Tag Archives: Slavery

Black-a-Moors in the European Imagination II: Beyond Dolce and Gabbana

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Detail of statue of St. Maurice, Magdeburg, Germany, Cathedral of St. Maurice and St. Catherine, choir, ca. 1240-50

The recent use of earrings fashioned in the images of exotic black women by Dolce and Gabbana during a fashion show has caused understandable controversy. Critics charge the imagery is too reminiscent to slave-era derived caricatures of blacks, like Mammy or Little Sambo. D&G has denied racism is at play, and instead point to a history of black-a-moor decorative art on the Italian peninsula dating back to the medieval era, where blacks were numbered among the Arab-Berber armies that invaded Sicily in the 10th century. The truth may lie somewhere between the two claims. While black-a-moor decorative art indeed predates slavery and black caricatures like Mammy, their history is rooted in the European imagination–and come with inherent contradictions. As shown in a previous post, in medieval European stories and legends, black-a-moors appear as threatening figures associated with the Muslim world. But, as I discuss here, they could also take the guise of benevolent allies. Over time, these varied depictions would meld with the coming era of African slavery, where skin color became increasingly tied to servitude and bondage.

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Columbus, Space Invaders and our Inner Fears

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In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottoman Turks, removing the last stronghold of Christendom in the East. The news sent shock waves throughout Europe. The Byzantines were no friends of the Papacy; in fact, the Eastern Christian city had been brutally sacked by reckless Norman Christian Crusaders nearly two and half centuries earlier, from which they never recovered. Still, the loss of Constantinople was a staggering blow.

For one, it placed the Sultan Mehmet II and his victorious armies right at Christendom’s doorsteps–and indeed, fears of the “dreaded Turk” would fill the minds of Europeans for generations, as the Ottomans rolled through the Balkans and reached the gates of Vienna. For the devout, here was yet another sign of the impending Apocalypse, that would pit the defenders of Christ against unbelievers. For European sailors and merchants, it meant the valuable flow of Eastern spices, silk and other goods–once controlled in great part through Constantinople–was now blocked by a hostile rival force. For investors in the profitable sugar plantations in the Mediterranean, it meant the drying up of much-needed supplies (from timber and Slavic slaves) to feed the sugar industry, and an increasingly dangerous waterway. A long period of Muslim-Christian détente would give way to religious rivalry, as two emerging fiscal-military states–the Ottomans and the Habsburgs–now battled over spheres of power for the next three centuries.

So what do Muslim conquests, the Apocalypse and trade have to do with Christopher Columbus and our primal fears of alien invaders? Perhaps everything. But if you like, you can skip past the history lesson to come and go right to Alien Columbus.

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Pirates, Hydrarchy and the Motley Crew: Beyond “Arrgggh!”

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In the late 17th thru mid 18th centuries, piracy was the method of last resort for the downtrodden and dispossessed: men desperate for work; deserters from throughout the war-wracked Atlantic; runaway slaves seeking refuge from bondage; criminals (from debtors to cutthroats) escaping the long arm of the law. Today, pirates are most remembered through popular culture–as dashing rouges, foppish cross-dressers, menacing brigands and motley crews of mad men and degenerates. But the pirates and piracy of history were much more complex, individuals who chose the margins of society as preferable to the authoritarian rule of empires, creating a separate space where they sought to govern themselves through methods that were radical not only for their day, but our own.

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Robert A. Heinlein- Letter from the Dean

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“Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro—as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved. Having traveled quite a bit in Africa, I know what she means. One thing is clear: Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions, “civilization” was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call “justice.”–Robert Heinlein

Well at least he didn’t use the n-word…

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“I have avenged America!” – Haiti and Revolution

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The transformation of slaves, trembling in the hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.–CLR James, Black Jacobins.

On the night of August 21, 1791, the slaves of the lucrative French colony of Saint Domingue rose in rebellion in the Northern part of the island. In a short while, the insurrection would spread, engulfing the colony and nearby empires, as a revolt of slaves transformed into an imperial war to define the very meanings of western notions of liberty, republicanism and freedom. When it had all ended, the beginning of the end of the instutition of slavery had begun and the second republic of the Western hemisphere was born–the free black nation of Haiti.

Haiti has played a prominent role in speculative fiction. In much of the mainstream, this has mostly been negative–with a focus on zombies, voodoo-doctors (a misrepresentation of Vodun) and other dreamt up horrors to make us gawk and gasp. The relentless media themes of Haiti as a pariah, as a defunct state as a “cursed” place where hope goes to die, has become so normalized that many who seek to imagine the fantastic about Haiti often end up indulging in the exoticized and the grotesque–unable to see beyond such limiting definitions.

Yet there has always been an oppositional portrayal. Since its inception, Haiti has stood as a symbol (even if at times contradictory) in the African diaspora. Images of Haiti’s leaders decorated the homes of African-Americans in the early 19th century, and inspired free blacks in Boston to invoke its name as both an act of threat and defense–against the violent white mobs that daily harrassed them. Historian Julius S. Scott’s work “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” depicts how news of the island’s revolutionaries electrified blacks, both slave and free, throughout the Atlantic. As late as the Harlem Renaissance, Haiti’s historical figures appeared in the art of Jacob Lawrence, while the anthropologist/writer Zora Neale Hurston spent time on the island studying and recording its culture, which would later impact her literary works.

This legacy has been picked up by varied speculative writers, whose depictions of Haiti and Haitian culture defy the normative. Haiti’s Vodun is respun as a powerful spiritual practice (not merely some cult) in the works of Nalo Hopkinson, its lwa even becoming part of the AI basis for a futuristic Pan-Caribbean society. In Nnedi Okorafor’s writings a Haitian scientist is responsible for detonating “Peace Bombs” that unleash magic and rework Earth’s entire ecology. When I set upon creating my own steampunk story (unpublished), Haiti seemed a natural start, as I used the genre’s penchant for alterting history to re-imagine a different aftermath for Haiti’s Revolution, and its impact on the 19th century Victorian Atlantic. Turns out I wasn’t the only one, as I found a fellow writer had also turned to Haiti to create his steampunk world. A short time later, I came across author N.K. Jemisin’s The Effluent Engine, a steampunk Haiti inspired story written in 2010. And of course, there is a long tradition from Haiti itself of storytellers, visual artists and more, that paint in bright vivid colors a rich history, society and culture. Haiti remains part of our collective imagination, our hopes and (for some) our fears. So it’s not surprising that it weaves readily into our creative impulses.

Yet it isn’t by some chance or whim that Haiti is the source of such inspiration and contention. Haiti’s importance, that which places it so central in our psyche, to conjure up so many different meanings when we utter its name, is tied directly to those events that began some 221 years ago, on the night of August 21 1791.

This is that story.

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