Grievous Entanglement (eBook)

Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

Erin Pearson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
240 Seiten
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5389-2 (ISBN)

Infos

How abolitionists persuaded people of their personal complicity with slavery to advance the cause of freedomGrievous Entanglement explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. Consumption became a formidable trope that tied the evils of chattel slavery to individuals' behavior through their purchase of slave-produced commodities like cotton or sugar. With her groundbreaking analysis of this dominant conceptual framework, Erin Pearson provides new insight into both the motivation behind and the functioning of antislavery activism. Unlike sentimental literature, which sought to engender sympathy for the enslaved, consumption-as-connection leveraged aversion to inspire people to sever their ties with an evil institution. Strategic disgust, Pearson shows, proved effective in inciting abolitionist action. It also frequently slipped into nonabolitionist and even proslavery uses by actually fomenting racism, as this book is the first to demonstrate. Examining a wide variety of media, including poetry, political cartoons, blackface minstrelsy, slave narratives, and novels produced from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, this ingeniously interdisciplinary study reveals how aversive consumption powerfully shaped ideas about slavery to both positive and pernicious effect.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.10.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Carter G. Woodson Institute Series
• Zusatzinfo: 3 color and 6 b&w illus
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Abolition • abolitionist novels • African American History • African American literature • American Literature • american slavery • Anglophone Atlantic • animal violence • anti-blackness • anti-black racism • antislavery action • Antislavery consumer activism • at-home Blackface minstrelsy • Black Abolitionists • blackface minstrelsy • blood-sugar metaphors • British Literature • Cannibalism • consumption as connection • Disgust • economic foundations of slavery • Elizabeth Heyrick • Elizabeth Margaret Chandler • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper • Frederick Douglass • Free Produce Abolitionism • Harriet Beecher Stowe • Henry David Thoreau • Herman Melville • hungry animal tropes • John Woolman • Mary Prince • minstrelsy • Moby-Dick • Olaudah Equiano • Quakers • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • semantic proximity • sentimentality • sentimental literature • Slavery • sugar cultivation • Sugar Trade • Sympathy • Tangible Commodities • Thomas Cooper • transatlantic • Transatlantic Studies • Uncle Tom’s Cabin • Walden
• ISBN-10: 0-8139-5389-8 / 0813953898
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-5389-2 / 9780813953892