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Introduction: Tragic Half-Breeds/Cosmopolitan Saviors
John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch military officer and author, concludes his 1796 narrative about his treacherous expedition to quell slave uprisings in Dutch Suriname by melodramatically pining after his quadroon slave Joanna. Shortly after his return to the Netherlands, he receives word that "this virtuous young creature had died by poison, administered by the hand of jealousy and envy, on account of her prosperity and the marks of distinction which her superior merit so justly attracts from the respectable part of mankind" (316). After "her lovely boy [also his son] was sent over the ocean to [his] longing arms" Stedman conveniently replaces her with a white Dutch lady "of a very respectable family in Holland" who "nearest approached [Joanna] in every virtue" (317). The conclusion to Stedman's Surinam epitomizes the binary stereotype of the tragic mulatto and cosmopolitan savior that has been disseminated throughout the western literary imaginary for centuries. Exemplified in Stedman's narrative, the abject, sacrificial, and (sometimes) "virtuous young creature" of mixed racial descent often saves the white male protagonist from being denied reintegration back into his native western society. Although Stedman's narrative ends triumphantly with his empowering subjectification as a socially reintegrated, white Dutchman, his abjection of Joanna paradoxically bears the trace of his objectified subjectivity: That is, Stedman is empowered by what theorist Michel Foucault refers to as a (racializing) "micro-physics of power"-discourse "whose field of validity is situated in a sense between [visible, sanctioned institutions] and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces" (26). And yet, as Foucault points out, the subject/object or the body can only be "invested with relations of power and domination.. .if it is caught up in a system of subjection" (26) by the discursive micro-physics of power. Since racial discourse functions through the abjection of a racial other, Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection illuminates the way in which the racializing micro-physics of power both subjectifies and subjects bodies. Kristeva clarifies that the empowered subject is dominated precisely by its discursive dependence upon the abject-that which is ejected and considered to be the subject's "waste"-for its seeming homogeneity. In other words, Stedman depends upon Joanna's death and ejection from his life for his reintegration into European society. In this way,...