Monday, January 23, 2012
White Guys Can't Just Assume the Voices of Slaves to Persuade an Audience
I'm going to go ahead and acknowledge how ridiculous it is from a 21st century context that Cowper assumed the voice of an enslaved black man in the 18th century in "The Negro's Complaint." I think the message is beautiful: "But, though slave they have enroll'd me,/ Minds are never to be sold," but I guess it's really hard for to me to accept a privileged white man assuming a slave's voice as a rhetorical device to incite pity from other privileged white people. I think "Pity for Poor Africans" is vastly more effective, because it exploits the British peoples' excuses for the continuation of slavery in the West and bridges that inane psychology with the orchard metaphor. The narrator in "Pity" is white, and exposes the fallacies of thinking "just one won't hurt." This is a stronger stance, and stealing from the orchard was an incredibly deft comparison of which Cowper's audience could definitely relate/understand. As we all know, slavery ended but racism and racial superiority lasts until today. In Cowper's time, they were inseparable concepts; "Pity" puts these concepts on the British people's terms so they can best understand the moral shambles of slavery and an inherent "better race."
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I agree with you that no white author may presume to truly comprehend the life and outlook of a slave. No matter how morally opposed Cowper is to the institution of slavery, it is impossible to take his "negro perspecive" as an unwavering account. That being said, I don't think that we should discredit his message as readers, simply because he is not black. In writing from a first person perspective, Cowper is able to evoke sympathy from his reader, in turn setting an example for future authors of all races.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Cowper was probably very effective in generating reader sympathies at the time of writing. That said, there is a grim irony in the fact that many supporters of racial superiority cited a supposed sub-intelligence/sub-creativity among blacks in defense of their oppression; it would have appeared, if only through Cowper, that blacks needed a white man's intelligence and creativity to defend themselves.
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