Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi Morgan Vanek (bio) Ramesh Mallipeddi. Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic. U of Virginia P, 2016. Pp. xiv, 265. US$49.50. Politically suspect, self-indulgent, ineffective: sentimentalism, Ramesh Mallipeddi admits, and metropolitan sympathy for slaves' suffering in particular, "has been the target of withering critique" by scholars of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world (4). In Spectacular Suffering, however, Mallipeddi invites us to reevaluate sentimental sympathy—not to recuperate this metropolitan preoccupation with the injured black body but rather to develop a new theory of slave agency that will better account for the "embodied [End Page 192] dimensions of black experience in slave narratives and in black cultural and aesthetic forms" (5). To this end, the book's first half examines scenes of physical distress in sentimental responses to slavery from metropolitan observers like Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne, while the second turns to the less well-studied archives of slaves' representations of their own experiences of dispossession, which range from Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Ignatius Sancho's Letters to medical records, captains' journals, and the proceedings of parliamentary investigations of the slave trade. By reading these archives together, Spectacular Suffering demonstrates how "the emergence of actual slaves as speaking subjects in the English public sphere was . . . shaped by the discursive parameters" of the metropolitan focus on spectacular suffering (71), and how these slaves, as speaking subjects, nonetheless managed to leverage spectatorial sympathy to generate a "melancholic counterknowledge of colonial modernity" (11). With attention to the methodological challenges that necessarily attend any excavation of these fragmentary archives, Mallipeddi thus strives to shift the focus of contemporary scholarship on the Atlantic world and begins to bridge the current "chasm between recovery projects that aim to generate historical knowledge about slavery . . . and those that take corporeal dimensions of slave existence as their point of departure to trace acts of regeneration and recuperation undertaken by enslaved people themselves" (15). Meticulously researched, clearly written, and original, Spectacular Suffering delivers on this promise: Mallipeddi both exposes the troubling ways contemporary critics reproduce their metropolitan subjects' tendency to foreground spectacle and suffering and demonstrates how recentring slaves' "bodily experience as a source of knowledge" can open new avenues of inquiry about how the "ostensible objects of sentimental compassion" generated their own "affective response to . . . the commodification of their bodies" (4–6). Instructors will find Mallipeddi's first three chapters especially useful, as the book begins with compelling close readings of widely anthologized and frequently taught texts (Behn's Oroonoko, Steele's Spectator No. 11 [Inkle and Yarico], and Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey) that demonstrate just how similar the transformations of the injured body at the centre of sentimental representations of slave distress are to the transformations of the body that underpin the commodification and punishment that characterize Atlantic slavery. In Chapter One, for instance, Mallipeddi identifies Oroonoko as a "foundational" illustration of this dynamic (47), weaving together research on the conventions of heroic drama, the logic of the fetish, and the processes of trade and mercantilist exchange to expose "the changing valences of the black body as a consequence of its commodification" (50). In Chapter [End Page 193] Two, Mallipeddi takes a similar approach, combining Jürgen Habermas' and Michael Warner's analyses of the public sphere with a close study of the heroic epistle (or lover's complaint) to argue that, in Steele's Spectator No. 11, the sympathy the heroic epistle makes available to Yarico, its heroine, emerges only "via a bracketing of racial slavery," by foregrounding her abandonment rather than her enslavement (70). By tracing this move through the many adaptations Steele inspired, furthermore, Mallipeddi discovers that this gesture also tightly circumscribed the sympathy available to Mary Prince, whose nineteenth-century History of her own enslavement was censored for acknowledging any forms of freedom she found within either slavery or sexual relationships; like the fictional Yarico, Mallipeddi observes, Prince is authorized to vouch for her experience as a woman or a slave, but not both. More striking, Mallipeddi finds that contemporary critical emphasis on the auction...