Placing Victorian Abolitionism

Author:

Chappell Lindsey N.ORCID

Abstract

This article analyzes Victorian abolitionism after the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, attending to particular epistemological racisms built into our ways of thinking about Victorian texts. Recent scholarship has begun to examine race in Victorian studies, but we've largely eschewed contemporaneous considerations of slavery and its ongoing imbrication with the British Empire. Notably absent are studies of abolitionism from within the U.S. South, where British commentators sought to contain slavery as a local depravity. I analyze narratives around the “Weeping Time,” the largest slave auction in U.S. history, including English actress Fanny Kemble's 1863 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, transatlantic periodical coverage of the auction, and nontraditional histories of local resistance. These texts disrupt the entrenched critical tradition of dividing the U.S. South from Britain, pushing us to reevaluate what we assume about race in Victorian studies today. Race, I argue, shapes Victorian and Victorianist subject positions through the location of bodies and ideologies in specific places. These localizations function as narrative shorthand to evaluate, for example, morality and aesthetics while silently assuming a default white subject position.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Literature and Literary Theory,Cultural Studies

Reference57 articles.

1. “Whenever We Meet an American Gentleman.” Times 23279, April 13, 1859, 7.

2. First African Baptist Church. Savannah, Georgia. www.firstafricanbc.com/history.php (accessed December 20, 2019).

3. Casual Racism in Victorian Literature;Betensky;Victorian Literature and Culture,2019

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