On 25 March 1807, the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade within the British colonies was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, becoming law from 1 May. This new collection of essays marks this crucial but conflicted historical moment and its troublesome legacies. They discuss the literary and cultural manifestations of slavery, abolition and emancipation from the eighteenth century to the present day, addressing such subjects and issues as: the relationship between Christian and Islamic forms of slavery and the polemical and scholarly debates these have occasioned; the visual representations of the moment of emancipation; the representation of slave rebellion; discourses of race and slavery; memory and slavery; and captivity and slavery. Among the writers and thinkers discussed are: Frantz Fanon, William Earle Jr, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Caryl Phillips, Bryan Edwards, Elizabeth Marsh, as well as a wide range of other thinkers, writers and artists. The volume also contains the hitherto unpublished text of an essay by the naturalist Henry Smeathman, Oeconomy of the Slave Ship.
Full table of contents
- Introduction
Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson
- Emancipation Art, Fanon and the 'Butchery of Freedom'
Marcus Wood
- The Afterlives of Three-fingered Jack
Diana Paton
- Putting Down Rebellion. Witnessing the Body of the Condemned in Abolition-era Narratives
Sara Salih
- The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-slavery and Racial Disgust in Charlotte Smith's Story of Henrietta (1800)
George Boulukos
- "To Rivet and to Record": Conversion and Collective Memory in Equiano's Interesting Narrative
Lincoln Shlensky
- Henry Smeathman and the Natural Economy of Slavery
Deirdre Coleman
- Slavery, Blackness and Islam: The Arabian Nights in the Eighteenth Century
Felicity Nussbaum
- Slavery and Sensibility: A Historical Dilemma
Gerald Maclean
- 'Go West Old Woman': The Radical Re-visioning of Slave History in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River
Maroula Joannou