Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T22:25:19.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Placing Victorian Abolitionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Lindsey N. Chappell Open the ORCID record for Lindsey N. Chappell [Opens in a new window]
Lindsey N. Chappell*
Affiliation:
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 225 - 259
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to my students at Georgia Southern University, whose questions and conversations required me to shift my ideas of Victorian studies. When I came to Georgia in 2018, they pushed me to create scholarship that accounted for the continuities between British imperialism and inequities they still saw around them. I therefore undertook this project as an experiment to explore what it might mean to do Victorian studies in this place and also to consider what might happen to Victorian and transatlantic studies if they take the South into account. Thanks also to Sophia Hsu, whose conversation and feedback have been crucial to this project, and to Abby Goode and AnaMaria Seglie, who have been generous and insightful readers. Finally, I am indebted to the editors and anonymous readers at VLC, whose suggestions were invaluable.

References

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.Google Scholar
Anthony, Katie. “5 Racist Anti-Racism Responses ‘Good’ White Women Give to Viral Posts.” I'm Not Nice, May 26, 2020, www.katykatikate.com/the-blog/2020/5/26/5-racist-anti-racism-responses-good-white-women-give-to-viral-posts (accessed June 1, 2020).Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
“Art. VII.–My Diary in America in the Midst of War.” London Quarterly Review 24, no. 47 (April 1865): 147–71.Google Scholar
Bailey, Anne C. The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banerjee, Sukanya. “Who, or What, Is Victorian? Ecology, Indigo, and the Transimperial.” Victorian Studies 58, no. 2 (2016): 213–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Malcolm Jr. Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Betensky, Carolyn. “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 4 (2019): 723–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Burnett, Katharine A. Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Butler, Pierce M. Mr. Butler's Statement, Originally Prepared in Aid of His Professional Council. [Philadelphia: JC Clark, 1850].Google Scholar
Callanan, Laura. Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-Victorian English Prose. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, Christoff, Alicia Mireles, and Wong, Amy R.. “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” LARB, July 10, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/undisciplining-victorian-studies.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clinton, Catherine, ed. Fanny Kemble's Journals. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Combs, Barbara Harris. “Everyday Racism Is Still Racism: The Role of Place in Theorizing Continuing Racism in Modern US Society.” Phylon 55, nos. 1–2 (Summer/Winter 2018): 38–59.Google Scholar
Cooper, Melissa L. Lawrence Lecture. Jepson Center, Savannah, Georgia, September 12, 2019.Google Scholar
David, Deirdre. Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Degraft-Hanson, Kwesi. “Torn Asunder: Savannah's ‘Weepin’ Time’ Slave Sale of 1859.” In Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, edited by Harris, Leslie M. and Berry, Daina Ramey, 61–63. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Degraft-Hanson, Kwesi. “Unearthing the Weeping Time: Savannah's Ten Broeck Race Course and 1859 Slave Sale.” Southern Spaces, February 18, 2010, https://southernspaces.org/2010/unearthing-weeping-time-savannahs-ten-broeck-race-course-and-1859–slave-sale (accessed December 20, 2019).Google Scholar
Dickerson, Vanessa D. Dark Victorians. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
First African Baptist Church. Savannah, Georgia. www.firstafricanbc.com/history.php (accessed December 20, 2019).Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Hack, Daniel. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Leslie M., and Berry, Daina Ramey. “Slave Life in Savannah: Geographies of Autonomy and Control.” In Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, edited by Harris, Leslie M. and Berry, Daina Ramey, 93–123. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, Nancy. Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
hooks, bell. “Language.” In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 167–75. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
“Inflation Calculator.” U.S. Official Inflation Data, Alioth Finance, www.officialdata.org (accessed December 17, 2019).Google Scholar
Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Edited by Scott, John A.. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.Google Scholar
LeFlouria, Talitha L. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lootens, Tricia. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lussier, Mark S. Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makdisi, Saree. Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaels, Brenna, and Michaels, T. C.. Hidden History of Savannah. Charleston: History Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Nelson, Dana D. Introduction to Principles and Privilege: Two Women's Lives on a Georgia Plantation, v–li. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.Google Scholar
O'Donovan, Susan Eva. “At the Intersection of Cotton and Commerce: Antebellum Savannah and Its Slaves.” In Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, edited by Harris, Leslie M. and Berry, Daina Ramey, 42–68. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.Google Scholar
“Our Library Table.” Sharpe's London Magazine, September 1863, 162–65.Google Scholar
Outka, Paul. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“A Residence in Georgia.” London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science 6, no. 53 (June 6, 1863): 608–9.Google Scholar
“Review of Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839.” Athenaeum, no. 1858 (June 6, 1863): 737–39.Google Scholar
Rigby, Kate. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Russell, Deborah. “Domestic Gothic: Genre and Nation in Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House.” Literature Compass 10, no. 10 (2013): 771–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, John A. Introduction to Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, by Kemble, Frances Anne, ix–lxi. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Sheehy, Barry, and Wallace, Cindy. Savannah: Brokers, Bankers, and Bay Lane—Inside the Slave Trade. Vol. 2 of Civil War Savannah. Austin: Emerald Book, 2012.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[Thomson, Mortimer “Doesticks”]. What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? n.p., 1863.Google Scholar
Venet, Wendy Hamand. Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
“Whenever We Meet an American Gentleman.” Times 23279, April 13, 1859, 7.Google Scholar
Wilson, Ivy G. “The Changing Same: Recursivity, Reification, and Reaping.” Victorian Studies 60, no. 1 (2017): 87–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Ivy G. Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Younquist, Paul. “Black Romanticism: A Manifesto.” Studies in Romanticism 56, no. 1 (2017): 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar