Race in Modern Society

three texts in this manner can help me to extract one possible blue-print of how "race" is mapped into modern conceptual space. One of the things that has struck many readers of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is that this novel seems to accept slavery as quite natural even as it mocks the racist idea of white superiority. This double theme, which may seem somewhat contradictory, is quite coherent if, as I will argue, slavery is mapped into the conceptual space of this novel as a function of class, with race as a detachable issue.

First, Behn's conser-vative agenda of promoting a traditional landed order required an ele-ment of class essentialism, and indeed the ideology of blood as a tangible marker of superiority gains a universal legitimacy as it is shown to distinguish African ranks as naturally as it does European ones. Oroonoko is introduced as one who "shook an Awe and Rever-ence, even in those that knew not of his Quality" (12), and when he later deliberately dresses as an ordinary slave to avoid being "gu'd at," the narrator tells to almost with a sigh: "Nevertheless, he shone through all.

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. . . The Royal Youth appear'd in spite of the Slave, and People cou'd not help treating him after a different manner" (36).12 Thus we see that the blood ideology so useful to the old landed order applies irrespective of race. When we look beyond the favorable pic-ture of the landed order's blood ideology to the conflict that emerges between landed and commercial orders, we see that slavery in Oroonoko is neatly divided into heroic and commercial forms.

Oroonoko's speech to his fellows at the time of the slave rebellion fur-ther makes it clear that only the commercial form is objectionable: "Are we, by the chance of War, become their Slaves? This wou'd not an-ger a Noble Heart ... no, but we are Bought and Sold like Apes" (52). The problem is not slavery per se; the problem is commercial slavery. Where. Oroonoko's character indicates that racism has no natural ground, his speech indicates that slavery is quite natural. Slavery is af-ter all practiced by the natives of Surinam, who explicitly live in an Edenic state of nature, as well as by the African Coramantiens. Whether one views the three cultures geographically, as a cross-section of global culture, or historically, as representing the passage through Edenic, heroic/landed, and commercial ages, slavery is naturalized by its universality. It becomes corrupted, however, by the all-corrupting commercial order. In other words, in the landed cultural order, slav-ery is intelligible as a natural link in the hierarchical class structure, which has little or nothing to do with race. Let me emphasize that I do not wish to argue that slavery really had nothing to do with race in the seventeenth century; I do argue that slavery was understood in such a way that Behn could reasonably present it on the screen of conceptual space as a class relation and not a race relation. This, in any event,