"The True Temper of It": Combustibility and Emblematic Representation in Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

Abstract:This article uses Richard Ligon's opening figure of clay pots found by colonizers on Barbados to develop a theory of the emblematic combustibility figured in the natural history he writes of the island. Clay pots need to be tempered to withstand firing, but, as Ligon states, colonizers don't have this knowledge of tempering, and the bricks they try to make to establish plantations keep exploding. I use the idea of this combustibility to trace various forms of multispecies violence inherent in the mono-cultural practices Ligon records. From racial slavery to ecocide to land dispossession, this violence registers in emblems that demonstrate an epistemological commitment to that violence, as well as the work of erasure and forgetting necessary for upholding the accumulation of wealth, power, and the fantasy of white innocence inherent in the history of the plantation complex.