The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch
The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch
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爱情与奴隶制的奇怪生涯：切斯纳特、恩格斯、马索克
DOI：
10.1093/alh/aji026
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发表时间：
2005
影响因子：
0.4
通讯作者：
Nancy Bentley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nancy Bentley
当学者们避免美国例外论的范式，即寻求只有美国才拥有的核心国家意义时，一位学者--严肃而诙谐地说--提出了一个问题，即美国文化的区别到底是什么？沃纳·索勒斯认为，是“禁止黑人-白人异性恋夫妇组建家庭，并剥夺其后代的合法性”（5）。索勒斯认为，对黑人与白人结合的长期禁令很可能是美国与其他西方社会最明显的民族差异。[1]这种区别本身并没有告诉我们什么，但这种例外的情况可能是一种关键的刺激：是什么样的集体需要或要求，在几乎每一个类似国家都有效的历史压力下，维持了两个世纪以来对这种婚姻的法律的限制？自由和奴隶制的问题显然与美国禁令的原因密切相关。然而，在19世纪的大量作品中，自由的语言可能并没有提供多少启示。在早期的自由主义思想家中，自由和奴隶制的反义词是如此强大，几乎是封闭的概念范畴，以至于它们可以不受动产奴隶制历史事实的影响。[2]然而，除了自由与奴隶制的对立，我们还可以提出第二个但并不完全平行的概念轴心：不是自由与奴隶制，而是爱与奴隶制。这种配对也为自由主义思想提供了一种结构性的对立;感受到最高的爱就是憎恶强迫征服另一个人的最小倾向。任何一个注意到哈里特比彻斯托“感觉正确”的必要性的人，都会认为奴隶制是错误的。然而，在这个时代的大部分书面记录中，爱和奴隶制的观念并没有作为对立的两极牢固地保持下去。探索爱和奴役的相互表达，就是打开一部存在于切分音中的亲密、反感和归属的历史。
At a moment when scholars avoid the paradigm of US exceptionalism that would seek a core national meaning possessed by the US alone, one observer—speaking seriously and waggishly in equal measure—suggests that the question of what distinguishes US culture may be answerable after all: Americanness, Werner Sollors argues, is the “prohibiting [of] black-white heterosexual couples from forming families and withholding legitimacy from their descendants”(5). The protracted ban on black-white unions, Sollors contends, may well be the US’s most pronounced national difference from other Western societies. 1 By itself the distinction tells us little, but the exceptional instance can be a critical spur: what collective need or demand sustained two centuries of legal restriction on such marriages, against the historical pressures effective in virtually every comparable nation?Questions of freedom and slavery are obviously germane to the reason for the US ban. Yet the language of freedom as it operated in a good deal of nineteenth-century writing may not offer much illumination. Among early liberal thinkers, the antonyms of freedom and slavery were such strong, almost hermetic conceptual categories that they could remain impervious to the historical facts of chattel slavery. 2 Alongside the freedom-slavery opposition, however, we can place a second but not quite parallel conceptual axis: not freedom and slavery, but love and slavery. This pairing, too, provides one of the structural oppositions for liberal thought; to feel the highest love is to abhor the smallest inclination toward the forced subjugation of another. Any person who heeds Harriet Beecher Stowe’s imperative to “feel right,” it is assumed, will necessarily feel slavery is wrong. In much of the written record in this era, however, ideas of love and slavery fail to remain securely in place as opposing poles. To explore the mutual articulation of love and slavery is to open a history of intimacy, antipathy, and belonging that exists in syncopated