Iron Arguments: Spectacle, rhetoric and the slave body in New England and British antislavery oratory

Abstract

Material proofs or Imaginary Property? Complex intellectual, historical and cultural relationships have always existed between the experimentation with rhetoric and the spectacle of the slave body in abolitionist literature. This article debates the challenges the eighteenth and nineteenth century writers offered to the widespread representation of the slave body within mainstream North American, British and Caribbean abolitionist discourse. The commitment of writers such as Robert Wedderburn, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker and Jupiter Hammon to experimental language and subject-matter testifies to the existence of a radical literary tradition much earlier than the popularly examined mid-nineteenth century authors, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. These earlier figures were intent, not only upon extending the permissible boundaries of abolitionist representation, but also in staking a claim for the politically liberating potential of the literary imagination in a fight for the right to aesthetic experimentation.