Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Lindsay A. Silver Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. America in the Nineteenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x, 284. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5339-9.) In Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners. At the same time, Dwyer emphasizes the prominence of emotions in proslavery defenses and abolitionist critiques, further underscoring the centrality of sentiments to many of the arguments seeking to uphold or destroy slavery in antebellum America. As a book about the power of emotions and feelings, Mastering Emotions primarily focuses on relationships between enslaved people and slaveholders. Dwyer draws on a wide variety of sources while making particular use of first-person accounts. These sources, which include slave narratives alongside the journals and diaries of white southerners who owned enslaved people, enable Dwyer to expose and explore the feelings and emotions that established, maintained, and even challenged the power dynamics within slavery. Dwyer’s work is deeply rooted in an extensive historiography of American slavery that acknowledges the prevalence of such sentiments among enslaved Blacks and slaveholding whites. What stands out about Mastering Emotions is that Dwyer is the first to seriously and methodically analyze the significance of feelings and emotions to the institution of slavery. Dwyer accomplishes this goal by applying the framework established by scholars of the history of emotions to the history of American slavery. As a result, the reader revisits many familiar scenes and stories from nineteenth-century narratives of enslaved people and slaveholders, but with a new understanding of how power dynamics operated between them, due to Dwyer’s emphasis on the importance of emotions in these relationships. Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives. Dwyer successfully demonstrates how the roles of enslaved persons and slave owners were culturally constructed, learned, reinforced, and challenged through emotions both real and performative. Included in the wide range of emotions Dwyer examines are trust, happiness, fear, and the enjoyment of freedom. In her discussion of fear and punishment, the author highlights how scholars have traditionally focused on physical punishment inflicted on enslaved people and have ignored or downplayed the role of emotional or affective discipline. By shifting the focus away from physical punishment and examining the role of emotions, Dwyer successfully demonstrates a greater understanding of “the lived experience of slavery and . . . the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline” (p. 139). Additionally, Dwyer exposes the contradictions in proslavery literature that argued that enslaved people did not have the capacity to feel emotions as strongly as white people, even as emotional punishments designed to break up enslaved families became a common form of control—one that enslaved people often felt was much more painful than physical violence. [End Page 142] In order to fully demonstrate the significance, power, and legacy of the emotional politics of slavery, Dwyer concludes with a brief but important overview of how emotions have shaped Black and white race relations in America since emancipation. In doing so, Dwyer outlines how different emotions, particularly fear, have tragically impacted the joys of freedom for Black Americans from the Jim Crow era to the present. Importantly, Dwyer’s conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Lindsay A. Silver Texas A&M University–San Antonio Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association