curate
curate reminds me of museums and the very explicit ways that white western museums of empire (british museum, met, etc) steal and pillage art and artifacts from colonized peoples and "curate" them into exhibits as a show of colonial dominance, but that these processes of extraction extends beyond museums and into the day to day workings of cities and food, etc.
and undead, churning the silt in the subsoil
This feels very Christina Sharpe-esque
shoot!
The double meaning of "shoot" is functioning interestingly here. On the one hand, shoot as in shoot a photo, but on the other hand shoot as in shoot a gun. On the surface they cleary mean shooting a photo, but the evocations of death, pain, and violence that come with shooting a gun are reverberating and tainting the line here.
Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness.
Alarm bells are going off in my head here reminding my of Katherine McKittrick's article "Plantation Futures" where she writes a whole section on the construction of lands as "uninhabitable" and the ways that produces and reifies the naturalization of Black and Indigenous peoples as inferior, nascet, and outside the category of "human" through designating the spaces they occupy as empty, denigrated, dangerous land. McKittrick writes: "Of course there were overlapping geographic experiences and peoples that troubled these seemingly discreet spaces, but this overlap is accompanied by an overarching system wherein particular spaces of otherness—for purposes here, black geographies—were designated as incongruous with humanness"
And as for solitariness, the great forests of the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice fields, are the profoundest of solitudes to a human observer
This narrative of "unnavigated" reminds me of the fronteir/a lot of the ways that land is seen as "undiscovered" to justify conquest. This also relates to the invocation of "human" here, which as Wynter and Yusuf point out is a category constructed around whiteness--what "human observer" is Melville talking about?
Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea
The juxtaposition of industrial cinder and city lots with the mountains and the sea does interesting work in setting up the distinction between the "man made" and the "natural world" and in effect, human and the environment. Not quite sure what to make of that here but wanted to point it out as this is a theme we've been tracing across many works.
The narrative was taken down from Mary’s own lips by a lady who happened to be at the time residing in my family as a visitor. It was written out fully, with all the narrator’s repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology. No fact of importance has been omitted, and not a single circumstance or sentiment has been added. It is essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundances and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible.
Of course, there's no way to know truly how authentic this account is to Prince's actual account, but I think this preface--giving the text the presumption of objectivity/truth in reguards to prince's story--must be interregated more deeply given the deeply politisized nature of truth/objectivity we have established in this class.
The names of all the persons mentioned by the narrator have been printed in full, except those of Capt. I― and his wife, and that of Mr. D―, to whom conduct of peculiar atrocity is ascribed.
The politics of naming here are interesting. What work does it do to name the "good" white people while redacting the names of the ones who committed particular atrocity? perhaps, in a way similar to uncle tom's cabin, this allows white readers to distance themselves from the worst attrocities of white supremacy and situate themselves as "one of the good ones"
respectable.
respectable is always an interesting and highly politically charged word. Respectable to whom? and by what standards does one merit respect? These are usually defined along the lines of power and place the burden onto the marginalized to act in a way that begets "respect."
It does not appear that Massasoit or his sons were respected because they were human beings but because they feared him; and we are led to believe that, if it had been in the power of the Pilgrims they would have butchered them out and out,
speaks to colonial anxieties about the potential power of indigenous resistance
My image is of God; I am not a beast.
The equation of christianity/belief in god with humanity ie. being christian grants you the status of humanity and makes you not a beast is really interesting and i'm sure does incredible work in upholding white supremacist christian hegemony
tribes
This word choice is interesting. Not sure if "tribes" was a word frequently used to talk about vegetable species, but of course I can't help thinking of the association to indigenous tribes.
It is difficult to pronounce which division of the earth, between the polar circles, produces the greatest variety.
His urge to hierarchialize and "rank" various ecosystems here is interesting--is his ranking of these natural environments perhaps a proxy for any social hierarchies?
whatever may contribute to our existence is also of equal importance, whether it be found in the animal or vegetable kingdom; neither are the various articles, which tend to promote the happiness and convenience of mankind, to be disregarded.
Here he clearly establishes his worldview that posits humans as the superieor beings on earth, wherin everything else exists to facilitate human survival, convenience, and pleasure. Thus, Bartram does not just study the "natural" world for the sake of understanding it, but for the sake of leveraging it for human consumption (literally and metaphorically).
There is now scarcely any person who does not mix, more or less of it, in his daily food; excepting the poor, remote inhabitants of the interior, and northern parts of Europe; whose cold, watery diet, most requires it.
I'm thinking about how sugar functions as a class signifyer and the layered implications if this as it serves as almost a tangible physical representation of western colonial exploitation when in the hands of the Europeans.
unqualified
I'm curious by what standards Moseley condiders someone "qualified" or "unqualified," and why he considers himself the arbiter of this delineation. Of course, this goes back to last week's discussion abot what ways of knowing are upheld as "valid."
ould longer be subject to the controul of the physician
This line is interesting because it enlivens sugar almost as an entity with its own autonomy and will, such that it cannot be controlled by people.
SUGAR, when first introduced into every country, was used only medicinally.
To situate these discussions in a contemporary contexts, I'm really intereted in how narratives of health shift over time, and what the political and social underpinnings of these shift are. It's surprising to read about sugar's historical roots as a medicinal, "health promoting" substance in the context of today's culture which heavily demonizes sugar as "unhealthy." Perhaps this shift could be accounted for by tracing sugar as a class signifyer. When sugar was a commodity that reflected wealth and colonial dominance, it gets marked as "healthy," but now as fatness and sugary diets are racialized markers of lower class, it is unhealthy and morally bad. Just some musings...have no idea if this actually tracks historically.
The Indians and Negros have no manner of Religion by what I could observe of them. ‘Tis true they have several Ceremonies, as Dances, Playing, &c. but these for the most part are so far from being Acts of Adoration of a God, that they are for the most part mixt with a great deal of Bawdry and Lewdness.
I hear a lot of Columbus's observations reverberating in this sentence.
Trees could grow in such a barren Soil, so thick together, among the Rocks.
I was reading something for another class about how Western colonial logics frame the land their colonized land as "unliveable," barren, and treacherous so as to denigrate the indigenous people to sub-human category and legitimize racialized violence. I think this is showing up here.
accidental
I'm wondering about the implications of framing the discovery as accidental. Does it in some way detract from the narrative of Columbus as this brilliant hero? Does it absolve Columbus of blame for the harm he caused by removing explcit intentionality? Not sure, but I think this is notable.
were not so satisfactory as I desired. I was Young, and could not be so easy, if I had not the pleasure to see what I had heard so much of,
Sloane's remarks that the accounts of the West Indies's ecosystems "were not so satisfactory" speaks to the hegemony of the Western scientific way of knowing/understanding one's surrounding environment. If he information doesn't exist in a format that 1. accesible to him and 2. deemed "objective" or valid by scientific standards, then it must just not exist at all. This is how self-important logics of Western European "discovery" of the Americas become solidified.