Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Notes on Art and the Abolitionist Imagination
Kalfou, 2023
Formed in the tumultuous summer of 2020, UC Cops off Campus groups coalesced around the joint aims of getting police off the campuses of the University of California and developing a collective abolitionist practice. In this essay I reflect on my own involvement in organizing to get cops off UC campuses as a lecturer in the art department of UC Riverside and in doing so, speculate on the complicated and evolving relationship between art and abolition. I attempt to disentangle the facile way that creativity is often understood in political and artistic contexts from the absolutely crucial centrality of the imagination within contemporary abolitionist struggles. Artists committed to systemic transformation might begin by taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s deceptively simple proposition: "Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.” Especially in this moment, art’s engagement with the political must go beyond embracing an abstract version of “change” that leaves institutional dynamics unexamined.
“For how Could we do Without Sugar and Rum?” The Semiotics of Abolitionist Aesthetics
This research examines Abolitionist discourse and praxis in Great Britain, France, and the United States during the period roughly spanning 1750-1865 and that correspond to the Anti-Saccharine and Free Produce Movements. To orient the line of this inquiry, this research emanates from the question: “In what ways did abolitionist discourse interrogate the prevailing ideologies of its time that supported the arguments and presented as natural the relations of power constituted within black chattel slavery?” From the time of Aristotle, who argued that slavery was a domestic relationship as natural as man and wife or mother and child, slavery existed unquestioned throughout world history. The emergence of a coordinated abolition movement in Britain at the close of the eighteenth century represents the creation of a constituency of overlapping discursive publics, ranging from Evangelical Christians to free market liberals to Romantic artists, all sharing the goal of the abolition of slavery, but differing in their specific motivations and tactics to achieve this end. In particular, this research will uncover a semiotics of abolitionism, and will view abolitionist discourse as not limited to the written word, but exemplified in aesthetic forms such as poems and novels, visual representations such as prints and broadsides, and ephemera. Beginning chronologically with Adam Smith as a generative site of abolitionist ideology, a robust analytical interplay between ideology and materiality will be in focus during this investigation born out of the methodological impulse that material culture and aesthetic sources figure as useful sites for historical inquiry due to the implicit ideologies standing behind the form of their materialization and didactic function within society to “do ‘social work.’” Evidence of the Anti-Saccharine and Free Produce Movements exists in divergent sources located far from locations of explicit ideological discourse (treatises, polemics, etc.), and while these other forms will be discussed here, it will be to draw a richer field of reference for the semiotics of abolitionist discourse.
What the Abolitionists Were Up Against, Revisited
What the Abolitionists Were Up Against, Revisited, 2020
Antislavery activists in the 19th century United States faced a set of formidable obstacles in moving the needle of northern popular opinion from apathy (at best) to engagement. This essay explores the hostile landscape of American social, political, and cultural life within which antislavery writers operated. They could not ignore these conditions if they were going to appeal to their largely northern, middle class audience: they had to assuage their concerns, prompt them to question assumptions, and force them to question conventional wisdom. But northern middle-class culture also provided antislavery activists with opportunities. Pushing the right buttons had the potential to transform hostility and apathy into interest and, maybe, enthusiasm in the fight against slavery. This essay does not show how antislavery women and wen pushed those buttons, but it does identify them and explores their potential to turn a culture of indifference into a culture of antislavery.
"The Savage Inscription": Abolitionist Writers and the Reinscription of Slavery
Using contemporary theories of the body, this essay reads the methods by which some white abolitionist-minded writers reinscribe the savage other in their representations of the tortured slave body. Such reproductions express anxiety over the boundaries between African slave and European or American citizen, just as those boundaries are being called into question.
Introduction to Early American Abolitionists, a Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820
Early American Abolitionists, a Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820, eds. James G. Basker, et. al. (Gilder Lehrman Institute,), 2005
This volume reprints some fifteen anti-slavery texts that, with one or two exceptions, have been out of print for almost two centuries. They have been edited by an unusual editorial team, con sisting of scholars at every rank from undergraduate to full professor. Our overarching purpose has been to restore to view some of the extensive anti-slavery literature—pamphlets, poems, sermons, printed speeches, and more—that flourished in early America. As the twenty-first century begins, it is easy to forget that slavery was not universally accepted during the Founding Era. Despite the failure of the founders to eradicate slavery at the national level, there were—as this literature attests—energetic and articulate opponents of slavery who attacked it relentlessly and achieved significant gains in many parts of the country over the period 1760 to I820.
2019
This project would not have been possible without the support of several scholars and readers. Professor Marcy J. Dinius, whose rich conversation and guidance in both her Print and Media History course and in several office hours' appointments, set me on the path to writing this thesis. Professor June Hee Chung directed this project and I owe her an immense amount of gratitude for tackling the subject with interest and for her questions and editorial suggestions throughout the writing process. I owe a special deal of thanks to Professor Jonathan Gross, whose fellow interest in Lord Byron and whose guidance and constant support first set me on the path to committing to DePaul University. Professor Gross' dedication to strong research serves as a constant inspiration and was most helpful for the work on Byron and abolition in this project. Thanks also to the dedicated graduate students of DePaul University who were kind enough to read and suggest different pathways and opportunities throughout the project. I would also like to mention the names of several other key players throughout the drafting process: