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While Hanley writes as a historian, Castellano writes as a literary
critic. Her monograph approaches Wedderburn as an author and "political
theorist who brought distinctly African-Caribbean knowledge to his
lower-class audiences in London" (13). She argues that reading
Wedderburn as a theorist with the seriousness he deserves can expand our
repertoire for reading and identifying counternarratives within Romantic
texts.
In the early nineteenth century, many British radicals endorsed
Thomas Spence's formula of natural rights: people are born into a state
of natural sovereignty, through which they have an automatic and equal
claim to common lands. Political self-possession is a given, but the
vitality of life can be eroded or taken away through separation from the
land. Accordingly, when Wedderburn wrote in Axe, "mind and keep
possession of the land you now possess as slaves; for without that,
freedom is not worth possessing" (82), some early scholars concluded
that he merely rearticulated "orthodox Spencean ideology" (Worrall 129),
with "little in the way of original political theory" (McCalman 25).
Indeed, like Spence, Wedderburn understood that without freedom there is
no world. And without connection to land there is no world to live
freely in. But whereas Spenceanism took for granted not only the right
to freedom but a de-facto possession of it, as a formerly enslaved man
born of enslaved maternal ancestors, Wedderburn understood that even as
a right among people, freedom still had to be actively possessed. Land
is important to Wedderburn not simply because it is a natural right, but
because, for him, it is where freedom must be communally produced.
Castellano cuts to the chase: "Wedderburn's ideas did not derive from
a Spencean 'directive.' Instead, Wedderburn traded in Spencean rhetoric
to instruct his white, lower-class readers in London about the radical
potential within African-Jamaican practices of insurrectionary land and
food reclamation" (25). Castellano terms these practices "Black
abolitionist geographies" (11), characteristic of the provision grounds
and Maroon territories where enslaved and free Black people "cultivated
intergenerational polycultures (against plantation monoculture) by
growing sweet potatoes, cassava, maize, taro, plantains, pigeon peas,
and other vegetables" (27). Black abolitionist geographies are central
to Castellano's framing of Wedderburn as a theorist of the commons. This
is because, as relations to land held in common by Africans who were
themselves legally reduced and reducible to property, Black abolitionist
geographies were antithetical to private ownership and incongruous with
the British liberal freedoms that white abolitionists imagined extending
to the Caribbean.
As Castellano frequently makes clear, however, Wedderburn was not
principally writing to abolitionists. He was, instead, publishing penny
pamphlets that typically passed around radical circles. It's with this
framing that Castellano argues "Wedderburn not only integrated Black
resistance to slavery with working-class radicalism but also championed
Black thought and practices as models for the English lower
classes" (30). Chapters 1 and 2 read Wedderburn's Axe and
Horrors as instilling Black ecological sensibilities into the
British radical vernacular. Chapters 2 and 3 place Wedderburn in
conversation with other Black British authors of the long eighteenth
century and thereby clarify what makes him unique: he was writing not
for the sake of legislative reform but to foster transracial and
trans-Atlantic solidarity between proletarian insurrectionists. And in
Chapters 4, 5, and 6, Castellano applies Wedderburn's Black abolitionist
geographies to reappraise a plethora of white-authored travel
narratives, natural histories, and pro- and antislavery political
writings of the Romantic period.
Castellano's discussion of kinship practices across The Horrors
of Slavery and Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince is
exemplary of her innovative reading strategies. In Chapter 1, the author
has already contrasted the carceral logic of capitalism to the
alternative agricultural practices of the provision grounds and Maroon
settlements. And in Chapter 2, she has established how Wedderburn's
uncensored pamphlets allowed him to castigate his father's participation
in the depravities of slavery, a topic considered too "unrespectable"
for most other abolitionist texts. By Chapter 3, then, Castellano can
respond to Jenny Sharpe's question: "How can we read the slave narrative
as a record of what the slave could not speak into being or was obliged
to forget?" (qtd. 64). Castellano proposes that "potential and partial
answers...can be found intertextually" (64). By reading Wedderburn's
celebration of his mother and grandmother alongside Prince's notoriously
"mediated[,] transcribed and edited" text (64), Castellano allows each
woman's freedom practices to illuminate the others'. Recurrent acts of
petit marronage, quarrels with enslavers inside their own home, flights
between plantations to reconnect with kin, negotiations for the
manumission of a son (Wedderburn) at the cost of a mother's (Rosanna's)
sale: together these "place-based liberation strategies" (64) map what
Castellano calls "abolitionist geographies of kinship" (64). While the
fragmentary nature of slavery's archives preclude, as Saidiya Hartman
teaches, the recovery of "precarious lives which are visible only in the
moment of their disappearance" (12), narrative records of Mary Prince,
Rosanna, and Talkee Amy can help in the retelling of each other's own
uncompleted story.
Intertextuality is also a central feature of Castellano's final three
chapters. Castellano moves backward and forward in time to situate
Wedderburn in a genealogy of Black ecological thinkers. Collectively,
they reveal a transhistorical anxiety about the "superabundance" of
Black abolitionist geographies in texts by white authors--Matthew Gregory
Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor (discussed in
Chapter 4), R. C. Dallas's History of the Maroons, J. G.
Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition, William
Blake's accompanying illustrations (Chapter 5), Joseph Sturge and Thomas
Harvey's The West Indies in 1837, and Thomas Carlyle's
"Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (Chapter 6). All these
authors question the future of Black freedom on account of the
incommensurability of Black agrarian practices with European
individualism, private property, and wage labor. Since "British
colonizers associated subsistence with pumpkins with Black independence
from wage labor," (106), the most consistent threat to colonial
capitalism was not overt rebellion so much as "the success of the Black
ecological project: the botanical and animal ecologies of the provision
grounds" (22).
In sum, Castellano's monograph has a lot to do with what J.T. Roane
calls "Black holes"-- visions "of social life, vitality, and cosmological
integrity [which] through the refusal to be seen, hiding in plain sight,
or doing things beyond the reach of surveillance enslaved Black people
opened critical and sometimes strategic gaps in the cartography of
mastery" (Roane 247-249). Castellano explores Wedderburn's writing as a
critical aperture on the insurgent Black ecologies that are reflected
throughout, without being captive to, the colonial texts in which they
are embedded. In making her intervention, Castellano also brings Black
women in the colonial archives and in Wedderburn's writing specifically
to the fore. Their "place-based liberation strategies" trouble the
masculinity of the white abolitionist narrative. By reading Wedderburn
from this vantage point, Castellano therefore brings Black feminist
methods and archives urgently to bear on Romantic texts more
broadly.
Castellano's choice to eschew spy reports makes for a curious
contrast with Hanley's reliance on them, as well as on sometimes
sensational newspaper reports, to tell Wedderburn's story. As
problematically mediated as spy reports are, they nevertheless remain
the primary archival record by which we can register Wedderburn in his
element as a debater. There is, however, an important distinction
between turning to surveillance records for the sake of historiography
and taking them as texts suited for literary analysis. Future work on
Wedderburn might grapple fruitfully with this distinction. The
ecological imagery logged in such documents ("vipers [sucking] the blood
of the poor innocent Blacks," "leaves of certain trees [healing]
wounds," "oysters [jumping] off the tree...in Jamaica") might especially
help expand Castellano's field-defining arguments about Wedderburn's
Black abolitionist geographies.
Alick McCallum is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University.
Works Cited
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