Today in “men are trash,” and enslaving, colonialist white men are the trashiest of trash, we bring you Sir Richard Steele’s 1711 Spectator retelling of the “Inkle and Yarico” story. For 150 years, versions of Inkle and Yarico were among the most famous narratives of British colonialism in the Americas, and we discuss a few of the most important examples. It’s a story in which an English merchant is saved by a Native woman, gets her pregnant, and promptly sells her into slavery. (As we said, the trashiest of trash.) We talk constructions of race, imperial violence, genre, and why this story was read in so many ways in the eighteenth century.
We read from and highly recommend Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. For more on Inkle and Yarico and racist European representations of Native people from Columbus through the eighteenth century, we also recommend Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.
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