Discuss desire for empire – what it looks like, how it emerges, and whether and how it should be reworked into an anti-imperialist stance.
Introduction
Contextualising empire to 19th century American imperialism, I argue that the formation of empire shaped our intimate desires in the creation of the racialised sexual hierarchy through the education of desire(Stoler 1995:4) and these desires explain the persistence of imperialist phenomena today, despite formal decolonisation. I view desire as the lens to explain the gap between the local face-to-face interactions and the far reaching and durable phenomena(Latour 2007:68). Specifically, I examine mass migrations of the transatlantic slave trade and Chinese coolie trade(Kumar 2020:17) through the subaltern, gendered phenomena of rape of enslaved Black women by White slaveowners and Chinese sex slaves in San Francisco. Utilising the overarching idea of the history of the present(Lowe 2015:136),or the use of history to trouble the givenness of the present formation, I argue that desire for empire, manifests in the pitfalls of multiculturalism in present day Britain. On initial analysis, viewing empire through the lens of an individual’s desire appears to offer anti-imperialist solutions through the desire-based framework(Tuck 2009) and the possibility of disciplining our intimate desires(Srinivasan 2021). However, while it may be sexy to believe that anti-imperialism rests upon what we do with our intimate desires of sex, freedom and love(OED 2024) I cast doubt on the potency of desire’s ability to be an anti-imperial force, by desire’s larger inability to oppose the highest form of imperialism: capitalism.
Background
Defining Anti-Imperialism
If empire is a geopolitical construct of diverse units controlled by a metropole(Doyle 1986:30-47) and imperialism is a way of administering populations, resources commanded by a metropole which enjoys concentrated military, political, economic, and cultural power(Ribeiro 2023), what then is anti-imperialism?
We are still living in an imperial world(Ribeiro 2023:376), and there is no primordial state to return to, no pre-racial state to access(Shotwell 2016:4). Hence, instead of anti-imperialism, which denotes an antagonism(OED 2024) to imperialism, fixating our imagination to ‘mere reversal as liberatory possibility’(Shotwell 2016:191) I instead employ a definition of anti-imperialism closer to post-imperialism, channeling energies into generative solutions to many another worlds(Shotwell 2016:191). Post-imperialism demands that we ‘deconstruct the imperial imaginations and materialities forged by different apparatuses in the metropoles as centers of planning and of accumulating unequal international power’ and ‘destabilise the existing hegemony of global knowledge production’(Ribeiro 2023: 382).
Whose Desire?
While desire can be possessed by any entity, nation-state, empire, community; in the anti-imperialist spirit, I choose to centre the desire of the colonised, and specifically the subaltern. The subaltern are a group that is represented through elite dominant representatives, rather than being accorded the ability to represent themselves(Spivak 2010(1988):43). Colonialist historiography keeps the male gender dominant(Spivak 2010(1988):41). ‘Imperialism … grants free choice as subject … (through) the fabrication of repression constructing a ‘counternarrative of woman’s consciousness, thus woman’s being, thus woman’s being good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus woman’s desire’(Spivak 2010(1988):52). Hence, desire is a key site of struggle for representation and in this essay, I turn to not just to the enslaved, but that of enslaved women.
In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman unearths legal cases of enslaved Black women who were raped by their White slaveowners. These legal cases were neglected for 145 years and previously not cited in any legal index. Just like the South Asian women who self-immolate after the passing of their husbands, whose names after their death were grotesquely mistranscribed in the police reports in the archives of the East India Company(Spivak 2010(1988):50), these enslaved women who were raped had no ‘voice’ until Hartman provided an elite, academic representation.
In this essay, I use the work of feminist, and subalternised scholars, to extend that same voice to Chinese sex slaves in San Francisco in the 1800s. In the legal cases, enslaved Black women were depicted as having mere ‘sexual intercourse’ with their slaveowners, rather than recognised as being raped ‘shroud(ing) this condition of violent domination with the suggestion of complicity’(Hartman 1997:85). While it is commonly accepted that these Chinese women were almost always imported as unfree labor, indentured or enslaved(Yung 1999:27), yet they are more commonly termed as prostitutes, which suggests an act of choice.
Additionally, the conditions of Black and Chinese women are delicately imbricated. The abolition of slavery was made possible with the replacement of the enslaved with ‘free labour’ of Chinese to placate British political discourse. Even though the Chinese were shipped on vessels much like those that had brought the enslaved, and encountered similarly violent, coercive and confined conditions(Lowe 2015:24), yet they were considered ‘free’ labour. With this absenting of Chinese immigrant labor within modern histories(Lowe 2015:174), I deliberately draw this connection, using academic literature on Black enslaved women as a way of knowing the ‘practice of everyday life’ and ‘figurations of freedom’(Hartman 1997:11) of these Chinese women. Hence, with this I take Lisa Lowe’s call in Intimacies of Four Continents to ‘read across the separate repositories organised by office, task, and function, and by period and area, precisely implicating one set of preoccupations in and with another’(Lowe 2015:5).
I centre these undiluted, named voices: Celia an enslaved woman who was hanged for killing her slaveowner who raped her, Harriet Jacobs who wrote of her seduction of a White man to obtain freedom, Suey Hin a Chinese sex slave who upon freedom owned a brothel and when she returned to China, converted to Christianity and freed the sex slaves she once owned.
The Education of Desire
In Education of Desire, Ann Laura Stoler uses her research from the Dutch East Indies to reread Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which she argues neglects race. In theorising the manufacture of desire, Stoler draws from both Foucault and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of desire. Desire is both an instinct that the law must respond to and repress as argued by Freud(Freud 1966), and that the law also can generate desire through its regulations(Foucault 1986). Sexuality is a 'deep transfer point' of power, Foucault argues ‘desire follows from and is generated out of the law and out of power laden discourses of sexuality where it is animated and addressed’(Foucault 1986:103 cited by Stoler 1995:3).
Celia was an enslaved Black woman who was raped by her slaveowner from the day she was purchased, till four years later when she killed her slaveowner. In State of Missouri v. Celia, a slave and George v. State, the court averred that the enslaved were not human, and not subjects of common law. Thus, the enslaved are legally unable to give consent and are presumed to be always willing(Hartman 1997:80). Moreover, throughout the legal case, desire was used to characterise the sexuality of Celia. Celia had seduced her slaveowner, the court argued, and hence Celia could not have been raped. The ‘idea of reciprocal and collusive relations engenders … construction of Black female sexuality in which rape was unimaginable’(Hartman 1997:81). The court’s argued that Celia had desired her slaveowner and seduced him, leading to the ‘conflation of force and feeling, confusion between consent and coercion, feeling and submission, intimacy and domination, and violence and reciprocity’(Hartman 1997:81). With Celia’s limited agency, Hartman asks ‘Do four years and two children later imply submission, resignation, complicity, desire of the extremity of constraints?’(Hartman 1997:85).
Counter-intuitively, seduction, the courts argued, was a tool for manipulation, and accorded power to the dominated, rather than by the dominator(Hartman 1997:80). While this may seem empowering to the enslaved, in reality the displacement of responsibility to Black individuals, criminalised Black individual behaviour, legitimating White people as the ruling principle of social relations of racial slavery(Hartman 1997:83). Hartman argues this absolute submission of Black enslaved people as mandated by law, was not simply that of the enslaved to the owner, but submission of enslaved to all Whites. Viewing this from the flipside, this meant the desire of White men for enslaved Black women, in whatever form, for whatever reason, would be blamed upon Black women.
The interpretation of Black women’s sexuality had implications on the sexuality of Black men and White women too. Black men were hypersexualised and rape of enslaved Black women was justified on the basis that Black men’s nature made ‘rape too often an occurrence’(Hartman 1997:96). Black men were viewed as a violent, sexual threats, and this was reflected in laws that made rape of White women by Black men a capital offense. While Black enslaved women were seen as seductive, on the contrary White women were seen as respectable, virtuous, pure. White women who were disgusted by sexual relations of their White slave owner husbands with enslaved women, blamed Black women for their husband’s infidelity. Proper and legitimate relations through marriage determined a White woman’s respectability, relations that Black women had no access to, with the inability of enslaved peoples to be married. This is not to say that White women could not be victims, in the rape of White women, charges were sometimes dismissed if White women were known to associate with Black people, and their sexuality denying them the protection of law their race should have offered.
With the end of slavery, Chinese coolie labour was brought in during the gold rush. Chinese workers, some allured by the promise of the gold trade, travelled to California(Yung 1999: 17). Of this, 250,000 Chinese were coerced into slave labour in the coolie trade from 1847 to 1874(Yung 1999:17). While the vast majority of Chinese labourers were men, Chinese women too were forcibly removed from their homes in Southern China, and sold into prostitution or domestic slavery. Most were kidnapped, lured or purchased from poor parents by procurers in China for as little as $50 and then resold in America for as much as $1000 in the 1870s(Yung 1999:27). Upon arrival, Chinese women were either turned over to their owners or stripped for inspection and sold to the highest bidder. Just like Chinese coolies who were bonded by contracts, Chinese women were bound by contracts to work without wages for a period of 4 to 7 years. They were forced to sign these contracts with their thumbprints because they could not read the terms and conditions(Yung 1999:41).
Chinese sex slaves existed in various settings, from parlour houses, or luxurious rooms on the upper floors of Chinatown establishments, in an ‘exotic’ atmosphere, serving wealthy Chinese or White males, to cribs, or small shacks that faced a dimly lit alley, serving poor labourers, teenage boys, drunkards. While Chinese sex slaves in parlour houses could potentially save enough money to buy back their freedom or send money home to support their families(Yung 1999:29), most Chinese women in cribs succumbed to venereal disease and were discarded on the street or locked in a room to die alone(Yung 1999:29).
The absence of women in the Chinese immigration pattern is used as justification for the rise of the sex trade in San Francisco. In 1850, there were 7 Chinese women, while there were 4018 Chinese men in San Francisco(Yung 1999:18). Subsequently, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese women could not enter California even if they had legitimate reasons, severely limiting the number of Chinese women even further(Yung 1999:23). Yung argues that the scarcity of women only served to strengthen the sex trade in San Francisco(Yung 1999:24) for men sought to seek sexual release. Chinese men had few other means to find female companionship that were deemed legitimate, due to miscegenation laws in California’s Civil Code amended in 1880 to prohibit marriage between a White person and ‘Negro, Mulatto, or Mongolian’(Yung 1999:29).
In 1870, more than 60% of the Chinese women in California, and almost two thirds of those in San Francisco, worked as prostitutes(Yung 1999:29). Orientalism refers to the creation of representation of people, created in the Western mind based on the Western experience of the Orient(Said 1978). The Oriental representation contains sexual undertones, ‘suggest(ing) not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies’(Said 1978:189). In this process, Chinese women were predominantly viewed through the lens of sex. Viciously untrue rumours that Chinese women had vaginas that ran ‘east-west’ instead of ‘north-south’ attracted many White patrons(Yung 1999:28). The racial sexual hierarchy was nowhere more obvious than that in that the highest paid Chinese sex workers could charge one ounce of gold, but any of her White peers could charge up to twenty ounces.
Chinese women who were orientalised were, much like Black enslaved women viewed as ‘seductive and sinister’ accused ‘tainting the blood of’ White Americans, and spreading sexually transmitted diseases.(Cheng 2023) Chinese men, too, were viewed as a sexual threat to White women, and when arrested, were depicted in police reports as perverts and pedophiles(Uchida 1998:164).
Desire as solution
Desire does not just offer an analytical tool to examine how the macro of imperialism plays out in our innermost lives, but by replacing a political project with a personal one, offers us the hope to enact change.
Desire-based framework, Eve Tuck offers, can ‘account for loss and despair’, but also the ‘hope, vision, and wisdom of lived lives and communities’(Tuck 2009:416). Hence, the desire-based frameworks offers individuals in positions of authority, the academic, the social welfare organisation, the government, opportunity to contextualise the actions of the subaltern, the colonised in their long histories. Yet, allow these entities to see the subaltern or the colonised not just through their suffering but us whole humans, offered the opportunity of complexity, contradiction and self-determination(Gordon 1997:5).
The recognition that our desires have undergone the process of education, offers individuals – including the subaltern or the colonised – the chance to discipline our desires. ‘Desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself’(Srinivasan 2021:96) Amia Srinivasan, feminist philosopher writes. ‘(This discipline) requires us to quiet the voices that have spoken to us since birth, the voices that tell us which bodies and ways of being in the world that are worthy and which are unworthy’ Srinivasan continues. Hence while the education of desire has led to the creation of a racialised sexual hierarchy, the disciplining of our desires offers us a chance to look at centuries of colonialism and choose otherwise.
‘Something Akin to Freedom’
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Ann Jacobs writes through a pseudonym Linda, of her personal journey from being born a slave, to her eventual freedom. In the chapter, A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life, Linda discusses her strategy for freedom through seduction of an unmarried white lawyer, Mr Sands, who ‘constantly sought opportunities to see me, and wrote to me frequently’. With the cottage that Dr Flint, her slaveowner, builds to house her as mistress in near completion ‘the crisis of my fate now came so near that I was desperate’, Linda ‘made the headlong plunge’ to undertake a sexual relationship with Mr Sands and is impregnated. Linda was confident Mr Sands, who eventually fathers two children with her, will honour his promise to buy Linda and their children out of slavery from Dr Flint. Instead, Mr Sands relinquishes his promise after he is elected as a congressman, and while he is aware of Linda’s deplorable position, hiding because of her relationship with him, he does not assist her freedom either.
‘The identification of the slave girl as ‘victim’ does not negate her role as agent’(Hartman 1997:107) Hartman argues. In Linda’s ‘deliberate calculation’, Linda uses strategy in utilising Mr Sands over Dr Flints to obtain ‘something akin to freedom’, noting ‘it is less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion’. She does so to have a sense of vengeance too, to obtain ‘something to triumph over my tyrant even in that small way’(Jacobs 1861: 84). In this, I view ‘something akin to freedom’ that Jacob describes, as republicanism definition of freedom as non-domination(Lovett 2022), rather than the liberal definition of freedom as non-interference. How can we interpret Linda’s seduction, while also aware that desire connotes guilt? In this we consider seduction by the dominated as an ‘opportunity for disruption and offers a glimpse of possibility in the context of peril’(Hartman 1997:102).
Suey Hin was a Chinese woman from Shandong who was first sold by her father, and was resold when she was 12 to work as a sex slave. She was known for her eventual rise as an owner of brothels, and had at one point in time owned fifty ‘girls’. When she converted to Christianity, and returned to China, she then freed all her remaining seven slaves. She was interviewed in Confessions of Chinese Slave Owner. According to a newspaper article, she worked as a prostitute for a decade until a ‘poor washerman who loved her’ who saved $3000 to buy her freedom so she could marry him. Her husband passed on soon after. She returned to China, smuggling her last seven slaves worth $38000, and freed all her slaves to their family, or promising to find them Christian husbands.
Suey Hin befriended the White Christian teachers from the Salvation Army, to build alliances in the potential event of political shutdown of the brothel she owned. While she initially did not understand the prayers, the more she did understand (the prayers) her mother and the old home in Shandong and how life was before she began to buy and sell young girls’(Grey 1899).
I raise these Suey Hin and Linda in tandem, to use each other’s experiences as a way of knowing each other’s experiences better. While Jacobs writes in first person, I can only hint at Suey Hin’s desires, as she is presented through an interpreter in a sensationalist newspaper article. Can we really draw boundaries between the desire for love and freedom? While Linda acknowledges ‘a more tender feeling crept into my heart’ for Mr Sands, she too is aware of the freedom that Mr Sands’ can offer her(Jacob 1861: 84). Linda is aware that she is not white, she cannot choose the object of one’s affection, the same way white woman can, because she can never enter a legitimate relationship with her lover. Linda implores the readers to not judge her, acknowledging that she has not been free to choose the objects of her affection, ‘prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world’(Jacob 1861: 43). Linda strategically enters a relationship with Mr Sands, rather than an unnamed young black man who worked as a carpenter and was born free and proposed to marry her and buy her out of slavery. ‘I loved him with all the ardor of a young girl’s first love’(Jacob 1861: 58), yet Linda was aware of her slim chance of freedom with the carpenter, because Dr Flint would not allow the marriage. By drawing a parallel to Jacob’s articulation of the limits of agency under slavery, and the blame of enslaved black women for their sexual violence, I ask did Suey Hin really desire, her husband, and Christianity or did she merely desire an alternative life were she was not sold by her father?
The Limits of Desire under Capitalism
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin argues, with the concentration of capital in the metropole, the export of labour towards the production of capital, and the formation of monopolies(Lenin 1968(1917)). The examination of desire only wrestles with imperialism as a socio-political construct, but ignores capitalism.
Both Linda and Suey Hin’s fundamental identities as slaves are a result of imperialism as capitalism. Adam Smith, the economist, stressed that the colonisation of America and access to the Chinese markets, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind under capitalism, with commerce, the world market and modern industry(Smith 1910: II: 121 (1776)). Harriet Jacob was born into slavery, and the economic value of her life as an enslaved Black women was through impregnation and re-production of further offspring, who too would be born into slavery(Hartman 1997:84). Harriet is one of the enslaved, a product of the transatlantic slave trade over four centuries, where 13 million Africans were kidnapped, forced onto ships to work on plantations. Suey Hin was sold by her father for a piece of gold, to a lady who forcibly brought her to San Francisco, where she was sold once more a decade later for the three pieces of gold into sexual enslavement. Her father was likely himself a victim of imperialist incursions in Southeast China, with increased taxes, loss of land, competition from imported manufactured goods forced open after the Opium War to trade. Suey Hin’s life followed a predictable arc where brothel owners maximised their investment on purchased young girls from China, first using them as domestic servants and then as sex slaves(Yung 1999:39). With same demand but reduced supply with the Chinese Exclusion Act, inadvertently the profitability of sex workers were raised(Yung 1999:33).
How do we think of desire, under limited freedom? What is desire for sex and what is not? Stoler acknowledges that limitations of the view of sexuality on history, ‘sexual desires were structured by desires and discourses that were never about sex alone’(Stoler 1995: 190). While Stoler references Frantz Fanon whose concept of desire for whiteness is about power, in the desire ‘to marry white culture is to … grasp white civilization and dignity and make them all mine’ with ‘sex as a vehicle to master a practical world’ or privileged schooling, well-paying jobs in the civil service(Fanon 1970: 63 as cited in Stoler 1995: 190).
Reading the personal first-hand accounts of Harriet Jacobs and Suey Hin, I sense that these enslaved women, were not motivated by this desire for whiteness not as power, but of freedom. Their relations with white people, for Jacobs, reluctantly with a white man, and for Suey Hin, with Christian missionaries to obtain legal coverage during a potential raid on her brothel, desired the freedom that whiteness offered, out of the restricted realms in their lives. Utilising the desire-based framework, her choice to free her ‘girls’ seems to be disciplining of her desire for freedom. If our desires have been educated into a sexualised racial hierarchy, I propose the mechanism of conflating desire for love and freedom. Who is not to say that this conflation, as Linda does in choosing Mr Sands over the carpenter, is in itself not just an education of desire, but a disciplining too. Looking at imperialism as capitalism, it is clear why Suey Hin chose to inflict the same subjugation that she faced, when brothel owners made an annual net profit of $2500 on each prostitute, rather than $500 in the limited occupations that were open to Chinese like her.
Seeing imperialism as capitalism explains why even after Suey Hin and Linda are no longer enslaved, they still have not achieved freedom as non-interference in liberalism. Linda never achieves social, economic, and political independence, as a ‘free’ woman now instead faces discriminatory Jim Crow laws. While we could discipline our carnal desires, or that governments distributing economic funds could view the marginalised as worthy of complex personhood, desire does not deal with the root of the issue of capital’s deep web in controlling the freedoms in our lives.
Multiculturalism today
Whom we desire, is whom we love, and desire a bond with. Bringing this back into the history of the present, the Education of Desire persists today, not as mere racial sexual hierarchy, but the broader narrative of nation building. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed argues that emotions as a mechanism to attach us to the very conditions of our subordination, building our relations with power that is enduring even in the face of collective forms of resistance(Ahmed 2015: 12). To explain how, Ahmed utilises Freud's theory of love(Freud 1959) which consists of love as identification, or to become closer to, and idealisation, to become more like as it allows us to perceives ourselves in a new way(Ahmed 2015:126). My desires also need to be approved by someone whom I already idealise, to show that these entities are valuable. As love forms through repetition, our love for an individual is transferred onto this collective entity, so does the collective shape our individual desires.
But who is desired to begin with? Ahmed argues entities who are more similar to the ideal, or whom we already identify with(Ahmed 2015:123) are more likely to be considered desirable. Whom is desirable, are entities whom I already identify with, because resemblance is a sign that I can reproduce these ideals, and whose ideality can return to me eventually. Hence, idealisation of multiculturalism as a social bond fails precisely in the refusal to mix more intimately between ethnic minorities and white working class communities(Ahmed 2015:199).
Taking the collective of the nation, the nation is a site of both production of individual desire and an agent of reproduction of national desire. Making the nation is tied to making love in the choice of an ideal other, who can allow the reproduction of the nation as ideal in the form of the future generation. What happens when love is extended to others who are recognised as different?(Ahmed 2015:133) In the United Kingdom, multiculturalism as national identity emerged against backdrop debates on asylum, migration, and race riots. Multiculturalism, at the broadest sense, denotes a tolerance of minority groups, and their behaviour, which possess an implicit or explicit challenge to the norms of a majority(Ashcroft and Bevir 2018) and that Ahmed defines as Multiculturalism is an imperative to love difference(Ahmed 2015: 133). In Britain, multiculturalism is primarily understood through race including widening Britishness to include non-whites. Following WWI, the British government passed the British Nationality Act 1948 which granted a majority of individuals in the Empire and Commonwealth the right to immigrate to the UK, triggering non-White immigration(Ashcroft and Bevin 2018). Imagining the national ideal with multiculturalism, allowed the British to view themselves as ‘good or tolerant’(Salecl 1998:4). Yet, the migrant population does not resemble Britishness as White, and hence is not similar to the ideal. The migrant population cannot reproduce my ideals towards White British, for migrants pose the risk in their failure to become British. Hence this love for multiculturalism is conditional, and ‘the conditions of love differentiate between those who can inhabit the nation, from those who cause disturbance’(Ahmed 2015:56).
When Princess Diana, one of the most popular figures in Britain, passed away in the tragic traffic accident, there was not just grief, but an outpouring of disapproval for her, because of her relationship with a non-white Egyptian partner. Much like the White women whose legal protection their ethnicity should have offered them from sexual violence, a ‘woman of such racial beauty and purity’ was condemned for her relationship with a non-White man(Ahmed 2015:124) that Ahmed argues, was viewed as her willingness to contaminate the blood of the British, as White(Ahmed 2015:137).
Conclusion
What allowed Princess Diana’s desire to supersede the racial sexual hierarchy that she advantaged from? While this might be controversial, I place Princess Diana, next to Celia, Linda and Suey Hin in an attempt to build a Vertical solidarity, or the relationship of the poor and weak with the rich and powerful (Senghor 1949). I aspire for an essay that is not just about anti-imperialism, but is also anti-imperialist in its approach. Rather than relying on grand theories, I instead intentionally build horizontal solidarity,(Senghor 1949 as cited by Burbank and Cooper 2023:25) or a relationship of equals among the formerly colonised, using the experiences of enslaved black women to inform that of Chinese sex slaves.
Even so, I recognise how impossible it is to write an essay about subaltern lives, without references to imperialism, the limits of history and archival material, even the feminist theorists, while Stoler criticises Foucault, Ahmed uses Freud. It is impossible to ‘fully reconstitute the experience of the enslaved’(Hartman 1997:11), without relying on archival material on the enslaved, by the enslavers.
Desire of sex and love, power and freedom are deeply entangled. Desire as an anti-imperialist approach fails in that it ignores imperialism as a capitalism. Desire is at best, a partial anti-imperialist stance; offering us a chance to see ourselves clearly, and as a starting point to discipline our desires, and disentangle ourselves from further reproducing imperialism; a chance to see the Other clearly, not as different from me, but as worthy of desires as complex and contradictory.
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