What is it about?
A collection of essays about the relationship between literature and slavery with a special focus on the role played by different types of emotions in the representation of the history of slavery and the ways literature has portrayed the many emotional aspects of the history.
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Why is it important?
This innovative volume is an important contribution to the comparative study of slavery as s theme of literature. The chapters touch on contexts ranging from sixteenth-century Portugal to twenty-first century Africa, and explore literary genres ranging from poetry to travel narratives and the novel, drawing on disciplinary and critical lenses that include affect theory, microhistory, biography, psychoanalysis, film theory and narrative and genre studies.
Perspectives
I am one of the editors of this three-volume series, which grew out of workshops held in Martinique, Paris and New York. It has been very refreshing to collaborate with an international group of scholars working on so many different regions, languages and historical periods. I wrote the Introduction to Volume 1, which creates a framework for the chapters that follow by raising a broad set of questions about slavery, literature and the emotions. It identifies slavery as a site of both obvious and less obvious and 'minor-key' emotions, considers how our ways of naming and conceptualizing emotional experience have changed over time, and highlights critical debates about sentiment and affect. I also wrote the volume's second chapter, "Slavery, Race and Affect in Gustave de Beaumont." This piece shows how, during the nineteenth century, ideas about race as a mode of human identity sharpened in tandem with the gradual elimination of slavery. As a case study, it explores a fascinating novel that straddles two contexts: the United States and France.
Madeleine Dobie
Columbia University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery, November 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/chlel.xxxvi.
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