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Spectacular Sufferingfocuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Sufferingthen turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves' embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion-African slaves-negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights.Spectacular Sufferingis an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

Given the high mortality rates aboard slave ships, the Middle Passage was known as a “voyage of death.” Disease and death, sickness and mortality, profoundly characterized the lives of Africans during the Atlantic crossing. This essay examines the subjective experience of dispossession, focusing in particular on a psychosomatic disease that was thought to be endemic to Africans forcibly migrated from home: “fixed melancholy.” Drawing on tracts on nautical medicine, slave ship captains’ journals, and evidence generated by the Parliamentary Committee’s testimonies, I argue that “fixed melancholy” is best understood as a form of nostalgia, an affective attempt at return that is simultaneously a symptom of the emotional distress produced by dislocation and a mechanism for slaves to resist their conditions of servitude. Via a brief reading of the opening chapters of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I also show how nostalgia—or the memory of place—continued to exert a residual influence on the emancipatory imagination in black diaspora.

After being kidnapped from West Africa at the age of ten and forcibly migrated across the Atlantic, the newly-orphaned Equiano begins to model social relations based on kinship, inventing a sequence of quasi-filiative ties to counter the social death ofslavery. Likewise, during the years of antislavery activism, he deploys an idiom of racial affiliation to create fraternal alliances with fellow African slaves in the diaspora—the enslaved in the Caribbean and the disenfranchised in England and America—and the native inhabitants on continental Africa, in an effort to connect the immediate goal of abolition with the more ambitious program of racial uplift, the legislative repeal of the slave trade with African nationalism. Situating kinship at the intersection of the biological and the social, the consanguineal and the contractual, this essay considers the primacy of familial, racial, and national attachments that Equiano fosters throughout his life. Kinship in The Interesting Narrative (1789), I argue, is not a static structure but a dynamic site of praxis, a mechanism for forging filiative and affiliative connections—and, indeed, the bedrock of individual self-constitution and racial renewal.

This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy—dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.

This Roundtable marks the beginning of a new era for the Journal of British Studies (JBS). Volume 63, issue 4, October 2024, was the last traditional issue printed on paper. No longer will members of the North American Conference on British Studies receive a bound volume quarterly in the mail. We fully understand that for many of our readers the end of print is emotionally wrought, and it constitutes a loss that is tangible and personal. We know that many people enjoy reading the journal from cover to cover, or dipping in and out, and then archiving it on their bookshelves for future use. In using the journal in this way, our readers have cherished JBS as a material object. As scholars born into an age of mass communication, cheap print, long distance shipping, and widespread literacy, we have taken the format of the academic journal for granted. But as historians we know better than anyone that the only thing constant is change. This Roundtable demonstrates that print—what it is, what it enables, what it means—has always been both capacious and contentious. As editors, we hope these essays spark a critical consideration of the age of print and encourage us to move forward into the new era together, innovating in the ways we produce, disseminate, and consume knowledge.

The circulation of the Yarico-Inkle story in eighteenth-century England poses the problem of metropolitan engagements with colonial slavery in an acute yet highly attenuated form. In two early histories of the Caribbean—Richard Ligon’sA True and Exact History of Barbados(1657), the original source of Yarico, and J. R. Oldmixon’sThe British Empire in America(1708), a work that silently incorporates Ligon’s prior account—Yarico figures within the context of plantation slavery, mainly in discussions of native Carib life in Barbados. But following Richard Steele’s sentimental version published inSpectator11 (1711)—in which the Amerindian Yarico is betrayed