, and in the dynamics that inhere between and among the bodies and geographies that inhabit and constitute Atlantic world theatre, that the colonial relation appears most fully.

For a concrete illustration of the colonial relation as it appears in performance, we might turn to the theatrical figure of the enslaved African prince, Oroonoko, in Thomas Southerne's play of the same name, or related figures such as Belcour, the title character in Richard Cumberland's enduringly popular play The West Indian (1771), and Montezuma, the tortured Aztec king in John Dryden's The Indian Emperour (1665). Belcour is, literally, a colonial relation—a white creole born in the West Indies (specifically, the illegitimate son of an English businessman), who arrives in the metropole with a pocketful of money and dubious credentials as an Englishman. By the close of the play, Cumberland has successfully integrated (laundered, one might say) West Indian riches into a promising bourgeois, English marriage uniting the creole Belcour with the lovely English Louisa. The colonial relation, in this instance, underwrites the romance of bourgeois, English marriage in the eighteenth century. Similarly, the royal slave, Oroonoko, stars in a plot that results in his own torture and suicide together with the consummation of two bourgeois, English marriages, each enabled by an infusion of West Indian wealth accumulated from slave labor. The colonial relation—embodied on stage in figures such as Belcour, Oroonoko, and Montezuma—displays the colony in association with the metropole, making visible (often fleetingly) a set of Atlantic connections that are not peripheral to life in the metropole (as traditional accounts would have it), but that underwrite and sustain evolving forms of metropolitan economic, political, and cultural life.

As I argue in this chapter, however, theatrical stagings of the colonial relation are significant as much for the publics they convoke and articulate at sites around the Atlantic world as they are for their performance of events and characters on stage. Any particular staging of the colonial relation is also a staging of relations among the members of the audience gathered to respond to the play they are watching—gathered to respond as a "people" according to the new dispensations of popular sovereignty that emerge in the eighteenth-century Atlantic arena. As such, a theatrical commons develops in the Atlantic world—one that is both interracial and racializing in different ways. Performative practices in specific sites, I argue, both proliferate and secure political identities in res communis, opening a space for an aesthetic and political commoning that has porous and contested boundaries in an imperial geography. Civic commons thus emerge and develop at sites of theatrical performance, and these performative commons articulate emergent possibilities and foreclosures of popular sovereignty by means of embodiment and representation, and in the promiscuous interaction between the two.

The model of the colonial relation articulated here recasts two central theoretical narratives of modernity by bringing the abject colonial scene into focus as spatially connected to the European metropole—namely, the narratives of modernity associated, respectively, with Michel Foucault and Karl Marx. According to Foucault, a historical transition takes place as the terrorized and punishable body of the subject of monarchical sovereignty is replaced by the disciplined body of the liberal political subject: at some point during the eighteenth century, Foucault argues, we move from a social and political organization based on punishment to one based on discipline, from sovereign power to what Foucault calls, variously, "governmentality" or "biopower"—namely, a power that does not operate by external force, but that operates by way of constructing (and thus controlling) viable bodies and lives. In contrast to Foucault's temporal narrative, however, I propose a spatial one: the theatre of horror deployed by sovereign power is not supplanted by the disciplined body of governmentality; rather, it is displaced to the colony. Consider, for instance, the statements of four (white) judges in Antigua, in the mid-eighteenth century, as they contemplate their juridical response to a thwarted slave uprising there: "Wee Conceive the former ways of puting the Criminals to Death was...