Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-34
Author(s):  
Mary Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Poetic Representation ◽  
The City ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal ◽  
Hard Labour

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Race and the Origins of Plantation Slavery

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
The North ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Staple Crop ◽  
Academic Debate

“Twenty and odd” Africans arrived in Virginia aboard a Dutch vessel in 1619 shortly after permanent colonization of the English Americas began. There has been significant academic debate about whether the enslavement of peoples of African descent in England’s early 17th-century colonies was an inevitable or “unthinking decision” and about the nature and degree of anti-black racism during the 17th century. The legal and social status of African peoples was more flexible at first in the English colonies than it later became. Some Africans managed to escape permanent enslavement and a few Africans, such as Anthony Johnson, even owned servants of their own. There was no legal basis for enslavement in the British Americas for the first several decades of settlement and slave and servant codes emerged only gradually. Labor systems operated by custom rather than through any legal mechanisms of coercion. Most workers in the Americas experienced degrees of coercion. In the earliest years of plantation production, peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Americas often toiled alongside each other in the fields. Large numbers of Native Americans were captured and forced to work on plantations in the English Americas and many whites worked in agricultural fields as indentured and convict laborers. There were a wide variety of different kinds of coerced labor beyond enslavement in the 17th century and ideas about racial difference had yet to become as determinative as they would later be. As the staple crop plantation system matured and became entrenched on the North American mainland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and planters required a large and regular supply of slaves, African laborers became synonymous with large-scale plantation production. The permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom disappeared, dehumanizing racism became more entrenched and U.S.-based planters developed slave codes premised on racial distinctions and legal mechanisms of coercion that were modeled on Caribbean precedents.

Imposing Identity: Death Markers to ‘English’ People in Barbados, 1627–1838

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-80
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Island ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Some Recent Thinking on Slavery in Islamic Africa and the Middle East

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-162
Author(s):  
John Edward Philips
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Social Disabilities

Slavery and its effects will probably long remain among the most contentious of topics. Outlawed universally only recently, the institution is one of humanity’s oldest and most widespread forms of domination. It still exists, despite laws to the contrary, in some societies around the world. Social disabilities suffered by former slaves and their descendants are important legacies. And the lessons which the history of slavery can teach us have still not been fully elucidated or absorbed. It thus remains a topic of importance to teachers and researchers in every branch of humanities and social science.The literature on slavery has been dominated by the study of plantation slavery in the Western world, especially the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States. Studies of slavery in other areas and times have often been colored by biases and preconceptions based on American chattel slavery. Even when the intent of a scholar has been to contrast slavery in other societies with that in the Americas, the questions posed and the methods used have too often been shaped by the questions and methods of scholars working in the Americas. This has vitiated attempts at comparison.

Arrested Mobilities: Affective Encounters and Crime Scenes in the City

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211988982
Author(s):  
Alison Young
Keyword(s):  
Taxi Driver ◽  
Lethal Violence ◽  
Mobility Studies ◽  
Poetic Representation ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
Crime Scenes

Drawing on insights from emergent thinking within mobility studies to focus on the banalities of everyday urban commuting, walking and other forms of unremarkable travel, this article considers everyday encounters that take place as we pass through the spaces of the city. Consideration of such mundane encounters is located within a framework attending to the interplay of affect, aesthetics, mobilities and materiality, both within the city as it is figured in literary or poetic representation and as a physical and geographical space. Focusing on the recent killing of a taxi driver in Melbourne, and on readings of Teju Cole’s novel Open City and Claudia Rankine’s poetry in Citizen, the article’s aims are two-fold. The first is a consideration of encounters in which movement through the city is arrested, halted, or brought to a standstill, whether temporarily or permanently, through racism, robbery or lethal violence, with the result that cities become agglomerations of spaces in which violence or insult has taken place – a patchwork of invisible crime scenes. Its second consideration is to propose that such arrested mobilities, and the crime scenes they engender, momentarily expose aspects of urban existence that could be called hauntological, revealing the usually obscured ghosts of the city.

Hospitals: N.Y. Appellate Court Denies Move to Privatize Public Hospital

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Robert Chatham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Municipal Hospital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Benefit Corporation ◽  
The City

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257 (N.Y. Mar. 30, 1999), that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act (HHCA), establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc. (PHS), a private, for-profit entity.

ASHA Convention 2013

ASHA Leader ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 46-48
Keyword(s):  
Ice Cream ◽  
Annual Convention ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

This year's Annual Convention features some sweet new twists like ice cream and free wi-fi. But it also draws on a rich history as it returns to Chicago, the city where the association's seeds were planted way back in 1930. Read on through our special convention section for a full flavor of can't-miss events, helpful tips, and speakers who remind why you do what you do.

App it Up in the City of Stars

ASHA Leader ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Sweeney
Keyword(s):  
The City
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