Capítulo II. Marco Teórico
2.2 El Diseño como un proceso cognitivo de asimilación y acomodación
2.2.2 La inspiración como proceso y la creatividad en la generación
But here the thing is impossible: a slave cannot be really emancipated. You cannot raise him from the abyss of his degradation. You may call him free, you may enact a statute book of laws to make him free, but you cannot bleach him into the enjoyment of freedom.40
Christian Spectator, 1824 By the turn of the nineteenth century it was no longer possible to ignore the immanent problem of slavery in the United States of America, that is, freedom. Two versions of this problem in particular concerned the slave-holders who, in 1816, founded the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United
39 See also Gerry Simpson, ‘Humanity, Law, Force’, in Strengthening the Rule of Law through the UN
Security Council, ed Jeremy Matam Farrall and Hilary Charlesworth (Oxon: Routledge, 2016).
40 ‘Review of the Reports of the American Colonization Society, from the Christian Spectator’, in
American Colonization Society, Seventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States (Washington: printed by Davis and Force, 1824), 90.
States, and who, eight years later, would name their colonial experiment in west Africa ‘Liberia’.41
(1) With the abolition of the slave trade nationally, along with the abolition of the institution of slavery in an increasing number of states, humans who had once been styled a movable species of thing were gaining their legal status as persons. Slavery, which always contains (holds within, and withholds from manifesting) a condition of freedom, was visibly giving rise to its opposite. For slave-holders this was problematic because it was making visible a contradiction in the concept of slavery that threatened to destabilise its institution. The presence of free people of colour in the United States presented a possibility—the free African-American—which contradicted the norm—the enslaved African in America. Against the non-human characterisation of Africans in America that justified their enslavement in the language of the law, here were African- Americans. This was seen as a threat to the institution of slavery still foundational in many parts of the country, because the appearance of this possibility threatened to awaken their slaves from docility, or worse, excite them to rebellion, with bloody consequences.42 Securing the institution of slavery depended on keeping
their slaves docile, which depended on maintaining a reality in which emancipation was impossible to imagine.
(2) At the same time, as persons, free people of colour in the United States still suffered a form of civil death, ‘de-graded’, if not by law, then by effect. As the Christian Spectator observed in 1824, in its review of the reports of the American Colonization Society: ‘A barrier more difficult to be surmounted than the institution of the Caste, cuts off, and while the present state of society continues
41 For a history of the American Colonization Society, see Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar
Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).For a history of the origins of Liberia, see also Amos J Beyan, African American Settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American Civilizing Efforts (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005); James Ciment, Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves who Ruled it (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013); Claude A Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); William Jay, An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti-Slavery Societies, 4 ed (New York: R G Williams, 1837); Tom W Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
42 See, eg, the discussion at one of the first meetings of the American Colonization Society, in A View
of Exertions Lately Made for the Purpose of Colonizing the Free People of Color, in the United States, in Africa, or Elsewhere (Washington, DC: printed by Jonathan Elliot, 1817), 4-11, and see in particular the statement of John Randolph at 9-10.
must always cut off, the negro from all that is valuable in citizenship.’43 Although
no longer legally things, the freedom of these free people of colour was being visibly contradicted by a virtual enslavement that operated, like the caste system on the Indian sub-continent, as a social rather than formally legal condition. The result, in the view of the Christian Spectator, was a form of slavery ‘never heard of […] in any country, ancient or modern, pagan, Mahommedan, or christian’.44 By
‘slavery’ the Christian Spectator did not mean physical bondage: ‘We do not mean here to speak of slavery as a system of bonds and stripes and all kinds of bodily suffering’.45 What made slavery in the United States ‘more ominous in its character
and tendency than any similar system which has ever existed’ was that its condition did not cease with legal emancipation.46 As a supporter of the American
Colonization Society stated in 1833, free people of colour in the United States were ‘nominally free, it is true, but virtually slaves—a proscribed and degraded caste, whose liberty (if liberty it may be called) is but negative, giving them but little, and exacting from them every thing.’47
In summary, these are the two main ways in which the problem of slavery was manifesting in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, as far as the American Colonization Society and its supporters were concerned. On one side, the presence of free people of colour contradicted the presence of unfree people of colour, destabilising the institution of slavery by making visible the contradiction that underwrites it. On the other side, the ongoing ‘virtual enslavement’ of these free people of colour contradicted their presence as free people in the United States. Wherever one looked, black people appeared simultaneously free and unfree, never wholly slaves, and yet never wholly citizens—their degradation as things contradicted by the appearance of their freedom as humans; their freedom as humans undermined by their abyssal degradation as things.48
43 ‘Christian Spectator’, in American Colonization Society, Seventh Annual Report, 87. 44 Ibid, 88-89.
45 Ibid. 46 Ibid, 90.
47 ‘Motion of Z C Lee, Esq, seconded by Hon J W Taylor’, in American Colonization Society, Sixteenth
Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States
(Washington: printed by James C Dunn, 1833), x.
48 See also John Seh David, The American Colonization Society and the Founding of the First African
The founders of the American Colonization Society conceived of ‘Liberia’ as the solution to this double-sided problem. Creating a colony ‘in Africa (or elsewhere)’49 for these free people of colour was conceived as the solution,
because the problem was understood as the appearance of free black bodies in the United States. Thus the institution of slavery, they argued, would remain insecure as long as the possibility of emancipation was made apparent by the presence of people of colour freely walking the streets. At the same time, they argued, emancipation itself would remain merely apparent as long as these free people of colour remained in the United States: here they would only ever experience the semblance of freedom, and not real freedom; for ‘[h]ere the thing is impossible: a slave cannot really be emancipated’.50 In short, whether they walked free or
laboured in bonds, a person of colour remained a thing in the United States, but seeing them walk free was both fanciful and dangerous because it gave the appearance of another, unreal reality that threatened the real asset of slavery by revealing the crack in its logic.
And so ‘Liberia’ was conceived at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an alternative to bleach:51 a way of making free the free people of colour of the
United States, by making their black bodies disappear altogether. If making their skin white with a liberal dousing of bleach was not a Christian solution to the perceived problem of the appearance of free people of colour in the United States, then the next best solution was to make them invisible, by colonising them in Africa (or elsewhere). To quote the slave-owning member of the American Colonisation Society, General Harper, who coined the name in 1824:
I have thought of a name that is peculiar, short, and familiar, and that expresses the object and nature of the establishment—it is the term LIBERIA; and denotes a settlement of persons made free: for our Colony may with truth be called the home and country of freedmen, in contradistinction to the slaves of whom they once formed a part.52
49 See ‘Constitution of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United
States’, in A View of Exertions Lately Made, 11-12.
50 ‘Christian Spectator’, in American Colonization Society, Seventh Annual Report, 90. See also
American Colonization Society, Sixteenth Annual Report, v, xvii.
51 See the passage from the Christian Spectator,cited in note 40 above: ‘But here the thing is
impossible: a slave cannot be really emancipated. You cannot raise him from the abyss of his degradation. You may call him free, you may enact a statute book of laws to make him free, but you cannot bleach him into the enjoyment of freedom.’
Liberia was thus born as a radical concept of liberty, directed at making the free positively free (whilst, incidentally, making the unfree positively unfree).53 As the
American Colonization Society proclaimed in its address to the people of the United States on the tenth anniversary of the Colony in west Africa, speaking of the condition of the African-American settlers there: ‘In Liberia, he exhibits not the semblance, but the reality of freedom’.54 If the United States would be known as
the land of the free, then Liberia would be known as ‘the land of the free’d.’55
But there is also a third way in which ‘Liberia’ was conceived as a force of liberty. Not only would colonisation emancipate the free people of colour of the United States (whilst securing the bonds of slavery there), but the establishment of an African-American colony in Africa would, it was said, also provide a model of civilisation that would lead to the emancipation of all of Africa’s peoples.56 This
was the great humanitarian mission of the day: to make Africans free from enslavement to their traditional ways—or as one of the founders of the American Colonization Society proclaimed in an initial meeting of the organisation: ‘[i]t is the hope of redeeming many millions of people from the lowest state of ignorance and superstition’.57 Through this colonisation mission, ‘civilization and the christian
religion would be introduced into that benighted quarter of the world’.58 Or as
another supporter wrote:
When she shall have done the work, Sir, it will be seen that the new world will have sent back to the old, the most sublime empire of reason and law, ever known to mankind. She will have planted in a land, once illustrious, but long darkened by superstition and despotism, the institutions of civil and
53 On the connection between the colonisation mission and the desire to secure the purity of white
America, see also the ‘Memorial of the President and board of Managers of the American society for colonizing the free people of color of the United State’, submission to Congress, in A View of
Exertions Lately Made, 14.
54 American Colonization Society, Address of the Managers of the American Colonization Society, to
the People of the United States (Washington, DC: printed by James C Dunn, 1832), 4.
55 Ibid, 11.
56 See, eg, ‘Review of Christian Spectator’, in American Colonization Society, Seventh Annual Report,
86: ‘Such is the history of the American Colonization Society. Its design is general—the benefit of the whole African race. Its plan of operation is specific, the establishment on the coast of Africa of a colony of free people of colour from America’ (italics in original). See also Burin, The Peculiar Solution, 13-14.
57 Statement of Elias Caldwell, in A View of Exertions Lately Made, 7. See also Ciment, Another
America, 9.
58 Statement of Elias Caldwell, in A View of Exertions Lately Made, 7. On the aims of the colonisation
religious liberty; and savage men will feel their influence, and be converted to civilization and Christianity.59
This was the light that the American Colonization Society hoped to shine on the lands and peoples of Africa: Liberia, a beacon for the empire of logos and law, enabling the growth of the institutions of liberty in a long-darkened land. ‘From them, under Heaven, the voice has gone forth—“let there be light in Africa”.’60And
savage menwill feel their influence.