“Within the Surround”: George Colman, the Younger’s The Africans (1808) and the Undercommons

Immanuel Kant’s subject-centered ethics renders duty to community a partial case of universal duty in general, bypassing intercommunity relations in favor of universality at the level of the human. For this reason, it is not obvious what grounds one should use to consider ethical cases in which demands are made of one community on behalf of another. “Within the Surround” takes up Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s the Undercommons as an alternative starting point to examine ethical relations between communities in Colman’s play.

Specifically the talk will consider how Moten and Harney’s critique of politics—“Politics is an ongoing attack on the common – the general and generative antagonism – from within the surround”—can help us understand what the play suggests Britain owes to the African people it enslaved in these early moments of a repeatedly deferred post-colonialism, and how such thinking may ultimately be useful in reconstructing an ethics of what one community owes to another that does not abstract questions of ethics and duty to efface sociocultural distinctions.