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In Oroonoko, the language of spectacle and visuality is Aphra Behn's principal strategy for presenting exoticism to the reader's gaze. In 1688, when the novella was first published, its twin locations-the West African slave trading station Coramantien and the American colony Surinam-were still relatively unknown to Behn's readers. In her dedication to Lord Maitland, Behn notes that "these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange."1 The narrative's strikingly specular character reflects Behn's attempt to display these unfamiliar places to an English audience. Moreover, spectacle was an important vehicle for mediating representations of alien cultures in the public pageants and major theatrical forms of Restoration England, especially the heroic drama. The novella's rendering of the New World-its ecstatic enumeration of exotic plants, strange animals, and unfamiliar objects-is partly shaped by the commercial spectacles of the public pageants; its idealized presentation of Oroonoko's battlefield exploits, by the stage spectacles of the heroic drama. Indeed, the novella portrays the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity.
What was strange and unprecedented in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, was not only the Surinam landscape, but also the socioeconomic institution that had come into existence there: plantation slavery.2 The rise of sugar colonies in the Caribbean, supported chiefly by the importation of slave labor from West Africa, denoted a shiftin England's colonizing activities: spatially, from the Old World to the New (or from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic); and ideologically, from expansionist strategies based on war and conquest to those advanced by commerce and trade.3 The resulting English commercial empire, created by the movement of people and commodities in the Atlantic basin-between Africa, Europe, and America-necessitated new discourses of imperial expansion and new ideologies of racial difference. The novella's effort to register this historic transformation is most powerfully evident, I argue, in its treatment of Oroonoko's black body. Historically, especially in Renaissance drama, blackness was deemed an undesirable attribute, but the black body itself was not always presented as a commodity. In Oroonoko, however, Behn first elevates the black body to an admirable...