Review: Kelly Ross, <i> Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in United States Literature </i>

Review: Kelly Ross, Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in United States Literature

Ross, Kelly. Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Cloth. 191 pp.

Ever since Michel Foucault’s seminal work on surveillance, Discipline and Punish, literary studies have adopted his theoretical and  historical understanding of the mechanisms by which societies exert control through acts of conspicuous and inconspicuous observation. In Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature, Kelly Ross seeks to redirect the conventional trajectory of this model. While reminding her readers that Foucault’s “surveiller” literally means “to oversee,” in the context of racialized surveillance within the antebellum slave system, she points out that observation might in fact be mutual. “Sousveillance”–a practice of resistant, fugitive watching from below–could also be in play: “[T]he workers were watching them [the plantation overseers], learning to detect any patterns of behavior that may eventually prove useful in day-to-day resistance as well as in larger acts of insurrection” (3). Ross seeks to explore the different ways in which power relations between watcher and watched, as well as the visibility or invisibility of the watcher, are able generate a more flexible, potentially resistant structure of observation than Foucault allows. This, she suggests, has important implications for the ways we conceive U.S. literary history and its engagement with enslavement and race.

In an astute analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of ratiocination, Ross observes that, in a figure like Dupin–in many ways the progenitor of the detective figure of popular culture–the act of detection depends upon a panoptic vision that is itself immune to external scrutiny. It performs what she terms an act of “nonreciprocal mind-reading,” in which the power differential in place between observer and observed is stacked heavily in favor of the former (72). Dupin, in his investigations into the murderous atrocities in the Rue Morgue, exhibits a singular cognitive capability, one which, in turn, fixates on the (inevitably inferior) mind of his opponent. In this case, Dupin’s opponent is a sailor who has captured an orangutan from its native land and held it captive until its escape. Analogies with the U.S. trade in enslaved people are, of course, obvious, and they have been a fruitful approach to take in understanding Poe’s tale. Ed White, for one, has argued that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” while being “the first American detective story,” is also “a response to American slave rebellions” (95, 88). Ross, though, pushes the implications of this reading further than previous accounts have managed, showing how Poe’s practitioner of surveillance becomes increasingly detached from the kinds of sociohistorical contexts in which questions of who watches, from which position, and to what ends have tangible consequences. “By individualizing the criminal,” she writes, “Poe makes the threat [of racial unrest] manageable, in contrast to the demographic realities of portions of the American South where enslaved people outnumbered whites” (72).

Central to this study is Ross’s exploration of slave narratives as the unrecognized precursors to the kind of detective fiction that Poe and (slightly later, and on the other side of the Atlantic) Arthur Conan Doyle would go on to inaugurate. She convincingly shows how narratives by Moses Roper and Charles Ball, both appearing in 1837, challenge the supervisory regime of slavery through acts of sousveillance undertaken as acts of espionage. Ross argues that slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s, published before the emergence of what Trish Loughran called “the abolitionist culture industry,” chose to position the enslaved as engaged with possibilities of active resistance. Of Ball’s Slavery in the United States, she suggests that, rather than assuming the position of eyewitness in a narrative space controlled by white rhetoric–for so long Frederick Douglass’s experience of Garrisonian abolitionism–Ball frames himself as a spy and “the conflict between the slave system and antislavery activists as a war, rather than a trial” (28). Although surveillance from above, following Foucault, instantiates structures of power associated with white supremacy, Ross’s study effectively complicates the apparent inevitability of this state of affairs by exploring how “antebellum authors were variously inverting, destabilizing and recombining the techniques of racialized surveillance and sousveillance in provocative ways” (12).

Ross’s third chapter offers two compelling examples of how assumptions of white surveillance–the fantasy of seeing without being seen–are deconstructed, narratives in which “the epistemological authority of white oversight” unravels (78). She argues that in both Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855), the reader is confronted with the staging of an epistemological crisis when white observers find themselves the target of an oppositional Black gaze. In the case of Melville’s text, at the moment when Delano is forced to recognize the reality and insurrectionist authority of the Black gaze, the third-person narrative focalized through Delano breaks off, as if now lacking the stabilizing epistemic authority of white invisibility. Replacing it is Benito Cereno’s legal deposition, posing as an authoritative text but, as Ross skilfully demonstrates, in fact rife with incompleteness and inadequacies. The destruction of the power of white surveillance brings with it a rupture in narrative form, undermining the attempt to reconstruct historical events. Likewise, Douglass’s novella switches from a third-person omniscient narrative, focalized through Listwell, an increasingly sympathetic white abolitionist, to that of Tom Grant, a racist white sailor. The transition from one to the other occurs at the point at which Listwell embraces sousveillance and fugitivity, a form of looking that lies outside the bounds of U.S. slave law and beyond the possibility of authoritative, authorized narration. “Because Grant maintains his racial superiority,” Ross points out, he “can provide testimony about the rebellion, relying on his white oversight to stabilize his reconstruction of the past” by framing it through the reassuring prism of American revolutionary rhetoric, thereby occluding its racial specificity (101).

The final chapter of Ross’s book switches the focus to questions of gender and the market, with readings of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative (written c.1853-60) through the organizing rubric of “speculation,” a term replete with multiple meanings: the conjecturing of multiple futures, the act of spying, and the practice of financial risk-taking. In her analysis of these two texts, Ross shows how their protagonists both “harness the power of surveillance to protect themselves and others” and exploit the speculative features of a marketplace in which their visibility is always commodified (103). Crafts, in particular, concludes her book with Hannah happily married in a manner that self-consciously “underscores its fictionality” (125), not as an implausible fantasy but rather to show how sousveillance “can open up a space to conceive the future” (126). If enslavement, as Johannes Voelz has characterised it in his book The Poetics of Insecurity, is “a life divested of futurity,” The Bondswoman’s Narrative’s conclusion is defiantly speculative, conjecturing an alternative future unimaginable within the constraints of mid-nineteenth-century Southern reality: Hannah’s tactics of observation culminate in an act of narrative resistance to the harsh inevitability of the enslaved person’s experience of time.

Ross ends her book with a short coda that brings its preoccupations right up to the present moment by reminding us of those examples of sousveillant recordings of police violence in our Black Lives Matter era and of the danger they cause for those witnesses once they circulate within the culture. The visible sousveillant–Darnella Frazier, for instance, who captured on video the murder of George Floyd–is put at risk by a society forced to confront the reality of a Black gaze and the visibility of a Black gazer. But, Ross concludes, “to make changes, whether individually or structurally, the information gathered by watching from below must be made public” (128). Attending to sousveillance, its risks and rewards, punctures the illusion of white scopic invulnerability; Ross shows how watching is, or can be, mutual, shared, disruptive–and potentially revolutionary.

Andrew Taylor

 

Works Cited

White, Ed. “The Ourang-Outang Situation.” College Literature 30.3 (Summer 2003): 88-106.