606029840 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code CHLEL XXXVI Eb 15 9789027246363 06 10.1075/chlel.36 DG 002 02 01 CHLEL 02 0238-0668 Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI 01 CHLEL Slavery A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery 01 chlel.36 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.36 1 B01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie Columbia University 2 B01 Mads Anders Baggesgaard Baggesgaard, Mads Anders Mads Anders Baggesgaard Aarhus University 3 B01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Aarhus University 01 eng 360 xx 334 + index LIT024000 v.2006 DSB 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIT.THEOR Theoretical literature & literary studies 06 01 The first volume of <i>A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery</i> explores literary representations of enslavement with a focus on the emotions. The contributors consider how the diverse emotions generated by slavery have been represented over a historical period stretching from the 16th century to the present and across regions, languages, media and genres. The seventeen chapters explore different framings of emotional life in terms of ‘sentiments’ and ‘affects’ and consider how emotions intersect with literary registers and movements such as melodrama and realism. They also examine how writers, including some formerly enslaved people, sought to activate the feelings of readers, notably in the context of abolitionism. In addition to obvious psychological responses to slavery such as fear, sorrow and anger, they explore minor-key affects such as shame, disgust and nostalgia and address the complexity of depicting love and intimacy in situations of domination. Two forthcoming volumes explore the literary history of slavery in relation to memory and to practices of authorship. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/chlel.36.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027218148.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027218148.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/chlel.36.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/chlel.36.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/chlel.36.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/chlel.36.hb.png 10 01 JB code chlel.36.toc v vi 2 Table of contents 1 10 01 JB code chlel.36.intro vii xx 14 Miscellaneous 2 1 A01 Mads Anders Baggesgaard Baggesgaard, Mads Anders Mads Anders Baggesgaard 2 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 3 A01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen 10 01 JB code chlel.36.intro2 1 15 15 Chapter 3 1 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p1 17 1 Section header 4 10 01 JB code chlel.36.01fes 18 34 17 Chapter 5 1 A01 Lynn Festa Festa, Lynn Lynn Festa 20 abolition 20 affect 20 disgust 20 Great Britain Parliament 20 sentimentality 20 slave trade 01 This essay addresses the way details about the unspeakable conditions on the slave ships interrupt the sentimentalization of the plight of the enslaved in order to examine the political volatility of affect — in particular, disgust — in the late eighteenth-century metropolitan debates over the abolition of the slave trade. While disgust, with its capacity to assign abject qualities to objects, would seem to be the province of the proslavery advocates seeking to strip the enslaved of their claim to humanity, this volatile affect also plays a role in abolitionist efforts to convert visceral responses to descriptions of the Middle Passage into an impetus for action, making dehumanizing revulsion into moral outrage. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.02dob 35 50 16 Chapter 6 1 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 20 affect theory 20 Alexis de Tocqueville 20 Gustave de Beaumont 20 history of race 20 Romanticism 20 shame 20 stigma 01 Gustave de Beaumont’s novel <i>Marie, ou l’esclavage</i> (1835), a companion piece to Alexis de Tocqueville’s <i>Democracy In America</i> (1835, 1840) (Beaumont accompanied Tocqueville on his travels through the United States) belongs to a small group of early nineteenth-century francophone fictions in which the question of slavery is deflected onto the examination of race. Romantic psychology and epistemology shape Beaumont’s exploration of race as a site of emotional intensity that has no fixed referent. This treatment of race as an emotional forcefield rather than as the cause of an emotional effect, anticipates the work of theorists of affect and social emotionality such as Sara Ahmed. While Beaumont strives to demystify race, thereby exposing the absurdity of racial prejudice, by centering whiteness as an aesthetic value and metaphor for purity, the novel in the end illustrates its tenacious hold. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.03bir 51 77 27 Chapter 7 1 A01 Helene Engnes Birkeli Birkeli, Helene Engnes Helene Engnes Birkeli 20 affect 20 colonial visual culture 20 Danish West Indies 20 miscegenation 20 portraiture 20 race 20 whiteness 01 This essay argues that <i>Little Marie on Neky’s Arm</i> (1838), a portrait by the Danish painter Niels P. Holbech, provides a challenge to sentimental constructions of the West-Indian “nanny” figure. The relational ambiguity of this painting recalls that of the wet nurse and her charge, a figure of nineteenth-century French painting described by Linda Nochlin (1988). In the context of the colonial imaginary, the nanny figure represented fears of “miscegenation” while also acting as a foil to white European motherhood. Other Danish painters portrayed the nanny figure against the backdrop of the external world. Holbech, however, foregrounds Neky and her charge, Marie by locating them in an indeterminate space. Through its close attention to detail and difference, the painting lays bare the colonial ideology demarcating near and far, nation and colony. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p2 79 1 Section header 8 10 01 JB code chlel.36.04kja 80 96 17 Chapter 9 1 A01 Jonas Ross Kjærgård Kjærgård, Jonas Ross Jonas Ross Kjærgård 20 belonging 20 early American history 20 Haitian Revolution 20 horror 20 Leonora Sansay 20 sentimentality 20 structures of feeling 01 <i>Secret History</i> tells the story of two sisters, Mary and Clara, who have joined Clara’s husband as he attempts to regain his lost colonial possessions in the final period of the Haitian Revolution. In contrast to the frights she experiences in war-ridden Saint-Domingue, Mary dreams longingly of a stable home. This chapter analyzes the novel’s dichotomy of horrifying fear and happy dreams on the level of figurative language, composition, and literary geography. It argues that <i>Secret History</i> engages with the specific challenge of forging a North-American cultural identity. The chapter also explores Sansay’s use of the sentimental mode, showing that it is used to interrogate the humanity of friends and foes, enslaved and free. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.05koh 97 111 15 Chapter 10 1 A01 Sigrid G. Köhler Köhler, Sigrid G. Sigrid G. Köhler 20 abolitionism 20 aesthetics of the drastic 20 August von Kotzebue 20 human rights 20 law and emotion 20 popular German theatre 01 German-language playwrights inscribed themselves into the international debate on abolition at the end of the 18th century, making themselves part of a transnational political communicative space. Most of these authors are rarely read today, except for August von Kotzebue, the most frequently performed German-language author of this period. These authors usually conceived their plays as discourse dramas that reflected the contradiction between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the system of enslavement and denounced slavery as a violation of human rights. To this end, as an analysis of Kotzebue’s play <i>The Negro Slaves</i> will show, they transgress the sentimentalist aesthetics prevailing in contemporary theater and develop an implicit poetics and aesthetics of what I call the ‘drastic.’ 10 01 JB code chlel.36.06col 112 137 26 Chapter 11 1 A01 Jane-Marie Collins Collins, Jane-Marie Jane-Marie Collins 20 abolitionism 20 Brazil 20 Christianity 20 sentimental novel 20 slavery 01 The first Brazilian abolitionist novel, <i>Úrsula</i> (1859), was written by a Black woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825–1917). Reis’s entire literary production was lost for over a century and discovery and recovery commenced only in the 1960s. This chapter examines <i>Úrsula</i>, and Reis’s short story <i>A escrava</i> [The slave woman] (1887). <i>Úrsula</i> was written in the decade following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850, while <i>A escrava</i> was written on the brink of the abolition of slavery (1888) and the fall of the monarchy (1889). The analysis presented here locates Reis’s writing within the Brazilian historiography of slavery and abolition. It is also framed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of sentiment and the conventions of sentimental writing. Drawing on Lynn Festa’s work on sentimental writing under British and French imperialism, sentiment is adopted here as a supple tool of analysis that permits a discursive and historical disentangling of Reis’s literary treatment of slavery and abolition. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.07sim 138 158 21 Chapter 12 1 A01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen 20 Cuba 20 human rights 20 melancholy 20 melodrama 20 natural rights 20 tableau vivant 20 tragedy 01 The novel <i>Sab</i> (1841) by the Cuban-Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda has been called both a radical anti-slavery novel (Sommer 1991, Davies 2013) and an anti-abolitionist novel that only pays lip service to the abolitionist cause (Williams 2008, Gomariz, 2009). In this article I approach this ambiguity by moving the focus from content to form and from story to reader. Building on insights by Peter Brooks (1976), Jacky Bowring (2017) and David Denby (1994), I argue that formally the novel is a melodramatic tragedy and that its melodramatic tableaux vivants foster moral reflection in the reader by creating a clash between the ideal and the real and between surface and depth. I develop this in critical dialogue with ideas about the (dis)connection between emotionality, empathy and human rights by Lynn Hunt (Hunt 2007) and Lynn Festa (2006). 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p3 159 1 Section header 13 10 01 JB code chlel.36.08wik 160 174 15 Chapter 14 1 A01 Toby Erik Wikström Wikström, Toby Erik Toby Erik Wikström 20 early-modern 20 genre studies 20 Mediterranean 20 seventeenth-century 20 theater 01 This article seeks to historicize the eighteenth-century sentimental literature of slavery by examining theatrical performances of cross-cultural servitude from an earlier, markedly different historical context, that of seventeenth-century France. In contrast to the sentimental period, transatlantic empire was still more aspiration than reality for France in the 1600s, slavery more a Mediterranean than an Atlantic phenomenon, and racial discourse still in gestation. I demonstrate that the ways in which French seventeenth-century playwrights modeled their audience’s emotional response to cross-cultural slavery evolved over time, moving from the possibility of audience identification with enslaved characters to a foreclosure of that possibility. The mechanism for this tendency to prevent identification is what I call generic drift, the migration of representations of servitude from the tragic to the tragicomic and comic stages. To demonstrate the evolution of the theater’s modeling of emotional responses to slavery from possible identification to the prevention of identification over time, I analyze representations of servitude in <i>Le More cruel</i>, an anonymous tragedy from 1610, Scudéry’s 1636 tragicomedy <i>L’Amant liberal</i> and Montfleury’s 1663–64 comedy <i>Le Mary sans femme</i>. I show that the tragedy partially encourages the audience to feel compassion for the plight of the slave, whereas the tragicomic and comic plays incite erotic pleasure or scorn, reactions that distance the audience from the enslaved. I also relate the generic drift to the increased disciplining of compassion in the 1600s and to France’s growing participation in the Atlantic slave trade. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.09dwy 175 192 18 Chapter 15 1 A01 Erin Austin Dwyer Dwyer, Erin Austin Erin Austin Dwyer 20 abolitionism 20 antebellum period 20 sentimentalism 20 slave narratives 20 United States 01 This chapter details the ideological foundations of the emotional norms of slavery and debates over whether those practices and feelings were tied to race or to slave status. It examines how theories of racialized emotional difference circulated, and the proslavery ramifications of those ideas, as well as how formerly enslaved people used the medium of slave narratives to refute white supremacist ideas about their affective inferiority and subvert the expectations of sentimental audiences. Abolitionists’ argument that emotional differences were rooted in slave status, not race, jeopardized proslavery ideology and individual slaveholders, as it meant that after Emancipation, Black people would expect the same emotional liberty as free people. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.10mou 193 209 17 Chapter 16 1 A01 Sarga Moussa Moussa, Sarga Sarga Moussa 2 A01 Diane Gagneret Gagneret, Diane Diane Gagneret 20 abolitionism 20 Alphonse de Lamartine 20 empathy 20 gender 20 Gérard de Nerval 20 orientalism 20 slave market 20 tears 20 travel literature 20 Victor Schoelcher 01 The oriental travel narratives of the first half of the nineteenth century played an important role in debates about slavery. An episode in the slave market of Constantinople that appeared in Alphonse de Lamartine’s <i>Voyage en Orient</i> (1735) created a model followed by later writers. But while Lamartine, a committed abolitionist, tried to stir up feelings of pity by describing the sale of a Black woman and her child, in Marcellus, Nerval and Pückler-Muskau, similar descriptions evoked different reactions, ranging from the condemnation of Islamic polygamy to the acceptance of slavery as an ‘oriental fatality.’ Nerval, for his part, reserved pity for the fate of White slaves. Oriental travel narratives as such represent a kind of emotional barometer that gauges both the progress of abolitionist discourse and resistance to it. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.11rob 210 227 18 Chapter 17 1 A01 Lori Robison Robison, Lori Lori Robison 20 desire 20 fantasy 20 ideology 20 Lacan 20 object-gaze 20 sympathy 20 Todd McGowan 20 traumatic gaze 01 This chapter considers the disruptive power of two nineteenth-century literary scenes, one from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i> (1852) and one from Lydia Maria Child’s <i>A Romance of the Republic</i> (1867), in which portrayals of enslaved women activate the emotions of readers while challenging the usual workings of sympathy. Drawing on the work of film theorist Todd McGowan, I find in these scenes a Lacanian gaze that unsettles readers by looking back at them, creating an opportunity for them to see ideology as ideology. Through this approach, I identify a textual strategy that challenges slavery and racism while pushing back against the racial objectifications inherent in the dynamics of sympathy: a strategy that could ultimately intervene in the cultural construction of Whiteness and Blackness. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p4 229 1 Section header 18 10 01 JB code chlel.36.12pal 230 242 13 Chapter 19 1 A01 Jennifer L. Palmer Palmer, Jennifer L. Jennifer L. Palmer 20 18th century 20 emotion 20 empire 20 France 20 gender 20 race 20 relationship 20 Saint-Domingue 20 slavery 20 testament 01 Plantation slavery brought whites and people of color into constant intimate contact in a system of intense forcible domination and subordination. This generated powerful emotions on the part of both enslavers and the enslaved. A close reading of one testament from eighteenth-century French Saint-Domingue suggests that systems of enslavement prompted a range of emotions on the part of white slave owners. While the emotional responses of the enslaved are much more difficult to identify, this example suggests that emotions played a key role in leading to or discouraging manumission. Why else would the wealthy, childless widow Marie-Magdeleine Rossignol manumit nine slaves in her will? 10 01 JB code chlel.36.13cot 243 258 16 Chapter 20 1 A01 Myriam Cottias Cottias, Myriam Myriam Cottias 20 abolition 20 indemnity 20 intimacy 20 life writing 20 Martinique 20 planter’s diary 20 reparations 01 This article considers the relationship between compensation and intimacy, focusing on the relationship between the colonist Pierre Dessalles, who owned a plantation in the French colony of Martinique in the mid-nineteenth century, i.e. the period of the abolition of slavery, and Nicaise, one of his slaves. It shows slavery to be a relation of property and domination that did not, however, foreclose the possibility of emotional ties ranging from fear, anger and disgust to love. Readings of the diary of this planter — an exceptional document for its time — show how intimacy and “emotion” in all senses of the word — feelings but also, in French, something closer to “stirring” or “revolt” — both shape and are shaped by the political situation in which they develop. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.14gom 259 275 17 Chapter 21 1 A01 António Martins Gomes Gomes, António Martins António Martins Gomes 20 exoticism 20 Luís de Camões 20 lyric poetry 20 Portuguese empire 20 Romanticism 01 This chapter examines two contrasting emotional responses to enslaved people in the writing of the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luís de Camões. On the one hand, Bárbora, the captive woman made famous in a lyrical poem by Camões, stands for the golden age of Portuguese discoveries and its open-mindedness towards far-off exotic civilizations; on the other, Camões depicts Jau, the Javanese slave he owned for about a decade, in a way that suggests social conservatism and indifference. In the nineteenth century, many Romantic authors and artists, inspired by the figure of the noble savage and a new emphasis on emotional bonds, highlighted the importance of these two slaves in the life of Camões. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p5 277 1 Section header 22 10 01 JB code chlel.36.15kul 278 294 17 Chapter 23 1 A01 Christina Kullberg Kullberg, Christina Christina Kullberg 20 Du Tertre 20 early modern Caribbean 20 Francophone studies 20 French literature 20 Labat 20 Mongin 20 slavery 20 travel writing 01 This chapter examines the inclusion of voices of the enslaved in seventeenth-century French travel writing to the Caribbean by looking at three missionaries writing at different moments of the French settlement and the early colonization: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654 and 1667–71), written by the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre; Jesuit missionary Jean Mongin’s letters on the evangelization of slaves, written in the 1680s; and Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, from his stay in Martinique between 1694 and 1706. It makes the argument that while commerce and profit were unquestionably the main motivations for allowing and sustaining slavery, travelogues also play on another, emotional register when representing slavery. The aim of the chapter is to interrogate the factors underpinning this representational strategy and in so doing to draw conclusions about how the techniques and motivations for including voices changed as slavery was gradually naturalized in the Caribbean. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.16mil 295 312 18 Chapter 24 1 A01 Marilyn G. Miller Miller, Marilyn G. Marilyn G. Miller 20 autobiography 20 Cuba 20 melancholy 20 poetry 20 rationality 20 romanticism 20 somaesthetics 01 Many of the most gripping scenes in the first-person account of life under slavery by the 19th century Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reference pleasures and punishments involving the exercise of the emotions. His works in both narrative and verse strikingly foreground emotional duress as a central and lasting product of the psychosocial and physical abuse that characterized enslavement. Denied the free expression of his own senses and emotions, his autobiographical protagonist is at the same time subject to the degraded sensory indulgences of overseers and others who force him to participate in acts that perpetuate his own harm. In the dramatic representation of these traumatic episodes, Manzano notes how his natural liveliness, bonhomie and even affection for those around him were gradually replaced by overwhelming melancholy and foreboding. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.17mur 313 329 17 Chapter 25 1 A01 Laura T. Murphy Murphy, Laura T. Laura T. Murphy 20 blood 20 child soldier 20 civil war 20 Emmanuel Jal 20 Frederick Douglass 20 Ishmael Beah 20 modern slavery 20 new slave narrative 20 Sierra Leone 20 slave narrative 01 This paper suggests that the slave narrative employs metonymy as an archive of memory when authors are unwilling or unable to articulate the experience of trauma explicitly. Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s use of the “blood-stained gate” metaphor as a repository for his emotional suffering, the paper describes how blood serves as a metonymic vehicle for communicating authenticity in narratives in which affective descriptions run counter to the ambitions of the genre. Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child (2008) present contrasting cases of blood’s capacity to serve as a repository for the emotional content of war. The trope of blood is then is used a lens for understanding why audiences respond skeptically to slave narratives and suggests a less suspicious reading practice among scholars and activists. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.contribs 330 333 4 Chapter 26 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2024 20241215 2024 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 01 245 mm 02 174 mm 13 15 9789027218148 01 JB 3 John Benjamins e-Platform 03 jbe-platform.com 09 WORLD 10 20241215 01 00 153.00 EUR R 01 00 129.00 GBP Z 01 gen 00 199.00 USD S 248029839 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code CHLEL XXXVI Hb 15 9789027218148 BB 01 CHLEL 02 0238-0668 Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI 01 CHLEL Slavery A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery 01 chlel.36 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.36 1 B01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie Columbia University 2 B01 Mads Anders Baggesgaard Baggesgaard, Mads Anders Mads Anders Baggesgaard Aarhus University 3 B01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Aarhus University 01 eng 360 xx 334 + index LIT024000 v.2006 DSB 2 24 JB Subject Scheme LIT.THEOR Theoretical literature & literary studies 06 01 The first volume of <i>A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery</i> explores literary representations of enslavement with a focus on the emotions. The contributors consider how the diverse emotions generated by slavery have been represented over a historical period stretching from the 16th century to the present and across regions, languages, media and genres. The seventeen chapters explore different framings of emotional life in terms of ‘sentiments’ and ‘affects’ and consider how emotions intersect with literary registers and movements such as melodrama and realism. They also examine how writers, including some formerly enslaved people, sought to activate the feelings of readers, notably in the context of abolitionism. In addition to obvious psychological responses to slavery such as fear, sorrow and anger, they explore minor-key affects such as shame, disgust and nostalgia and address the complexity of depicting love and intimacy in situations of domination. Two forthcoming volumes explore the literary history of slavery in relation to memory and to practices of authorship. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/chlel.36.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027218148.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027218148.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/chlel.36.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/chlel.36.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/chlel.36.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/chlel.36.hb.png 10 01 JB code chlel.36.toc v vi 2 Table of contents 1 10 01 JB code chlel.36.intro vii xx 14 Miscellaneous 2 1 A01 Mads Anders Baggesgaard Baggesgaard, Mads Anders Mads Anders Baggesgaard 2 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 3 A01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen 10 01 JB code chlel.36.intro2 1 15 15 Chapter 3 1 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p1 17 1 Section header 4 10 01 JB code chlel.36.01fes 18 34 17 Chapter 5 1 A01 Lynn Festa Festa, Lynn Lynn Festa 20 abolition 20 affect 20 disgust 20 Great Britain Parliament 20 sentimentality 20 slave trade 01 This essay addresses the way details about the unspeakable conditions on the slave ships interrupt the sentimentalization of the plight of the enslaved in order to examine the political volatility of affect — in particular, disgust — in the late eighteenth-century metropolitan debates over the abolition of the slave trade. While disgust, with its capacity to assign abject qualities to objects, would seem to be the province of the proslavery advocates seeking to strip the enslaved of their claim to humanity, this volatile affect also plays a role in abolitionist efforts to convert visceral responses to descriptions of the Middle Passage into an impetus for action, making dehumanizing revulsion into moral outrage. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.02dob 35 50 16 Chapter 6 1 A01 Madeleine Dobie Dobie, Madeleine Madeleine Dobie 20 affect theory 20 Alexis de Tocqueville 20 Gustave de Beaumont 20 history of race 20 Romanticism 20 shame 20 stigma 01 Gustave de Beaumont’s novel <i>Marie, ou l’esclavage</i> (1835), a companion piece to Alexis de Tocqueville’s <i>Democracy In America</i> (1835, 1840) (Beaumont accompanied Tocqueville on his travels through the United States) belongs to a small group of early nineteenth-century francophone fictions in which the question of slavery is deflected onto the examination of race. Romantic psychology and epistemology shape Beaumont’s exploration of race as a site of emotional intensity that has no fixed referent. This treatment of race as an emotional forcefield rather than as the cause of an emotional effect, anticipates the work of theorists of affect and social emotionality such as Sara Ahmed. While Beaumont strives to demystify race, thereby exposing the absurdity of racial prejudice, by centering whiteness as an aesthetic value and metaphor for purity, the novel in the end illustrates its tenacious hold. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.03bir 51 77 27 Chapter 7 1 A01 Helene Engnes Birkeli Birkeli, Helene Engnes Helene Engnes Birkeli 20 affect 20 colonial visual culture 20 Danish West Indies 20 miscegenation 20 portraiture 20 race 20 whiteness 01 This essay argues that <i>Little Marie on Neky’s Arm</i> (1838), a portrait by the Danish painter Niels P. Holbech, provides a challenge to sentimental constructions of the West-Indian “nanny” figure. The relational ambiguity of this painting recalls that of the wet nurse and her charge, a figure of nineteenth-century French painting described by Linda Nochlin (1988). In the context of the colonial imaginary, the nanny figure represented fears of “miscegenation” while also acting as a foil to white European motherhood. Other Danish painters portrayed the nanny figure against the backdrop of the external world. Holbech, however, foregrounds Neky and her charge, Marie by locating them in an indeterminate space. Through its close attention to detail and difference, the painting lays bare the colonial ideology demarcating near and far, nation and colony. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p2 79 1 Section header 8 10 01 JB code chlel.36.04kja 80 96 17 Chapter 9 1 A01 Jonas Ross Kjærgård Kjærgård, Jonas Ross Jonas Ross Kjærgård 20 belonging 20 early American history 20 Haitian Revolution 20 horror 20 Leonora Sansay 20 sentimentality 20 structures of feeling 01 <i>Secret History</i> tells the story of two sisters, Mary and Clara, who have joined Clara’s husband as he attempts to regain his lost colonial possessions in the final period of the Haitian Revolution. In contrast to the frights she experiences in war-ridden Saint-Domingue, Mary dreams longingly of a stable home. This chapter analyzes the novel’s dichotomy of horrifying fear and happy dreams on the level of figurative language, composition, and literary geography. It argues that <i>Secret History</i> engages with the specific challenge of forging a North-American cultural identity. The chapter also explores Sansay’s use of the sentimental mode, showing that it is used to interrogate the humanity of friends and foes, enslaved and free. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.05koh 97 111 15 Chapter 10 1 A01 Sigrid G. Köhler Köhler, Sigrid G. Sigrid G. Köhler 20 abolitionism 20 aesthetics of the drastic 20 August von Kotzebue 20 human rights 20 law and emotion 20 popular German theatre 01 German-language playwrights inscribed themselves into the international debate on abolition at the end of the 18th century, making themselves part of a transnational political communicative space. Most of these authors are rarely read today, except for August von Kotzebue, the most frequently performed German-language author of this period. These authors usually conceived their plays as discourse dramas that reflected the contradiction between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the system of enslavement and denounced slavery as a violation of human rights. To this end, as an analysis of Kotzebue’s play <i>The Negro Slaves</i> will show, they transgress the sentimentalist aesthetics prevailing in contemporary theater and develop an implicit poetics and aesthetics of what I call the ‘drastic.’ 10 01 JB code chlel.36.06col 112 137 26 Chapter 11 1 A01 Jane-Marie Collins Collins, Jane-Marie Jane-Marie Collins 20 abolitionism 20 Brazil 20 Christianity 20 sentimental novel 20 slavery 01 The first Brazilian abolitionist novel, <i>Úrsula</i> (1859), was written by a Black woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825–1917). Reis’s entire literary production was lost for over a century and discovery and recovery commenced only in the 1960s. This chapter examines <i>Úrsula</i>, and Reis’s short story <i>A escrava</i> [The slave woman] (1887). <i>Úrsula</i> was written in the decade following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850, while <i>A escrava</i> was written on the brink of the abolition of slavery (1888) and the fall of the monarchy (1889). The analysis presented here locates Reis’s writing within the Brazilian historiography of slavery and abolition. It is also framed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of sentiment and the conventions of sentimental writing. Drawing on Lynn Festa’s work on sentimental writing under British and French imperialism, sentiment is adopted here as a supple tool of analysis that permits a discursive and historical disentangling of Reis’s literary treatment of slavery and abolition. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.07sim 138 158 21 Chapter 12 1 A01 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe Karen-Margrethe Simonsen 20 Cuba 20 human rights 20 melancholy 20 melodrama 20 natural rights 20 tableau vivant 20 tragedy 01 The novel <i>Sab</i> (1841) by the Cuban-Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda has been called both a radical anti-slavery novel (Sommer 1991, Davies 2013) and an anti-abolitionist novel that only pays lip service to the abolitionist cause (Williams 2008, Gomariz, 2009). In this article I approach this ambiguity by moving the focus from content to form and from story to reader. Building on insights by Peter Brooks (1976), Jacky Bowring (2017) and David Denby (1994), I argue that formally the novel is a melodramatic tragedy and that its melodramatic tableaux vivants foster moral reflection in the reader by creating a clash between the ideal and the real and between surface and depth. I develop this in critical dialogue with ideas about the (dis)connection between emotionality, empathy and human rights by Lynn Hunt (Hunt 2007) and Lynn Festa (2006). 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p3 159 1 Section header 13 10 01 JB code chlel.36.08wik 160 174 15 Chapter 14 1 A01 Toby Erik Wikström Wikström, Toby Erik Toby Erik Wikström 20 early-modern 20 genre studies 20 Mediterranean 20 seventeenth-century 20 theater 01 This article seeks to historicize the eighteenth-century sentimental literature of slavery by examining theatrical performances of cross-cultural servitude from an earlier, markedly different historical context, that of seventeenth-century France. In contrast to the sentimental period, transatlantic empire was still more aspiration than reality for France in the 1600s, slavery more a Mediterranean than an Atlantic phenomenon, and racial discourse still in gestation. I demonstrate that the ways in which French seventeenth-century playwrights modeled their audience’s emotional response to cross-cultural slavery evolved over time, moving from the possibility of audience identification with enslaved characters to a foreclosure of that possibility. The mechanism for this tendency to prevent identification is what I call generic drift, the migration of representations of servitude from the tragic to the tragicomic and comic stages. To demonstrate the evolution of the theater’s modeling of emotional responses to slavery from possible identification to the prevention of identification over time, I analyze representations of servitude in <i>Le More cruel</i>, an anonymous tragedy from 1610, Scudéry’s 1636 tragicomedy <i>L’Amant liberal</i> and Montfleury’s 1663–64 comedy <i>Le Mary sans femme</i>. I show that the tragedy partially encourages the audience to feel compassion for the plight of the slave, whereas the tragicomic and comic plays incite erotic pleasure or scorn, reactions that distance the audience from the enslaved. I also relate the generic drift to the increased disciplining of compassion in the 1600s and to France’s growing participation in the Atlantic slave trade. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.09dwy 175 192 18 Chapter 15 1 A01 Erin Austin Dwyer Dwyer, Erin Austin Erin Austin Dwyer 20 abolitionism 20 antebellum period 20 sentimentalism 20 slave narratives 20 United States 01 This chapter details the ideological foundations of the emotional norms of slavery and debates over whether those practices and feelings were tied to race or to slave status. It examines how theories of racialized emotional difference circulated, and the proslavery ramifications of those ideas, as well as how formerly enslaved people used the medium of slave narratives to refute white supremacist ideas about their affective inferiority and subvert the expectations of sentimental audiences. Abolitionists’ argument that emotional differences were rooted in slave status, not race, jeopardized proslavery ideology and individual slaveholders, as it meant that after Emancipation, Black people would expect the same emotional liberty as free people. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.10mou 193 209 17 Chapter 16 1 A01 Sarga Moussa Moussa, Sarga Sarga Moussa 2 A01 Diane Gagneret Gagneret, Diane Diane Gagneret 20 abolitionism 20 Alphonse de Lamartine 20 empathy 20 gender 20 Gérard de Nerval 20 orientalism 20 slave market 20 tears 20 travel literature 20 Victor Schoelcher 01 The oriental travel narratives of the first half of the nineteenth century played an important role in debates about slavery. An episode in the slave market of Constantinople that appeared in Alphonse de Lamartine’s <i>Voyage en Orient</i> (1735) created a model followed by later writers. But while Lamartine, a committed abolitionist, tried to stir up feelings of pity by describing the sale of a Black woman and her child, in Marcellus, Nerval and Pückler-Muskau, similar descriptions evoked different reactions, ranging from the condemnation of Islamic polygamy to the acceptance of slavery as an ‘oriental fatality.’ Nerval, for his part, reserved pity for the fate of White slaves. Oriental travel narratives as such represent a kind of emotional barometer that gauges both the progress of abolitionist discourse and resistance to it. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.11rob 210 227 18 Chapter 17 1 A01 Lori Robison Robison, Lori Lori Robison 20 desire 20 fantasy 20 ideology 20 Lacan 20 object-gaze 20 sympathy 20 Todd McGowan 20 traumatic gaze 01 This chapter considers the disruptive power of two nineteenth-century literary scenes, one from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i> (1852) and one from Lydia Maria Child’s <i>A Romance of the Republic</i> (1867), in which portrayals of enslaved women activate the emotions of readers while challenging the usual workings of sympathy. Drawing on the work of film theorist Todd McGowan, I find in these scenes a Lacanian gaze that unsettles readers by looking back at them, creating an opportunity for them to see ideology as ideology. Through this approach, I identify a textual strategy that challenges slavery and racism while pushing back against the racial objectifications inherent in the dynamics of sympathy: a strategy that could ultimately intervene in the cultural construction of Whiteness and Blackness. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p4 229 1 Section header 18 10 01 JB code chlel.36.12pal 230 242 13 Chapter 19 1 A01 Jennifer L. Palmer Palmer, Jennifer L. Jennifer L. Palmer 20 18th century 20 emotion 20 empire 20 France 20 gender 20 race 20 relationship 20 Saint-Domingue 20 slavery 20 testament 01 Plantation slavery brought whites and people of color into constant intimate contact in a system of intense forcible domination and subordination. This generated powerful emotions on the part of both enslavers and the enslaved. A close reading of one testament from eighteenth-century French Saint-Domingue suggests that systems of enslavement prompted a range of emotions on the part of white slave owners. While the emotional responses of the enslaved are much more difficult to identify, this example suggests that emotions played a key role in leading to or discouraging manumission. Why else would the wealthy, childless widow Marie-Magdeleine Rossignol manumit nine slaves in her will? 10 01 JB code chlel.36.13cot 243 258 16 Chapter 20 1 A01 Myriam Cottias Cottias, Myriam Myriam Cottias 20 abolition 20 indemnity 20 intimacy 20 life writing 20 Martinique 20 planter’s diary 20 reparations 01 This article considers the relationship between compensation and intimacy, focusing on the relationship between the colonist Pierre Dessalles, who owned a plantation in the French colony of Martinique in the mid-nineteenth century, i.e. the period of the abolition of slavery, and Nicaise, one of his slaves. It shows slavery to be a relation of property and domination that did not, however, foreclose the possibility of emotional ties ranging from fear, anger and disgust to love. Readings of the diary of this planter — an exceptional document for its time — show how intimacy and “emotion” in all senses of the word — feelings but also, in French, something closer to “stirring” or “revolt” — both shape and are shaped by the political situation in which they develop. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.14gom 259 275 17 Chapter 21 1 A01 António Martins Gomes Gomes, António Martins António Martins Gomes 20 exoticism 20 Luís de Camões 20 lyric poetry 20 Portuguese empire 20 Romanticism 01 This chapter examines two contrasting emotional responses to enslaved people in the writing of the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luís de Camões. On the one hand, Bárbora, the captive woman made famous in a lyrical poem by Camões, stands for the golden age of Portuguese discoveries and its open-mindedness towards far-off exotic civilizations; on the other, Camões depicts Jau, the Javanese slave he owned for about a decade, in a way that suggests social conservatism and indifference. In the nineteenth century, many Romantic authors and artists, inspired by the figure of the noble savage and a new emphasis on emotional bonds, highlighted the importance of these two slaves in the life of Camões. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.p5 277 1 Section header 22 10 01 JB code chlel.36.15kul 278 294 17 Chapter 23 1 A01 Christina Kullberg Kullberg, Christina Christina Kullberg 20 Du Tertre 20 early modern Caribbean 20 Francophone studies 20 French literature 20 Labat 20 Mongin 20 slavery 20 travel writing 01 This chapter examines the inclusion of voices of the enslaved in seventeenth-century French travel writing to the Caribbean by looking at three missionaries writing at different moments of the French settlement and the early colonization: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654 and 1667–71), written by the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre; Jesuit missionary Jean Mongin’s letters on the evangelization of slaves, written in the 1680s; and Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, from his stay in Martinique between 1694 and 1706. It makes the argument that while commerce and profit were unquestionably the main motivations for allowing and sustaining slavery, travelogues also play on another, emotional register when representing slavery. The aim of the chapter is to interrogate the factors underpinning this representational strategy and in so doing to draw conclusions about how the techniques and motivations for including voices changed as slavery was gradually naturalized in the Caribbean. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.16mil 295 312 18 Chapter 24 1 A01 Marilyn G. Miller Miller, Marilyn G. Marilyn G. Miller 20 autobiography 20 Cuba 20 melancholy 20 poetry 20 rationality 20 romanticism 20 somaesthetics 01 Many of the most gripping scenes in the first-person account of life under slavery by the 19th century Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reference pleasures and punishments involving the exercise of the emotions. His works in both narrative and verse strikingly foreground emotional duress as a central and lasting product of the psychosocial and physical abuse that characterized enslavement. Denied the free expression of his own senses and emotions, his autobiographical protagonist is at the same time subject to the degraded sensory indulgences of overseers and others who force him to participate in acts that perpetuate his own harm. In the dramatic representation of these traumatic episodes, Manzano notes how his natural liveliness, bonhomie and even affection for those around him were gradually replaced by overwhelming melancholy and foreboding. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.17mur 313 329 17 Chapter 25 1 A01 Laura T. Murphy Murphy, Laura T. Laura T. Murphy 20 blood 20 child soldier 20 civil war 20 Emmanuel Jal 20 Frederick Douglass 20 Ishmael Beah 20 modern slavery 20 new slave narrative 20 Sierra Leone 20 slave narrative 01 This paper suggests that the slave narrative employs metonymy as an archive of memory when authors are unwilling or unable to articulate the experience of trauma explicitly. Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s use of the “blood-stained gate” metaphor as a repository for his emotional suffering, the paper describes how blood serves as a metonymic vehicle for communicating authenticity in narratives in which affective descriptions run counter to the ambitions of the genre. Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child (2008) present contrasting cases of blood’s capacity to serve as a repository for the emotional content of war. The trope of blood is then is used a lens for understanding why audiences respond skeptically to slave narratives and suggests a less suspicious reading practice among scholars and activists. 10 01 JB code chlel.36.contribs 330 333 4 Chapter 26 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2024 20241215 2024 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 01 245 mm 02 174 mm 01 JB 1 John Benjamins Publishing Company +31 20 6304747 +31 20 6739773 bookorder@benjamins.nl 01 https://benjamins.com 01 WORLD US CA MX 10 20241215 01 02 JB 1 00 153.00 EUR R 02 02 JB 1 00 162.18 EUR R 01 JB 10 bebc +44 1202 712 934 +44 1202 712 913 sales@bebc.co.uk 03 GB 10 20241215 02 02 JB 1 00 129.00 GBP Z 01 JB 2 John Benjamins North America +1 800 562-5666 +1 703 661-1501 benjamins@presswarehouse.com 01 https://benjamins.com 01 US CA MX 10 20241215 01 gen 02 JB 1 00 199.00 USD