ABSTRACT
Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight towards revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, “biologizing,” statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement [peuplement], family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their colour and their justifi cation from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power. (Foucault, 1990: 149)
I
When brown people as a collective in Jamaica began to challenge the statutes that restricted them economically and socially, they were also implicitly challenging the cultural narratives by which they had been (mis)described and defi ned as a group. The decades preceding and following Abolition and Emancipation are of critical interest to anyone who is concerned with the history and formation of racial identity, because the cultural and legal texts of the time reveal the making, unmaking and remaking of racial, social and legal categories. It is worth reiterating Heuman’s observation that people of colour were barely visible as a group in Jamaica during the eighteenth century. Their appeals for legal redress were made on an individual basis: at this time they were not advocating for the legal rights of free people of colour in general, nor were they necessarily campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade. According to Heuman, the revolution in St. Domingue changed this, prompting Jamaican people of colour to organize petitions and campaigns for the betterment of the group as a whole. Although many still wanted to preserve the slave
system, they now advocated for the privileges that people of colour in St. Domingue had recently acquired (Heuman, 1981: 23, 24).
