Author: Kari J. Winter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.
Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change
Author: Kari J. Winter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.
Generations of Captivity
Author: Ira Berlin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the Charter Generation to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the Plantation Generation to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the Revolutionary Generation to the Age of Revolutions, and the Migration Generation to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the Freedom Generation. This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the Charter Generation to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the Plantation Generation to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the Revolutionary Generation to the Age of Revolutions, and the Migration Generation to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the Freedom Generation. This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.
Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire
Author: Stephan Conermann
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847010379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of 'slavery' and 'freedom' derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies.
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847010379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of 'slavery' and 'freedom' derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies.
The Quarters and the Fields
Author: Damian Alan Pargas
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813059070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
Book Description
The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813059070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
Book Description
The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.
Joining Places
Author: Anthony E. Kaye
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.
Principles and Agents
Author: David Richardson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300262906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
A new history of the abolition of the British slave trade “Easily the most scholarly, clear and persuasive analysis yet published of the rise to dominance of the British in the Atlantic slave trade—as well as the implementation of abolition when that dominance was its peak.”—David Eltis, co-author of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Parliament’s decision in 1807 to outlaw British slaving was a key moment in modern world history. In this magisterial work, historian David Richardson challenges claims that this event was largely due to the actions of particular individuals and emphasizes instead that abolition of the British slave trade relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. British slaving and opposition to it grew in parallel through the 1760s and then increasingly came into conflict both in the public imagination and in political discourse. Looking at the ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, Richardson shows that from the 1770s those simmering tensions became politicized even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, mobilizing public opinion to coerce Parliament to confront and begin to resolve the issue between 1788 and 1807.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300262906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
A new history of the abolition of the British slave trade “Easily the most scholarly, clear and persuasive analysis yet published of the rise to dominance of the British in the Atlantic slave trade—as well as the implementation of abolition when that dominance was its peak.”—David Eltis, co-author of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Parliament’s decision in 1807 to outlaw British slaving was a key moment in modern world history. In this magisterial work, historian David Richardson challenges claims that this event was largely due to the actions of particular individuals and emphasizes instead that abolition of the British slave trade relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. British slaving and opposition to it grew in parallel through the 1760s and then increasingly came into conflict both in the public imagination and in political discourse. Looking at the ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, Richardson shows that from the 1770s those simmering tensions became politicized even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, mobilizing public opinion to coerce Parliament to confront and begin to resolve the issue between 1788 and 1807.
Long Past Slavery
Author: Catherine A. Stewart
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
The Blind African Slave
Author: Jeffrey Brace
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299201430
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Book Description
The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299201430
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Book Description
The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.
Black Subjects
Author: Arlene Keizer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
Writers as diverse as Carolivia Herron, Charles Johnson, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott have addressed the history of slavery in their literary works. In this groundbreaking new book, Arlene R. Keizer contends that these writers theorize the nature and formation of the black subject and engage established theories of subjectivity in their fiction and drama by using slave characters and the condition of slavery as focal points. In this book, Keizer examines theories derived from fictional works in light of more established theories of subject formation, such as psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, performance theory, and theories about the formation of postmodern subjects under late capitalism. Black Subjects shows how African American and Caribbean writers' theories of identity formation, which arise from the varieties of black experience re-imagined in fiction, force a reconsideration of the conceptual bases of established theories of subjectivity. The striking connections Keizer draws between these two bodies of theory contribute significantly to African American and Caribbean Studies, literary theory, and critical race and ethnic studies.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
Writers as diverse as Carolivia Herron, Charles Johnson, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott have addressed the history of slavery in their literary works. In this groundbreaking new book, Arlene R. Keizer contends that these writers theorize the nature and formation of the black subject and engage established theories of subjectivity in their fiction and drama by using slave characters and the condition of slavery as focal points. In this book, Keizer examines theories derived from fictional works in light of more established theories of subject formation, such as psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, performance theory, and theories about the formation of postmodern subjects under late capitalism. Black Subjects shows how African American and Caribbean writers' theories of identity formation, which arise from the varieties of black experience re-imagined in fiction, force a reconsideration of the conceptual bases of established theories of subjectivity. The striking connections Keizer draws between these two bodies of theory contribute significantly to African American and Caribbean Studies, literary theory, and critical race and ethnic studies.
Spectacular Suffering
Author: Ramesh Mallipeddi
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves’ petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves’ embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi’s keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves’ petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves’ embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi’s keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.