Victoria 3 slavery
I frame this mode of reading as what Sharpe would call “taking care,” “Black annotation” and “aspiration”: “imagining and keeping and putting breath black into the Black body in hostile weather” (20, 113). One way I do this is to introduce Black writers beyond enslavement, not only through fronting our historical readings with contemporary Black scholars, but by showcasing early Black literary production beyond the slave narrative, as in week six, where we read poems by Phillis Wheatley alongside letters by Ignatius Sancho.įurther, in class discussions I ask students to look for what Katherine McKittrick and Tiffany Lethabo King call “Black livingness” and locate “representations of Black flutter, kinetics, and flight” that “inspire preliminary and early, or proto-, conceptions of Black fungibility” and “emerge as an anxious response to Black uncontainability and fugitivity” (McKittrick, qtd. While it’s perhaps more difficult to find these “other worlds” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, I ask students to try to “move beyond a critique of bestialization to generate new possibilities for rethinking ontology” (Jackson 1). Yet as a juxtaposition to these representations, we consider Weheliye’s desire to think “humanity creatively,” and “launch alternate ways of understanding our uneven planetary conditions and imagine the other worlds these might make possible” (11, 15).
Alongside our opening readings from Black Studies, we examine examples of early British travel narratives, philosophy, and scientific discourses to analyze how humanity was what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson would call “plasticized” within white accounts of colonialism and enslavement (3). Although we read the history of enslavement from a majority Black point of view, I refuse to let Blackness be read only as enslavement, subjection, and reduction to flesh. This class enacts what Christina Sharpe has defined as “wake work”: we work toward “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death” at the same time we “resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially” (3). Taking seriously the Victorian era’s indebtedness to slavery deepens our conversations about both Victorian empire and the role of Victorian literature in the formation and solidification of racial categories. And the rise of the Western novel was deeply engaged with slavery and empire, as seen in foundational texts such as Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe. The beginnings of settler-colonialism can be traced back to 1441, when the Portuguese arrived on the shores of Senegal and initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade (King 18). Wong state, “scholars of Victorian literature and culture are, in fact, scholars of Atlantic slavery” (370), prefacing the Victorian era with slavery helps us see Victorian literature as part of slavery’s afterlife.īritish slavery, which wasn’t fully abolished until 1838, brought an influx of colonists to the Caribbean where sugar production boosted the British economy and fueled the Industrial Revolution that gave birth to the Victorian novel. If, as Alexander Weheliye claims, Black Studies is an intellectual tradition that began in the eighteenth century (3), and, as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. It reads slavery and empire through a Black Studies framework, foregrounds writers of color, and presents slavery as foundational to Victorian literature. This graduate course explores connections between British slavery and empire, and analyzes their racializing assemblages within a longer cultural history from the seventeenth century to today.
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