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result(s) for
"Antislavery movements in literature"
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Abolition Time
How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions
and redefine literary scholarship Abolition Time
is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through
literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory,
critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation
with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A.
Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral
epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.
Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth
century through the twenty-first-such as William Wells Brown's
The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel, Toni
Morrison's A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine's
Citizen -to consider literature and literary scholarship's
roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic
literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how
these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer
relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance,
property, or biology.
Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking
critically about what is meant by the term justice in the
broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the
question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously
about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the
abolitionist movement.
eBook
The illustrated slave : empathy, graphic narrative, and the visual culture of the transatlantic abolition movement, 1800-1852
\"... analyzes ... works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Debating the Slave Trade
How did the arguments developed in the debate to abolish the slave trade help to construct a British national identity and character in the late eighteenth century? Srividhya Swaminathan examines books, pamphlets, and literary works to trace the changes in rhetorical strategies utilized by both sides of the abolitionist debate. Framing them as competing narratives engaged in defining the nature of the Briton, Swaminathan reads the arguments of pro- and anti-abolitionists as a series of dialogues among diverse groups at the center and peripheries of the empire. Arguing that neither side emerged triumphant, Swaminathan suggests that the Briton who emerged from these debates represented a synthesis of arguments, and that the debates to abolish the slave trade are marked by rhetorical transformations defining the image of the Briton as one that led naturally to nineteenth-century imperialism and a sense of global superiority. Because the slave-trade debates were waged openly in print rather than behind the closed doors of Parliament, they exerted a singular influence on the British public. At their height, between 1788 and 1793, publications numbered in the hundreds, spanned every genre, and circulated throughout the empire. Among the voices represented are writers from both sides of the Atlantic in dialogue with one another, such as key African authors like Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano; West India planters and merchants; and Quaker activist Anthony Benezet. Throughout, Swaminathan offers fresh and nuanced readings that eschew the view that the abolition of the slave trade was inevitable or that the ultimate defeat of pro-slavery advocates was absolute.
eBook
American slaves in Victorian England : abolitionist politics in popular literature and culture
This study examines the circulation within England of the ideas of the black abolitionist campaign. It surveys the reshaping of American abolitionism by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and the worker versus the slave.
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Apocalyptic Sentimentalism
In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy,Apocalyptic Sentimentalismdemonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite-fear, especially the fear of God's wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to \"feel right\" or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God's apocalyptic vengeance-and the terror that this threat inspired-functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad for sympathy and love. Fear, then, was at the center of nineteenth-century sentimental strategies for inciting antislavery reform, bolstering love when love faltered, and operating as a powerful mechanism for establishing interracial sympathy. Depictions of God's apocalyptic vengeance constituted the most efficient strategy for antislavery writers to generate a sense of terror in their audience.
Focusing on a range of important antislavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown,Apocalyptic Sentimentalismillustrates how antislavery discourse worked to redefine violence and vengeance as the ultimate expression (rather than denial) of love and sympathy. At the same time, these warnings of apocalyptic retribution enabled antislavery writers to express, albeit indirectly, fantasies of brutal violence against slaveholders. What began as a sentimental strategy quickly became an incendiary gesture, with antislavery reformers envisioning the complete annihilation of slaveholders and defenders of slavery.
eBook
Provocative eloquence : theater, violence, and antislavery speech in the antebellum United States
\"In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery's defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As antislavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Victory of law : the Fourteenth amendment, the Civil War, and American literature, 1852-1867
In Victory of Law, Deak Nabers examines developing ideas about the nature of law as reflected in literary and political writing before, during, and after the American Civil War. Nabers traces the evolution of antislavery thought from its pre-war opposition to the constitutional order of the young nation to its ultimate elevation of the U.S. Constitution as an expression of the ideal of justice—an ideal embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nabers shows how the intellectual history of the Fourteenth Amendment was rooted in literary sources—including Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and William Wells Brown's Clotel —as well as in legal texts such as Somerset v. Stewart, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Charles Sumner's \"Freedom National\" address. Not only were prominent writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass instrumental in remapping the relations between law and freedom, but figures like Sumner and John Bingham helped develop a systematic antislavery reading of the Constitution which established literary texts as sources for legal authority.
This interdisciplinary study sheds light on the transformative significance of emerging legalist and constitutionalist forms of antislavery thinking on the literature of the 1850s and 1860s and the growing centrality of aesthetic considerations to antebellum American legal theory and practice—the historical terms in which a distinctively American cultural identity was conceived.
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