Daniel O'Quinn

Mercantile Deformities: George Colman's Inkle and Yarico and the Racialization of Class Relations

Of all the late eighteenth-century comedies set in colonial spaces none is as important as George Colmans highly successful comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787) for understanding the relationship between shifts in British imperial policy and the racialization of class on the London stage.1 Of crucial importance is the apparent contradiction between the plays supposed abolitionist gestures and its explicitly racist representations of Africans and Native Americans.2 These ostensible political contra dictions and confusions regarding racial identity are part of a larger re-calibration of colonial relations that is thoroughly enmeshed in the stabilization of the white middle class body in the m?tropole. This radical re-orientation of the narratives historical function can be excavated from the operas reception history. Inkle and Yarico opened on August 4,1787 at the Haymarket and is thus one of the latest manifestations of a tale that was repeated so often during the eighteenth-century that it has been described as an archive for a history of colonial thought in the period.3 The early reviews and accounts of the first runs tended to focus on the performance of affect in the character of Yarico and how the feeling elicited by her character was mobilized in a condemna tion of Inkles mercantile greed. However, these understandings of the play as a critique of mercantilism were superceded by assertions that the opera was an example of abolitionism avant la lettre. When Inchbald anthologized the opera in the early nineteenth-century, she applauded Colmans prescient concern for humanity in chains:

Who Owns What: Slavery, Property, and Eschatological Compensation in Thomas De Quincey's Opium Writings

This essay explores what it means to be a thing at a particularly volatile moment when the consolidation of the European national subject and the racialization of colonized peoples were woven into the same historical process. Since the publication of John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, De Quincey has become the ne plus ultra of the “psychopathology” of British imperialism.1 De Quincey’s writings have become exemplary for discussions of imperialism and colonialism in the period spanning the breakdown of Britain’s mercantile empire in the 1770s to the reconstruction of a territorially based empire by the midnineteenth century.2 What has gone unremarked is the degree to which many of De Quincey’s foremost discursive strategies are shared by equally sophisticated Anglo-African rhetoricians such as Olaudah Equiano. Contrary to critical orthodoxy, De Quincey and Equiano share a certain predicament and develop remarkably similar strategies to address what amounts to a problem at the core of modernity itself. Simply put, that problem is how one recovers from the experience of thingness or nonhumanity. De Quincey and Equiano become things in radically different ways. The former experiences the nonhuman through what he calls the agency of opium, and the latter, of course, is made the object of commodity exchange. To suggest that the experiences of addiction and commodification are comparable in any simple way would be capricious. But what I hope will be clear by the end of this essay is that the arduous process of textualizing these two experiences of nonhumanity are not only related to but also deeply revelatory about the limits of the political at a moment when raciological thinking becomes incorporated into the complex management of the imperial state. Since that management relies so fundamentally on the difficult task of defining the human in such a way as to ensure the dehumanization of the culturally different and the

HANNAH COWLEY'S A DAY IN TURKEY AND THE POLITICAL EFFICACY OF CHARLES JAMES FOX

Mr. Fox rose to reply; but his mind was so much agitated, and his heart so much affected by what had fallen from Mr. Burke, that it was some minutes before he could proceed. Tears trickled down his cheeks, and he strove in vain to give utterance to feelings that dignified and exalted his nature. The sensibility of every member in the House appeared uncommonly excited upon the occasion. (Parliamentary History 388)

Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

Navigating Crisis in Sheridan's The Rivals

This essay begins with the observation that crisis is an important concept for Lauren Berlant not only because she deploys it to displace trauma theory’s monopoly on the analysis of severe social transformation, but also because her primary historical archive responds to contemporary examples of social insecurity that resonate with the cascade of adjustments that beset Britain in 1770s. I argue that the emergence of laughing comedy in the 1770s, particularly in the work of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is one such instance where paradoxically audiences were called on to feel and assess the historical impasse besetting all aspects of the British polity during the American crisis.