Stedman’s Myrmecology

This essay magnifies representations of Surinamese ants as they march through the art, literature, and natural history of the long eighteenth century. I focus primarily on the recurrence of the eusocial insect in John Gabriel Stedman’s diaristic Narrative of a Five-Years Expedition (1796). For Stedman, encroaching ants pose a threat to Dutch colonial commodities (sugar and cotton, for example), and he repeatedly aligns ant incursions and predations with those of enslaved and marooned populations who resist imperial forces. This suggests that, for Stedman, insect complementarity is part and parcel of racialization and vice versa; Narrative thus engineers alternative ways to understand the emergence of racial identity in the long eighteenth century. In addition, while Stedman’s insect analogies can be understood as further dehumanizing enslaved and marooned Black populations, I argue that these analogies expose a “destructive decolonialism” wherein enslaved, marooned, and insect populations forge a community of resistance that can fracture colonialism and its attendant capitalist mercantilism

Analogy · Epistemology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Philosophy