ON THE MAP

This map is a fantasy of a circumscribed world (see Figure 7.1). A dotted line to “Crusoe’s” island off the northern coast of South America traces a fictional itinerary across neatly bisected hemispheres, “skipping” in the middle over the divide between not-quite-aligned halves of the cartograph. This map bifurcates the globe through the Atlantic Ocean into eastern and western hemispheres, “old” and “new” world. The latitude lines are given equal parity with what political borders exist on the map, neither form of projection taking precedence in their visual overlap. Place names occasionally interrupt the other lines in the image, but there is no obvious visual hierarchy declaring which names take precedence over the navigational lines and which names do not. Most important is the juxtaposition of completeness and incompleteness: though the map seems at first to be neatly contained within the binary opposition of hemispheres, a closer look reveals a world fraying at its edges. North America and other regions dissolve into open-ended space. In one way, this reflects a commitment to empiricism, the openness a means of reflecting the “truth” of the continents’ constitutive but as-yet unknown borders. In another more literal way, this openness reveals a world imperiled by the colonial knowledge of what already exists.

This world is brought into relation with what has not (yet) been mapped, perceived, anticipated, or speculated about—a world actively but not unselfconsciously being made in the image of what Tiffany Lethabo King calls the “conquistador eye,” which predicates its visualizing power on eliding and overlooking Indigenous, Black, and noncolonial space.¹ It produces a map tenuously held together through imaginary navigational lines, but the very material edges of land mass that cannot be made to appear threaten to unwrite and unmap the entire document at any moment. The aporias in the map gesture to the frailty of cartography as a whole: the literal mapmaker would not have seen a fraction of what they depicted—thus, the entire exercise in mapping might be read as simply a maker’s fantasy or projection.² Even as Crusoe’s little island is perfectly plotted near the shores of South America, the world around the island recedes. The imaginary lines that produced the material infrastructures of early modern global trade—the equator, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn—are as real here as Crusoe’s island. However, the radically open-ended and unbounded spaces that had yet to be assimilated into the meaning-making systems of global trade and domination throw these “real” lines into sharp relief, casting doubt on the generative truth of the colonial gaze. The map necessarily bears a truthful resemblance, a verisimilitude, to the world “out there,” but at the same time, there are strange occlusions that threaten to undo the fundamental conceit of mapmaking.

In tracing this fissure, what becomes apparent and strange about this map is how it serves two functions at once—or rather, how it fails two functions at once. Even as it pledges to tell a spatial truth to help orient one’s view(s) of the world, it also breaks apart, or performs a “queer” action in the sense that Sara Ahmed discusses in Queer Phenomenology (2006). She notes that “queer” denotation is a particular way of disorienting forces, objects, and subjects—of turning these things obliquely against and sometimes integrating them into the smooth functioning of systems like heterosexuality or whiteness.³ For Ahmed, queer mo(ve)ments are visible when these smooth orienting infrastructures that pattern the world are occluded or otherwise “fail to keep things in their place.”⁴ This map both offers its world to whiteness and colonial systems of sex-sexuality-gender-race-etc.⁵ by placing it “within reach” and collapses in on itself so that it can only display its own imaginative failures as truth.⁶

The roiling relationship between what is given and what is lost to the viewer of this map encodes an emergent form of scopophilic erotics imbricated within the larger matrix of power, fantasy, and desire at play in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Although the novel is most famous for its portrayal of Crusoe’s decades-long residence on an uninhabited island, other incidents in the text—including his enslavement as a Barbery captive, his organization of a sugar plantation in Brazil, and his movements as a sailor—locate Crusoe within the complex geographies of British colonial and imperial expansion. Crusoe’s relationships, notably with the “Moor” Xury and the Indigenous captive Friday, illustrate power dynamics that are not only intensely entwined within British economies but also intensely eroticized. As Melissa K. Downes notes in her exploration of Crusoe as ostensibly a “famously sexless text” and its BDSM-like dynamics, this interpretation requires a slightly different understanding of “the erotic.”⁷ She abstracts the colloquial usage of “the erotic” as a force driving sexual relations between people, and instead employs it in a more diffuse and psychoanalytically tinged sense. By presenting the erotic as a key relational force at play in Crusoe, I follow Downes’s claim that “to understand Robinson Crusoe as erotic is to understand the erotic as tied to relationships, but not always necessarily to relationships between and among people.”⁸ This chapter is interested in how the map, as infrastructure, channels and (re)directs that relational force. Moreover, it explores how queer spaces on the map catalyze a paradoxical and characteristically colonial mode of erotic nonrelation, creating a map that unqueers the things it presents.

My goal here is not to offer a “queer” reading of Crusoe that will allow me to produce a proper queer subject in whom erotics can appear as nonnormative desires or anxieties; relatedly, I do not seek to redefine erotics as something a map can feel or enact, queerly or otherwise. Rather, I investigate the map’s dual failure—an apparent/initial queerness of the map that is then unqueered—and the effects of that dual failure. I suggest that the map’s erotics articulate a fundamental and productive tension between the purported goal of a colonial map, the literal projection of knowledge and desire, and the persistent and self-aware failure of that projection, as characterized by the map’s absences. A central question becomes how this failed orienting device of the fantasy map rambunctiously (dis)organizes, skips over, and fails to see its own imperial fantasies at multiple points in the map itself and in Crusoe, and how the simultaneous production and refutation of that failure produces a colonial system of nonsensical or disoriented erotics.

This chapter works to square the role of maps within eighteenth-century systems of hegemony-making with the odd symptomatic and elusive moments of queer eroticism that occlude some of Crusoe’s stranger passages. Such a method allows me to explore how these double failures ultimately register as anything but queer; the map’s disorientation facilitates a systematized and naturalized perceptual fault in which erotic relations are first registered and then overlooked in order to “smooth” and project order onto the world. Though it’s tempting to call these relations “queer,” their strangeness actually produces their hegemonic power—faulty dynamics that with time become heterosexuality, racialized gender, and so forth.

The map powerfully conflates the viewer’s literal and psychoanalytic gaze: the former observes the map’s rendering of spatial relations, the latter theorizes vision as a vector for seeking and obtaining pleasure. That elision is particularly potent because it makes a rich set of visual metaphors available for analysis.⁹ Consider a “saccade,” the medical term for the shuddering movement of the eye while viewing objects in motion. Though it may not feel so, eyes actually jump—or saccade—between the object they’re looking at and the environment, producing a smoother perception of the object’s motion because of the visual breaks in viewing it. These breaks are vital to the perceptive process but occur both within and anterior to perception. “Saccade” becomes a persuasive metaphor for exploring scopophilic erotics and its necessary elisions because it bridges the perceptual and projective aspects of both the map and the narrative the map animates. Moreover, the term’s pluripotent reach helps me read the eroticized fantasies underlying colonial scopophilic maps,¹⁰ as well as the erotics of verisimilitude and referentiality embedded within the maps of Crusoe.

As Defoe shows, fictional travel literature was more than an exercise in expanding the colonial imagination or patterning the “empty space” of the frontier.¹¹ It is a new way of seeing the frontier such that the distinction between the apparent colony and the actual colony collapses. This impacts our understanding of early realist novels, because what results is a perceived verisimilitude that is ultimately not a product of a spatial or indexical relation but rather of forceful imposition or infrastructuring of projection. Maps are narrative devices that tell colonial stories, richly embellished with fantasies of ontological infrastructures of desire, identity, and time.¹² In exploring how fantasy maps are unqueered but left strange, it’s possible to see how the early realist novel participates in this saccadic process of colonial projection.

If part of the colonial process is subjecting racialized Others to colonial regimes of sex-sexuality-gender, these maps fantasize about what erotics look like in advance of and against the reality of the colonial encounter. They foreclose the encounter’s queerness, producing strange but now-familiar relations. Obviously, mapping as an act requires drawing boundaries, framing space and its antinomies, and ultimately projecting an ordered world. It’s also a fantasy structure predicated on perceptual mechanisms that strategically do not perceive the world they pledge to render. This overlooking, or saccading, is how an erotics of nonrelation begins to speak through these spatialized, “mapped” fantasies.

OVERLOOKING THE MAP

Though map technology existed long before Defoe’s articulation of the fantasy map in Crusoe, as S. Max Edelson notes, in the early eighteenth century, the map rises to prominence and concatenates the needs of an expanding empire.¹³ Maps manage projective mercantilist capitalism, data for an increasingly politically and spatially unruly empire undergoing a series of economic and social upheavals, and infrastructural demands for imperial totalizing projects. The map, in other words, is already considered a site where the needs and desires of empire coalesce and take shape.

Robinson Crusoe uses its map and its narrative mapping not as a literal perception of space but as part of a larger world-building project of reconciling or aligning projection, rather than perception, and reality. As Ala Alryyes writes on Crusoe’s cartography: “Although it may appear that geography is distinguished by an objective, neutral subject, a genealogy of geographical knowledge reveals that, in this age of conquest and colonialism, European polemics over the demarcations and legal representations of space were imbued with polemos itself, war and conflict.”¹⁴ Alryyes reads mapping in Crusoe as a knowledge-making project of empire, in which Crusoe’s mastery of space is inextricably bound to his ability to wage war, producing orders of being that are relational insofar as they are spatialized. For Alryyes, Defoe-via-Crusoe also draws this power not just from mastery and aesthetics but through the ways that maps communicate verisimilitude.

Truth appears in multiple registers in Alryyes’s reading, in which the mimetic representation of space (the ostensible purpose of a map) is subsumed by a larger realism defined by the “funny mirror of fiction” in which “verisimilitude … is perhaps beside the point. For Defoe is actually a ‘realist of a larger reality.’ ”¹⁵ Alryyes’s reading uses the pseudoarchival map in Crusoe as an object of empire that speaks to its own of the realities of the colonial project conceived by Defoe. Nevertheless, the map’s apparent verisimilitude is a constitutive element of its ability to tell a larger truth: the realism of its construction is the engine of its metaphorical power. To Alryyes, Defoe’s distorted map is still a map, except that this map traverses internal rather than external territory. Here, the openness of Defoe’s map closes again as its coordinates become anchored in the metaphorical register, but their frames of reference still hold.¹⁶

Following Andrew Franta’s Systems Failure, the map as it emerges in the early eighteenth century is in messy shape indeed—it’s a bad object that is always already a target of empiricist suspicion yet becomes increasingly central to the project of Empire.¹⁷ Franta’s work historicizes a fundamental skepticism about systems: in this case, the map’s ability to sustain its essential realism, or to reflect with some degree of verisimilitude the picture of the world it allegedly captures. Whereas the eighteenth century is often characterized as the era that developed the technologies of war, law, and rights discourses that inflect narratives of ongoing colonial expansion, what Franta demonstrates is that systems anxiety is non-teleological, and that maps as a projective element of fiction were already shot through with anxieties about the status of the embodied British subject.

These anxieties around what a map captures go beyond questions of spatial indexicality. The fantasy about what a map reflects (a picture of the world as it is) shifts—in Franta’s reading as well as mine—to fantasies about what a map has the capacity to imagine. Franta reads this paranoid curiosity about maps’ capacities from Borges back to Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy: he points out that unspeakable spaces on the body or within the psyche can be externalized through the map’s visualization of narrative. As these maps get more “realistic,” they increasingly occlude an accurate perception of the terrain they index. This means that the map’s bearing on reality, its increasing verisimilitude, in fact marks its departure from Alryyes’s “realism of a larger reality.”¹⁸ The map emerges as a failing representational structure that, revealingly, does not need to be accurate but merely forceful. Franta and Alryyes both read maps as objects that transverse fiction and reality through their ability to forcefully index and coordinate points across these separate registers, regardless of accuracy.

The resulting maps depict overlooked relations which appear instead merely as relations. The ground they index is a projection of the eye/I of the cartographer, run through an apparatus that structurally erases the perceptual fault lines between what exists and what appears. This projective aspect of mapmaking is known as a “geographic imaginary”—a term that allows geographers to explore how subjectivity, desire, and projection bear on space.¹⁹ Feminist and queer geography uses “geographic imagination” to explore how the erotic necessarily informs the construction of space and place.²⁰ In registering imagined spatial relations, cartographs become strange palimpsests that not only offer and efface the point of view from which the scopophilic gaze originates but also forcibly erase the desires and relations necessitating the map in the first place. The map, in the manner of a saccade, appears to be an inert object, though actually it is the product of a perceptive and projective process that can only produce the visible by overlooking and looking away from what is actually present and projecting a smooth space between projected points.

OVERLOOKING THE BOAT

Crusoe’s journeys abroad begin, crucially, by a primary encounter with Blackness: because Black life is often articulated in the colonial voice as absolute negation,²¹ this encounter allows for the boundaries of fantasy and reality to be drawn and verisimilitude to be established. As the second son who must make his own fortune, Crusoe first joins the crew of a slave ship that is overtaken by Turkish pirates off the coast of the Moorish port of Salle. While his fellow sailors are sent “up the Country to the Emperor’s Court,” the captain of the pirate vessel instead retains his services as a slave.²² Though Salle appears on the map, Crusoe never leaves the boat. Verisimilitude—the story’s ability to say something real about the real world—is thus established here through nonrelation. Defoe establishes that this novel is “grounded” in the “real world” by gesturing toward a point on the map that is known to exist without Crusoe having to see it. The map in the novel—and the novel itself—is granted realism because of what Crusoe doesn’t see and Crusoe is granted reliability as a narrator by not encountering the places he describes. Its externality to Crusoe’s perception demonstrates a commitment to empiricism in much the same way the map does. His relationship to the “real” world is defined and upheld through a selective perceptual uptake and negation rather than constant encounter. The contact zones of the novel, like this ship outside Salle, become apertures through which Crusoe projects out knowledge that appears to be under his purview. But like the map, openness is projected and then forcibly saccaded over: the zones it observes are simultaneously known and unknown because of their strange way of seeing-as-elision.

This characteristically colonial double-failed saccadic desire extends throughout Crusoe’s relationship with Xury. It’s tempting but tricky to identify erotics in Crusoe—the text’s lack of overt sexuality doesn’t quite occlude the possibility of relations between Crusoe and others like Xury and later Friday; however, the confluence of emergent racialized sexual hierarchies and a shifting homosocial-homosexual paradigm avant la lettre often forces critics to look for erotics sublimated through other forces. For example, Joseph Campana identifies an emergent colonial sexual paradigm centering consumption and domination in dynamic tension with anxieties about being consumed and dominated. For Campana, Defoe’s novel explores a subject who disavows desire and regulates attachment through asceticism, denial, and orality, which function as an extension of the book’s (homo)erotics. In Crusoe’s human encounters, including with Xury, “excessive attachment conspires with insupportable absence, provoking a kind of phantasmatic projection that threatens dispossession. Crusoe’s response is to wish only for things he fantasizes he can tame and control, as in the case of Friday.”²³ The resulting matrix of desire and fear that characterizes Crusoe’s interactions with Friday and the figure of the “cannibal” that haunts the island is thus indicative of the novel’s insistence on consumption and orality as an organizing principle of masculine desire in the eighteenth century, which then becomes articulated through contextual flows of power. Though not organized exclusively through genital contact and penetration, for Campana, this structure allows colonial subjects to render bodies into erotically consumable flesh—and of course, recognizing this process is key to understanding “not only the histories but the futures of sexuality.”²⁴ In other words, Crusoe’s joining together attachment and absence into a projective act that both necessitates and usurps control is symptomatic of the colonial encounter, both materially and figuratively.

However, there is another reading of Crusoe’s encounters with Xury in which Crusoe’s mapping I/eye does not need to perceive the ground but rather skips over it, or saccades, as a means of mastering it. Campana argues that Crusoe creates self-protective relations of domination and consumption in which the thing he desires is always an object of fear requiring subordination—he cites Kristeva’s formulation of “phobia as a metaphor for want” as the operative mode of desire in this seemingly asexual text.²⁵ However, in taking together the sense of erotic domination from Campana with the function of the map as a style of projective fiction, a different erotic relationship between Crusoe and Xury reveals itself. In addition to rendering flesh consumable, territorializing borders, or emptying space through the logic of terra nullis, the ability of the “conquistador I/eye” to dominate a space through the nonrelation of the saccade manifests here textually as it does in the map visually.

The double-failure of the map’s visualization of the frontier is reiterated in the double-failure of Crusoe’s projected relationship with Xury. At first, Xury is characterized as a competent sailor and trader who expresses his dedication to Crusoe through words and deeds—an unquestionable asset to Crusoe throughout their shared journey. As Xury navigates (literally and metaphorically) the dangers of the open world, he pledges his loyalty to Crusoe and “smil’d in [his] Face and spoke so innocently that [he] could not mistrust him;” the two are consistently united in Crusoe’s narration, which refers to them as “we” as they feel and struggle their way through an unknown coastline.²⁶ Crusoe is “off the map” by his own admission, and so the relationship between him and Xury, while by no means that of equals, is defined by a relational perception that allows Crusoe to observe, rather than project, the world he encounters.²⁷ Crusoe becomes accustomed to the saccadic nonrelation of the “map”—in other words, the failures of his projected system of relational meanings begin to become apparent as those connections are explored at greater length—as the perceptual apparatus of the eye/I is trained on this new space.

That is, however, until the saccade completes and the projective fiction of the map fails again: the first failure exposed the possibility of relation outside of the known points of triangulation, but this second failure “unqueers” that unknown space and occludes the possibility of a relationship between Crusoe and Xury. After weathering the unknown coastline, Crusoe begins to triangulate his location based not on what he sees, but rather what he expects to see. He writes:

I knew very well that the Islands of the Canaries, and the Cape de Verd Islands also, lay not far off from the Coast. But as I had no Instruments to take an Observation to know what Latitude we were in, and did not exactly know, or at least remember what Latitude they were in; I knew not where to look for them, or when to stand off to Sea towards them’ otherwise I might now easily have found some of these Islands. But my hope was, that if I stood along this Coast till I came to that Part where the English Traded, I should find some of their Vessels upon their usual Design of Trade, that would relieve and take us in.²⁸

Here, Crusoe’s frame of reference shifts to a deliberate overlooking or non-relationship between the world he is seeing and the world that he is mapping onto it. Though Xury is included in Crusoe’s desire to be rescued by English traders, he now begins a process of devaluation as the new coordinates of Crusoe’s projected world take hold. Though Xury’s perception of the world remains more accurate than Crusoe’s—“Xury, whose Eyes were more about him than it seems mine were”—his ability to register and hold his gaze in this projected mapped fiction of Crusoe’s perception wanes.²⁹

This fault in colonial perception comes to its logical conclusion as Xury’s ability to see accurately is superseded by Crusoe’s ability to not see strategically. As the duo encounter a Portuguese vessel, these differences concretize as Crusoe’s double-failed project “map” reinscribes the situation within a known frame of reference, forcibly unqueering the openness of the boat and remaking the scene into a familiar dynamic in which the nonrelation of what appears and what is perceived is central. In this scene, Xury calls out “Master, Master, a Ship with a Sail,” and Crusoe writes, “the foolish Boy was frighted out of his Wits, thinking is must needs be some of his Master’s Ships sent to pursue us, when, I knew we were gotten far enough out of their reach. I … immediately saw not only the Ship, but what she was, (viz.) that it was a Portuguese Ship, and as I thought was bound to the Coast of Guinea for Negroes.”³⁰ In recognizing the ship’s national origin, Crusoe reconciles the map of the world that he had been projecting and investing with his desires for navigating the openness of “unknown” space, a reconciliation based on the second perceptual failure inherent to the saccade. Not only does Xury not misrecognize the ship—the idea that it was Moorish is itself a projection of Crusoe’s—but moreover, Xury identifies a larger shared homology between the vessels: they are both slave ships.

Xury’s perception of the world is shown to be accurate and truthful in a way that does not usurp Crusoe’s projection. However, the perceptual effect of Crusoe’s saccading vision has already precluded Xury’s accurate read because it allows Crusoe to navigate Xury’s sale and barter for his own passage. It is here where the erotics of nonrelation come into full expression. Xury’s perception of the Portuguese slaving vessel cannot be related to Crusoe’s projection of its meaning—rather than being ignored, it cannot register within the saccade’s perceptual mechanism due to its structural double-failures. Whatever relationship between Crusoe and Xury had existed is, from this point onward, necessarily contained within that strange nonrelation—that open space of the map between points originating within Crusoe’s gaze. As such, the snap back of Crusoe’s eye/I that completes the metaphorical saccade accounts for the lack of connection as well as the level of control over Xury’s body and desires.

The ship’s appearance reorients Crusoe’s supposedly empirical perception, creating the saccadic fault that occludes the queer potentials of the open space and produces instead strange nonrelation between two characters. Whereas Crusoe had been able, in the queer uncoordinated space of the open map, to hold both Xury’s desires and his own in view, the ship reoriented or restructured Crusoe’s perception, rendering that open space unavailable for fantasy and desire. The ship’s introduction occludes what had just been perceived before it and puts in its place a nonrelation between Crusoe and Xury, which enables the former to sell the latter. In effect, this creates an erotic infrastructure where the desiring body is also the projecting body is also the empirical body: to produce this body, the other participant in an erotic relation must be strategically overlooked or left in the queer open space between perceptual points. That space doesn’t cease to exist, but it cannot operate the smooth functioning of the saccade, or the map, or the novel—the device registering perception. What it produces is (again) strange but definitely not queer. What potential there was for queerness—transgressive or disorienting relations—is lost in the perceptual jump between projected coordinates. The visual closure of the ship reorients—unqueers—that bizarre open unperceived space within the saccade. This comes to matter in the following passage, in which Crusoe’s control over animal reproduction operates with this same logic of nonrelation and erotic control, though expression and enactment of explicit sexuality remain absent from the text.

OVERLOOKING THE ISLAND

A great deal of work has been done on the ways that Crusoe’s time on the island both illustrates and expands the colonial project’s imbrication of space and place with sexual, gendered, and racialized infrastructures. Whereas critics like Campana and Hans Turley explore how Crusoe’s colonial acts on the island are acts of force and assault—and they are—I want to suggest at the same time that the projective relationship that Crusoe establishes is an exercise in redrawing a fantasy coordinate system in which the land is remapped according to his fantasy of the space.³¹ The violence in question is not only a matter of coercing the space to respond to colonial desire but of projecting a system that is fundamentally incapable of seeing coercion. In other words, though this portion of the novel is remarkably obsessed with cataloguing Crusoe’s colonizing acts in intense detail (conveying an empiricist drive for verisimilitude), these projective acts are also indicative of a kind of erotic nonrelation made possible through the saccadic motion I’ve been describing. In particular, the reproductive politics of the island evidence the same sort of erotic double-failures we see at play in the map and on the ship. Though different than the erotic dynamics at stake between Crusoe and Xury, the unqueered occlusions of Crusoe’s time on the island demonstrate yet another way that colonial worldbuilding operates as a kind of projective map-making project based in forceful and necessary perceptual faults.

In exploring the shipwreck, Crusoe finds himself cataloguing both present and absent items. However, for every lamentation of things lost, Crusoe projects an analogical alternative. Nothing appears that is not already a fantasy shaped by his needs. Even as Crusoe writes that “it was in vain to sit still and wish for what was not to be had,” he nevertheless experiences just this phenomenon.³² A coordinate system emerges in which the thing Crusoe fantasizes about appears, albeit in different form, before him. Seeking a place to bring a raft of supplies up the shore, Crusoe notes, “As I imagin’d, so it was, there appear’d before me a little opening of the Land, and I found a strong Current of the Tide set into it.”³³ In another instance, Crusoe imagines himself to have stripped the ship bare of all provisions, yet finds a final stash of luxury, imperial goods—bread, spirits, sugar, and flour.³⁴ He imagines that his gun is the first ever fired on the island, and the native birds flee to confirm this belief.³⁵ What is being built—projected—here is not just the image of an Indigenous landscape that must be shaped through domination (under the guise of pedagogical intervention, as in Paul Kelleher’s recent assessment, or other colonial modes) but a means of projecting out the world that Crusoe wishes to perceive—in a movement that maps over and excises the exigencies of the island. When things rise to interrupt the steady view of the map, threaten to interrupt the self-securing truth of its projection, they evidence the supplemental form of power in the erotics of nonrelation.

This takes its full expression, as well as its most overtly erotic politics, in how saccadic perception organizes—unqueers—Crusoe’s treatment of the island’s animals. As Kelleher writes in “A Table in the Wilderness,” erotics in Robinson Crusoe emerges as part of the modern system of husbandry explored by the novel. Kelleher shows that a kind of sexuality in Robinson Crusoe is made visible through the pedagogical scene that emerges between Crusoe and Friday and articulates how Crusoe’s transformative processes of mastery are all redoubled on his own body, particularly in the imposition (or rather, fantasy of imposition) of hunger and its relief. Kelleher contends that “in order for the human subject to arise and take its place in the world, the self must be rendered and handled as just another object to be shaped, mastered, and ultimately, ‘husbanded’ ”—in other words, this novel explores how an imperial subject emerges through how they impose their own regulations on themselves.³⁶ Kelleher focuses on Crusoe’s domestication of the island’s wild goats, which cannot be accomplished via outright violence but instead relies on the imposition of hunger. Through this, Kelleher argues, Crusoe is constituted as a subject via his self-enforced proximity to goat-ness. The erotics that Kelleher reads appear to be less reciprocal and more reflexive, as “the domination of others, in Defoe’s imagination, necessarily entails practices of self-mastery and self-formation.”³⁷ Kelleher shares a focus on consumptive erotics with many of the other writers on Crusoe’s sexual politics. Though hunger is certainly a helpful proprioceptive metaphor through which to read the novel’s erotics, one intriguing aspect of consumption is its self-evident materiality. Consumption creates both absences and wastes: it brings the consuming body into the world in a tangible, interactive way. Saccadic nonrelation might help account for the strange rifts that occur in the materiality of the world that Crusoe interacts with but fails to form relations toward. When taken alongside consumption as a metaphor, saccades suggest a mode of interaction with other lands and peoples that is ultimately self-securing, hiding away the important material relations that converge on the perceiving/projecting eye/I and account for its power.

The reproductive cycles of the island become indicative of this nonrelation: the longer Crusoe lives there, the more he carries out the double-failed perception that first perceives and then elides its novel spaces. Throughout the novel, Crusoe continues to find and kill female animals, particularly pregnant ones, including a sea turtle with a clutch of eggs, domestic cats, and a poultry hen with chicks.³⁸ Crusoe takes particular note of killing female species and their “useless” flesh: both she-goat and wild cat become environmental feminine excess. In a land with no observed potential for human reproduction, this exertion of control over other creatures’ reproduction becomes an extension of Crusoe’s assertion of a sex-gender (and species) hierarchy. It essentially remaps lines of husbandry and futurity to become circuited exclusively through Crusoe’s fantasies about how reproduction works. Unlike consumptive moments—or moments that express Crusoe’s fear of being consumed—there is no material linkage or chain here between what is taken and what is expended: instead, the perceptual break occurs here again as queer lifeways are perceived, overlooked, and then culled. In a sense, the process of saccadic projection is becoming more efficient, as Crusoe becomes more adept at occluding his own perceptions and foreclosing the queer openings he finds around him.

More projected coordinates take hold and occlude the island’s queer failures to conform to Crusoe’s initial “map.” Crusoe recasts himself as the island’s father: his refusal to salvage women’s clothes from the wreck, and the notable absence of other male animals on the island despite obvious reproduction establish Crusoe as the spatial and relational patriarch-cartographer of the island (as well as its rightful steward, as Kelleher points out).³⁹ Though he eventually domesticates some of the fowls and goats that populate the island, his early time there is defined by the need to control and curtail reproductive cycles that fail to map onto his structures of desire.

And yet, Crusoe’s cats, rather than the goats, play out the full sense of erotic nonrelation. Crusoe finds domestic cats on the island who then have kittens. In addition to the original dog who had survived the shipwreck, he calls these once-familiar creatures his “Family” and notes that he was “much surpriz’d with [their] Increase.”⁴⁰ Becoming overrun, he culls these so-called family members.⁴¹ This is surprising: not only is the act constructed as filicide, but “[he] had killed a wild Cat, as [he] call’d it … I thought it was quite differing Kind from our European Cats, yet the young Cats were the same kind of House breed like the old one.” Moreover, both cats he found were females.⁴² Crusoe’s “family” of cats seems guilty of adulterous miscegenation and/or lesbian parthenogenesis—producing impossible offspring that went against all colonial logics of sex and sexuality, not to mention flouted his fatherly reign. Crusoe’s imposed domestic relationship was initially a cognate to family and reproductive structures, but in mapping this fantasy onto his encounter with aberrant practice, it proved impossible to substantiate.

As Gabriel Rosenberg reminds us in “How Meat Changed Sex,” animal husbandry expresses its erotics not just in the more abstract realm of biopolitical control of nonhuman subjects but also quite literally as sexual acts taken to ensure the production of new meat animals.⁴³ Though Rosenberg’s analysis is more concerned with animal husbandry at the scale of industrial capitalism, the salient point about the erotic structure of animal (re)production remains. Furthermore, what Rosenberg makes visible is the idea that animal husbandry bears an erotic nonrelation to bestiality despite, and not because of the congruence of sexual acts between them. I suggest that erotic nonrelation is produced in the way that the laws around animal reproduction occlude—or map the space between and so necessitate a saccade over—these sexual homologies in animal-human sexual practices of both sorts. Though it operates more abstractly than the scopophilic desires that shape his relationship with Xury, what we see clearly between these two examples is the immense power that saccades offer to the perceiving/projecting eye/I.

In one sense, by remapping the cats from members of the house to vermin, Crusoe demonstrates the ultimate extension of colonial power: not just control over life, but control over the system that confers the ability or right to be seen as living at all. Much like Crusoe’s episode with Xury, the cats also demonstrate a period within the saccade in which a relationship characterized by an openness and inability to bear projection produces a queer and disoriented erotics—before the saccade “closes” and the profusion of feeling and affiliation is martialed again. It is this power to remap the cats that accounts for Crusoe’s power over Friday, Xury, and the rest of the island’s inhabitants and life forms. Even Friday’s designated “name”—an arbitrary temporal marker—functions as a projective means of remapping him into colonial systems of relation.

UNMAPPING

This instance of mapping, compounded as it is with other acts of projective fiction-making in this text, reaffirms King’s contention that “the mapping of Blackness and Indigeneity is an attempt to spatially fix and capture forms of Black fugitivity and Indigenous resistance that elude the British and present an existential threat throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.”⁴⁴ In reading eighteenth-century maps as instances of colonial spatializing logics that designate Blackness as a “chaotic space” and Indigeneity as “anaspatial,” King articulates the ways that “Black and Indigenous ‘livingness’ forced … British settlers’ cartographic attempts to write themselves into being through anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence to continually adjust and remain under revision.”⁴⁵ In other words, King shows how the real-life project of the colonial map does what I have explored here—functions as a projective fiction that allows the Transparent I/eye to project, over/see, and produce subjects according to its desires, which necessarily contain an erotic component.⁴⁶

I conclude by returning to the unsettling nature of this particular map and its fantasy status. As King observes, all colonial maps are necessarily fantasy structures with embedded erotics, regardless of whether they are meant to achieve a degree of verisimilitude with the real world or not. The failures of Crusoe’s various “maps” in this story underscore these points and reaffirm the currents of Black and Indigenous thought in which “living otherwise” is both the object of colonial repression and its refutation. However, in exploring Robinson Crusoe’s depiction of an erotics of nonrelation, I hope to re-see a valence of King’s argument. The saccadic motion of my reading metaphorizes a process that is considered a natural, involuntary part of seeing clearly. By reading maps as fantasy structures that have the power to repattern relations through the language of the saccade, I highlight how this process of overlooking is naturalized and thus invisibilized. Whereas metaphors of consumption, pedagogy, or BDSM erotics take for granted that there is a material series of consequences predicating a violent and domineering system, the metaphor of the saccade and the unqueering of the map suggest that a key part of the colonial process is the construction of a system in which the projecting/perceiving eye/I can occlude its own erotic investments—and pleasures—from the world it doubly fails to perceive. The saccadic looking-away-from the queer open places of these “maps” (whether metaphorical or literal) precludes the possibility of engagement, care, or substantive relation. What’s left is a nonrelated gap held in constant place by the eye/I that is structured to overlook it. Perhaps sexuality here is resettled, then, rather than simply unsettled. The occluded queer failures tug uncomfortably at the edges of its vision in naturalized processes of forcibly overlooking them. The easiness of perceiving Crusoe’s island on the map imperceptibly skips over a vertiginous expanse of projected-over relations that, try as we might, we cannot see.⁴⁷

NOTES

1. 1. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

2. 2. Anne McClintock explores a similar text in the opening of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), though her map claims far less representative verisimilitude.

3. 3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 162.

4. 4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 165.

5. 5. Since McClintock’s Imperial Leather, Richard Braverman’s Plots and Counterplots, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, this linkage has been explored extensively. This essay takes for granted the interrelationship of those terms when approached from a postcolonial stance. See Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

6. 6. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 165.

7. 7. Melissa K. Downes, “Erotic Bo(u)Nds: Domination, Possession, Enclosure and the Self in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” in The Erotic in Context, ed. M. Soraya García-Sánchez, Cara Judea Alhadeff, and Joel Kuennen (London: Brill Publishers, 2010), 171–182 (171).

8. 8. Downes, “Erotic Bo(u)Nds,” 171.

9. 9. This also follows King’s analysis of the productive slip between “I” and “eye.” See King, The Black Shoals, 88–89.

10. 10. Cartographic imaginaries have been explored at length within the Black radical tradition, as in King, The Black Shoals, 74–110; Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (New York: Vintage, 2002); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13–19; and Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

11. 11. In The Black Shoals, King refers to the Blackened and Indigenized spaces on maps as “chaotic space” and “anaspace,” respectively (77–78).

12. 12. On Indigenous place-based knowledge as a vector for engaging with decolonial sexuality and human-being, I am thinking with Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 4–22; Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Catherine E. Walsh and Walter Mignolo, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); King, The Black Shoals; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

13. 13. S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

14. 14. Ala Alryyes, “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: ‘Maps,’ Natural Law, and the Enemy,” Eighteenth-Century Life 44, no. 3 (September 2020): 51–74 (52).

15. 15. Alryyes, “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” 58.

16. 16. This dynamic between projection and displacement through appeal to a larger I/eye is echoed in Hans Turley’s work about how Defoe displaces Crusoe’s anxieties about normative sexuality through an appeal that I’d characterize as “upward” toward God rather than “outward.” This saccadic motion and its relation to the project of verisimilitude in this text is characteristic of both Turley’s and my reading. See Hans Turley, “The Sublimation of Desire to Apocalyptic Passion in Defoe’s Crusoe Trilogy,” in Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, ed. Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 3–20.

17. 17. Andrew Franta, Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

18. 18. Alryyes, “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” 58.

19. 19. Jen Jack Gieseking, “Geographical Imagination,” in The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, ed. D. Richardson, N. Castree, M. Goodchild, A. Jaffrey, W. Lui, A. Kobayashi, and R. Marston (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 1–8.

20. 20. As Gieseking argues: “Studies around cognitive and mental mapping reveal how situated and specific the geographical imagination is to a person, and also related to a person’s race, class, gender, sexuality, and sense of embodiment and privilege” (“Geographical Imagination,” 3).

21. 21. A great deal of scholarship in Black studies works through this claim and its consequences, especially in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. See, for instance, the work of Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

22. 22. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer (New York: Oxford University Press 2008), 18.

23. 23. Joseph Campana, “Cruising Crusoe: Diving into the Wreck of Sexuality,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 159–179 (167).

24. 24. Campana, “Cruising Crusoe,” 175.

25. 25. Kristeva, quoted. in Campana, “Cruising Crusoe,” 171.

26. 26. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 22.

27. 27. “I knew not what, or where; neither what Latitude, what Country, what Nations, or what River.” (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 22).

28. 28. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 25.

29. 29. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

30. 30. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 29.

31. 31. Turley, “The Sublimation of Desire,” 3.

32. 32. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 43.

33. 33. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 45.

34. 34. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 49.

35. 35. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 48.

36. 36. Paul Kelleher, “A Table in the Wilderness: Desire, Subjectivity, and Animal Husbandry in Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 9–29 (20).

37. 37. Kelleher, “A Table in the Wilderness,” 15.

38. 38. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 74, 88.

39. 39. Kelleher, “Animal Husbandry in Robinson Crusoe,” 27.

40. 40. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 88.

41. 41. Crusoe “came to be so pester’d with Cats, that [he] was forc’d to kill them like Vermine, or wild Beasts, and to drive them from [his] House as much as possible” (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 88).

42. 42. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 88.

43. 43. Gabriel Rosenberg, “How Meat Changed Sex: The Law of Interspecies Intimacy after Industrial Reproduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 23, no. 4 (October 2017): 473–507.

44. 44. King, The Black Shoals, 85.

45. 45. King, The Black Shoals, 77–78.

46. 46. I draw this formulation from Snorton’s use in Black on Both Sides. King also points out how these fantasies are related to the fantasy of Black fungibility. See Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 8–11; and King, The Black Shoals, 21–26.

47. 47. This coincides with the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); and Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). My hope, drawing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s logic from The Undercommons, is to write endnotes to be capacious and vibrant spaces under and around the text, where a writer invites in alternatives, messiness, and where academic thought begins to undiscipline itself. I hope this note holds open this space and invites in as much as it can hold. See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 106–107.