ABSTRACT
From certain points of view, there is enough advantage in seeing cultural encounters as scenes of division that the images persist. Thus, a brief citation of The Isle of Pines in 2001 notes that “a war breaks out … when George Pine’s (black) descendants assume the same sexual liberties as their founder” (Lamb 69). Such claims often conflate the emergencies of two generations, projecting conventions of primitive behavior—heightened sexuality, lack of restraint, cultural inertia—to portray a society that is historically tainted and incompetent within its own resources. As we have seen with Van Sloetten’s scientific practice, and as we will now see in his political and cultural assumptions, outside observation is characteristically based upon locating objects through contrast and distance, and then measuring their relationship to known baselines; perspectival differentiation supports a “Linnean strategy of possession” (Carter 21), a scientific mode of organization that claims to stand on its own but will also substantiate the interventions that follow. This approach, easily accepted because it highlights the familiar, prefers clear distinctions between the observer and the observed—distances that can be quickly reified, for instance, in language difference: “we … asked them in our Dutch Tongue Wat Eylant is dit? to which they returned this Anſwer in Engliſh, That they knew not what we ſaid” (15).
