Antislavery Literature

"The Unknown Painter" is an antislavery short story that first appeared in the mid-1830s.  Its author, original place of publication, and date remain undetermined.  It concerns the Spanish artist Bartoleme Esteban Murillo and his black slave, the painter Sebastian Gomez.  This paper analyzes the nineteenth-century publication history of the story, its translation, and the ideologies of its revisions and republications.  The analysis pays particular attention to racial content, its revision in Frederick Douglass' Paper, the zombie sub-theme, and translations.

Within Catherine Gore’s vast literary corpus there is an uncharacteristic novel titled Adventures in Borneo: A Tale of a Shipwreck (1849), in which the author experiments with exotic settings and adventures, a fictional subgenre in which she is not entirely comfortable. In the period of its publication, the British press was reporting and commenting on the controversial events involving Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, and his anti-piracy campaign in the waters of the Malay Archipelago. In this article I try to investigate Gore’s take on such a delicate topic as British conduct in remote foreign lands, vis-à-vis alien cultures; I also refer to one of her unpublished letters, as well as to Brooke’s journal published in 1846 – most likely her primary source for the socio-cultural information on the Borneo population deployed in the novel. This article also seeks to contribute to the critical-literary debate over Catherine Gore providing a starting point for a more thorough study of her attitude towards British colonialism.

This essay will examine Madge Vertner, Griffith's second antislavery novel, as an exilic voice of Kentucky abolitionism.  The novel speaks to many of the reasons why its author left Kentucky with such antagonism and, given the declining death of the novel's heroine, possibly suggests Griffith believed that if she had not left Owensboro her spirit might have died there too.  Mattie Griffith was a Kentucky novelist, but no local patriot.

Imaginary dialogues had the advantage of emphasizing rationalism and removing argument from the realm of passion and violence.  While they were used often in both anti- and pro-slavery literature of the United States, along with other rhetorical genres they did no more than expose the fault lines in US society created by slavery.  These dialogues were polite addresses to slavery’s daily violence and could not resolve what required a civil war to end.  It was part of the reform literary culture to produce such set-pieces and this type of polite literature was part and parcel of what made much reform writing so ineffective, since it was a drawing-room rendition and philosophical abstraction of raw human experience under slavery.

Au cours des années 1835-1845, le système esclavagiste, qui atteint son apogée à Cuba, détermine et façonne l'idéologie des créoles réformistes. L'esclavage met en exergue les contradictions et les limitations du mouvement réformiste, intégré par des intellectuels, des fonctionnaires et des esclavagistes “progressistes”, issus d'horizons hétérogènes sur le plan géographique, mais qui se rejoignent au moment de condamner le trafic négrier et dans leur rejet de l'abolition. Dans une attitude bourgeoise, les réformistes cubains tentent d'imposer un nouveau système de travail basé sur le salariat, sans succès. Face à une population esclave toujours plus nombreuse, les créoles réformistes sont bridés dans leurs aspirations politiques. Leur posture hostile à la traite suscite le courroux des négriers, des esclavagistes “conservateurs” et des autorités coloniales qui fomentent une campagne diffamatoire à leur endroit, dont la conspiration de La Escalera est l'aboutissement.

We examine how child labour informed the ethos and conscience of one nineteenth-century American writer, and how her workplace memories from a Massachusetts textile mill emerged in literary form to replace a foreshortened childhood.  Lucy Larcom's narratives of child labour during the mid-1840s, published several decades later, represented an inherent advocacy of human developmental rights during a period when U.S. law did not acknowledge children's industrial labour as a social wrong.  Her advocacy was fragmentary and partial, mixed together with larger stories, and did not have an argumentative focus on child labour.  Larcom's continuing return to images and themes of child labour characterizes her writing more than its repetition of standard sentimental tropes of nature.  Her class consciousness of child labour contributed a subterranean radicalism that emerged with opportunity in the imagery of a poet otherwise careful to shape her market acceptability for middle-class Victorian America.  In order to examine that class consciousness, we will first address Larcom's autobiographical self-observations in A New England Girlhood (1889) concerning her life as a teenage factory worker, in order afterwards to contextualize representations of labour in her well-known antislavery poem “Weaving.”

Para un esclavo, ser el agente de su propia enunciación no significa ser el agente de su propia emancipación. Este importante matiz fue el que determinó en gran parte la última etapa de la vida del poeta esclavo Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), “liberado” a instancias de un grupo de intelectuales cubanos en 1836. A cambio de su emancipación, Manzano se había comprometido a escribir su autobiografía, la única redactada por un esclavo en castellano y cuya primera parte terminó en 1839. La problemática de la vida de Manzano radica precisamente en el hecho de que debería su emancipación a los esfuerzos de este cenáculo de intelectuales criollos.
Si el estudio literario y poético de la obra de Manzano tiene una importancia considerable en sí, alcanza otra dimensión cuando se la analiza bajo una perspectiva histórica. La historiografía tradicional y “blanca” presenta la manumisión de Manzano como un gesto altruista y casi revolucionario que honraría a ciertos criollos reformistas de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Algunos ven la liberación de Manzano como el primer ladrillo aportado al edificio abolicionista cubano. Sin embargo, esta manumisión, debido a su carácter excepcional, no permitía prever una posible futura igualdad entre negros, mulatos y blancos en Cuba. Al contrario, esta postura puntual ilustra más bien la actitud interesada de una élite reformista preocupada por hacer durar la esclavitud el mayor tiempo posible, en particular por medio de la política llamada del “buen trato”.

The Heroic Slave (1853) was perhaps the most significant of Douglass's responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Working against the sentimental abstractions inflecting white narrative and visual aesthetics in the period, Douglass's fictive technique invokes the visual realism of the daguerreotype, focusing on the physical form of Madison Washington, while exploring the range of available genres available - dramatic, fictional and historical. Written at a moment at which the very existence of African American freedom seemed to be under threat, the novella produces an enabling fiction of self-emancipation directed not only at the slave South, but seeking to generate a futurist political vision, based on inclusive citizenship, for free black people in the North. In doing so, it marks a retreat from the celebratory transnationalism that had infused Douglass's earlier politics, refocusing its attention on the historical present, and future role of African American in the United States. .

Este ensayo examina la representación de la nodriza africana en la poesía de tres escritores cubanos: José María de Cárdenas, José Padrínes y Juan Clemente Zenea. Estos escritores formaron parte del grupo que se reunió en torno a Domingo del Monte y la revista El Artista en 1849. Ese año, la sección de Literatura del Liceo Artístico y Literario de La Habana patrocinó un premio especial sobre el tema "Lactancia". A través de un análisis detallado de estos poemas, este ensayo considera cómo estos escritores retrataron estas esclavas y qué revelan estas representaciones sobre sus puntos de vista sobre la raza, el género y el colonialismo en la Cuba del siglo XIX.

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This essay examines the representation of the African nurse in the poetry of three Cuban writers: José María de Cárdenas, José Padrínes, and Juan Clemente Zenea. These writers were part of the group that gathered around Domingo del Monte and the magazine El Artista in 1849. That year, the Literature section of the Artistic and Literary Lyceum of Havana sponsored a special prize on the theme of "Lactation". Through a close analysis of their poems, this essay considers how these writers portrayed these enslaved women and what these representations reveal about their views on race, gender, and colonialism in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Fragmento de un capítulo del libro: "Miedo negro, poder blanco en la Cuba colonial" (Iberoamericana, 2015)
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Jorge-Camacho/dp/8484897990/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?__mk_es_US=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=white+power+black+fear+colonial+cuba&qid=1581529238&sr=8-1-fkmr0

'In Publishing Scholarly Editions, Christopher Ohge cogently argues for approaching editing in pragmatic terms, explicitly invoking the ideas of William James and John Dewey. Such an approach emphasizes the complexities of writerly acts, publishing exigencies, and readerly interpretations and charts the networks of actions and practices that constitute literary experience. Through a lucid contribution to editorial theory and deftly articulated case studies, Ohge shows the opportunities that scholarly editing and especially digital editing provide for displaying these complexities and networks and opening up, rather than closing down, meaning.'

–– Professor Samuel Otter, Slusser Chair in English, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Melville’s Anatomies (1999).

'This is an EXCELLENT book! Useful and timely'.
–– Peter Robinson, Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan and founder of Inkless Editions

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

This monograph studies the multiple fears caused by the presence of black slaves and their descendants in Cuba during colonial times: fears of a slave revolt, language corruption, racial miscegenation, music, and religion, among others. It discusses the figures of the cultural administrator, white flaneur, enslaved wet nurses, la mulata, black music, black ñáñigos, and independence politicians to show the panic among white elites of racial and cultural contamination and the importance of medical and naturalistic discourses in constructing these views. The thesis of the book is that the fear of black was an originating concept in the formation of the Cuban nation.
The book bases its arguments on several theoretical models: Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection, Mary Dougla’s Purity and Danger, Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, and Mijail Bajtín’s heteroglossia.

Esta monografía estudia los múltiples miedos que causó la presencia de esclavos africanos y sus descendientes en Cuba durante la época colonial: miedos de rebelión de esclavos, corrupción del lenguaje, de la mezcla racial, de su música y su religión, entre otros. Discute asimismo las figuras del administrator cultural, del paseante blanco, de la mulata, de la música acongada, de la nodriza africana, del negro ñáñigo y políticos independentistas para mostrar el pánico dentro de las clases letradas al contagio racial y cultural, y la importancia de los discursos naturalistas y médicos en formar estas opiniones. El libro sustenta la tesis de que el miedo al negro fue un concepto originario en la formación de la nación cubana. El libro se apoya para esto en las propuestas teóricas de Julia Kristeva (Poderes de la perversión), Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Michel Foucault (Biopolítica), Mijail Bajtín (heteroglosia), entre otros .

This essay examines the intersections of gender, race and colonialism in the antislavery works of two nineteenth-century Spanish playwrights: María Rosa Gálvez’s ZINDA (1804) and Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s LA CADENA ROTA (ca. 1876). While ZINDA and LA CADENA ROTA were written during different periods of the nineteenth century, both works highlight the struggle for the affirmation and autonomy of the female subject through the denunciation of slavery, which stood as a metaphor for woman’s condition. Gálvez’s play, published at the turn of the century, both embodied Enlightenment values and anticipated Romanticism by granting voice and subjectivity to an African woman with the objective of carrying out a project of liberal reform (the denunciation of slavery); for its part, Sáez de Melgar’s work, while composed much later in the 1860s, could essentially be categorized as a late Romantic work that made use of melodramatic strategies to seek the vindication of the rights and freedom of the slave.

Yet the analogy between women’s condition and chattel slavery, so common in nineteenth-century women’s literature, needs to be rendered problematic in light of the Eurocentric, colonial discourse that often frames the antislavery narrative. In both Gálvez and Sáez de Melgar’s dramatic works, the female subaltern subject—representing the racial other—must negotiate between the Enlightenment values identified with the masculine, metropolitan subject, and the dominant discourses of race and gender that inscribe the colonized woman in a position of (double) subalternity. Departing from Gayatri Spivak’s famous question “Can the subaltern speak?,” this essay interrogates the notion that antislavery discourse, rooted in the Enlightenment project, necessarily leads to the decolonization of the subaltern subject, or a questioning of colonial discourse.

At the same time, I argue that while Gálvez’s work asserts female agency within the limits of the colonial order, subsuming the question of race under gender, Sáez de Melgar goes further in destabilizing metropolitan discourse through the female subaltern subject’s emergence as a political subject, thus forging a space of discursive resistance that was not yet possible earlier in the century. My analysis also considers the ways in which the position of Gálvez and Sáez de Melgar within their literary and cultural milieu influenced their choice of rhetorical and aesthetic strategies to address the problem of slavery through the trope of gender.

Partindo de uma análise de The heroic slave (1852) de Frederick Douglass, o artigo lida com a gênese da primeira prosa de ficção afro-americana à luz dos debates político-institucionais da época. Há de se questionar o que fez escritores afro-americanos como Douglass abrirem mão do formato das slave narratives para produzirem textos de ficção. Argumentar-se-á que a participação desses pensadores nos debates daquela época de crise institucional teve reflexos diretos em sua produção artística. Assim, se o jovem Douglass escreveu uma narrativa de escravos pautada no testemunho e resistência pacífica ao governo, o Douglass da década de 1850 inaugurou uma modalidade de literatura pautada no ativismo, refletora de sua radicalização como pensador político. O que ocorreu para que tal mudança se efetuasse, e que novos dispositivos expressivos surgiram para expressar esse momento de virada, são duas questões que balizarão o presente estudo.

*** Abstract: Departing from an analysis of Frederick Douglass' The heroic slave (1852), this article deals with the genesis of the pioneering African-American fiction with a view of the political-institutional debates of its time. One has to question what prompted African-American writers such as Douglass to relinquish the format of the slave narratives in order to produce fictional works. I argue that the involvement of these intellectuals in the debate of those times of institutional crisis had direct effects on their artistic production. Thus, if on the one hand the young Douglass wrote a slave narrative grounded on the testimonial and pacifist resistance against the government, the 1850 Douglass inaugurated a literary modality grounded on activism, which reflected his own radicalization as a political thinker. What happened for such a change to ensue, as well which expressive devices were created to express this turning point, are the two questions which will guide this study.

Born into slavery in North Carolina around 1815, Moses Roper is a significant if understudied figure in Irish studies, Black Atlantic studies, and American studies more generally. His flight to the United Kingdom in 1835 and his subsequent writing and activism fundamentally altered the relationship between the fugitive subject and the cultural and political ground of emancipatory activism across all of what were then the home nations. Roper has long dwelt in the shadow of Frederick Douglass. Unlike Douglass, with his stable family life and ascent to the heights of political influence, Roper remained rootless. This article charts his 1838 Irish tour and point to the wider remit of our current research project, which aims to rediscover and unfold Roper’s story by retracing his life, writing, and his tours of “remote places” in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England (Roper, Letter 136).

O artigo analisa as intertextualidades de Úrsula (1859), de Maria Firmina dos Reis, ressaltando como a autora se valeu de princípios estéticos centrais do romantismo europeu para fins próprios de representação. Um tratamento detido do capítulo 1 do romance mostra uma substituição clara dos imperativos da cor local de Gonçalves de Magalhães e José de Alencar pela representação do que o Império do Brasil realmente era: mais do que um cenário inócuo de fauna e flora exuberantes, era uma terra historicamente manchada pela escravidão e pela tirania dos mandatários. Assim, Firmina dos Reis escreve o primeiro romance antiescravista brasileiro a partir dos desafios alencarianos de representação nacional; seu trabalho minucioso com teorias e ideias em curso a tornam uma inteligência inovadora dentro do romantismo.

ABSTRACT: The article analyzes the intertextualities within Úrsula (1859) by Maria Firmina dos Reis, highlighting how the author employed central aesthetic principles of European romanticism so as to achieve her own representational goals. A close reading of chapter 1 of this novel reveals a clear reconsideration of the imperatives of the local color school (of Gonçalves de Magalhães and José de Alencar), replacing them by the representation of what the Brazilian Empire really was: more than an innocuous scenery of exuberant fauna and flora, it was a land historically tainted by slavery and the tyranny of its leaders. Thereby, Firmina dos Reis writes the first Brazilian anti-slavery novel against the grain of the Alencarian challenges of national representation; her meticulous work with theories and ideas in progress renders her an innovative intelligence within romanticism.

A search for freedom has provided a major theme for American literature, one that is inseparable from an understanding of its intellectual, emotional, cultural and political wellsprings. This course provides a graduate-level introduction to a spectrum of the literature of US slavery, a major body of literature that spans centuries and continues to the present day.  After beginning with a recent science fiction neo-slave novel that attempts to re-imagine the existence of an American slave, the course readings will survey antebellum, post-bellum, and contemporary representations of slavery and emancipation experiences.  We will cover Barbary Coast narratives, African American slave narratives, resistance and rebellion texts, early African American novels, nineteenth-century reform fictions by white authors, and major late twentieth-century novels on slavery.

Review of The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, Vannak Anan Prum

-- Slave narratives are working-class literature in extremis. They relate an existential struggle for possession of self and labour. Failure to wrest control away from a master or to effect escape often means traumatic depression. The slave narrative is predicated on the eventual success of that struggle. Stripped to its essence, a slave narrative is a working-class fight to the death.

"Griffith Browne, Mattie (1 Jan. 1825?-25 May 1906), antislavery writer and women's suffrage activist, was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the daughter of Thomas and Catherine Griffith. Her father was a tavern-keeper and farmer. Various estimates have been made of her correct birth year, but no exact date has been established. Mattie and her older sister, Catherine, were orphaned in childhood, losing first their mother and then their father in 1830."

Mattie Griffith today may be Kentucky’s best-known antebellum novelist, due to her Autobiography of a Female Slave (1856), a white-authored pseudo-slave narrative. Griffith’s current reputation rests on her antislavery fictions, which were not influential but plentiful and two of which are currently in print. This is a far distance from the obloquy she endured from her home state as an abolitionist “ultra” and a subsequent century and a half of deep obscurity. Griffith manifested a love-hate relationship to Kentucky, one where hatred of slavery prevailed and drove her into lifelong exile. In a society where women were denied political voice, her writing instances expressive citizenship. The importance of Griffith’s writing lies in understanding how an antebellum Southern women’s oppositional voices employed devices of pseudonymous self-invention, anonymity, and moral calls cloaked in romantic literary style. .......