Wheatley’s Poems , Archibald Bell, and the Dillys: A Book-Historical Revaluation of the Wheatleyan Moment

The East was not the only exotic peregrination in Britain’s clandestine print trade in the nineteenth century. The trade in obscene publications also travelled across the Atlantic Ocean for its themes and eventually its audience, following the image of the flogged slave woman. As with the erotic fixations on the oriental harems and Eastern sex manuals, the preoccupation with the history of transatlantic slavery was caught up in larger circuits of desires and different print communities. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the flogged slave woman was a ubiquitous rhetorical and visual image in Britain largely introduced by transatlantic abolitionism. The image appeared in parliamentary debates, abolitionist pamphlets and newspapers, visual arts, and slave narratives. The flogged slave man did not have the same abolitionist appeal,1 but the image of the flogged slave woman was repeatedly reproduced for public consumption, provoking Christian compassion, abolitionist zeal, and, disturbingly, prurience. The image underwent a series of literary and visual repetitions and transformations influenced by the British libidinal investment in the whip — what Ian Gibson has called ‘the English Vice’.2 This chapter explores four historical versions of the image of the flogged slave woman which was trafficked in diverse print communities over the course of the nineteenth century and shows how a preoccupation with flagellation influenced its reception and in turn produced an underground industry that made explicit the denied sexual desires associated with it.

London played a key role in the history of transatlantic slavery: it was an important port in the Atlantic trade, a hub of commercial organisation, a market for slave-produced commodities, and a conduit through which the wealth accumulated from enslavement flowed. The signs and symbols of London’s slaving past can be read in its statues and street names, and in the histories of some of its most familiar institutions. The degree to which these sites have been recognised as the tangible vestiges of the afterlives of slavery has shifted at different moments. The bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 brought a temporary reckoning. In 2020, following the Black Lives Matter protests, London’s historical connections to slavery were once again re-examined. This article considers how London’s financial, cultural, and municipal institutions have grappled with the notion of ‘historical repair’ and the degree to which these practices can contribute towards processes of racial justice.

Despite scholarly agreement that the Flying African myth has emerged throughout the Americas from every location with a history of transatlantic slavery, this article is the first to analyze that myth in Canada. Taking this scholarly absence as evidence for larger erasures of Black culture in Canada, I trace variations of the myth in order to reframe the nation’s ambivalent history of transatlantic slavery. Dominant narratives commemorate the Underground Railroad while ignoring the country’s longer collusion in slavery and racial oppression. Comparing iterations of this myth across Canada—and considering these in light of Caribbean, Latin American, and US versions—offers a unique opportunity to theorize the relationships between nation, diaspora, and the histories of transatlantic slavery. Moreover, the multiplicity of identifications and definitions of Blackness in Canada offers a particularly salient microcosm for theorizing the diaspora writ large. In particular, I consider the Flying African myth within the specific context of Black Canada to expand on Gilroy’s project in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment became figural of any age at all, and age itself came to signify the inhumanness of blackness. Black Age posits that age is an analytical category that reveals where alternative humanisms exist, and is a figure of a counter-historical temporality of modernity. By building on Hortense Spillers’s influential theorization of blackness as having been “ungendered” during transport across the Atlantic Ocean, this book argues that blackness is concomitantly “unaged,” a process thought of as “Oceanic lifespans.” This book uncovers how critical observations of black age’s untimeliness arise from black feminist critiques of liberal humanism from the 1970s onward. By focusing on black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative black life.

The enormous variety of commemorative events surrounding the sequential bicentenary anniversaries, in 2007 and 2008, of the abolition of the British and United States' slave trade has revived public interest in the history of transatlantic slavery and its abolition, and renewed as well a debate that Catherine Hall has likened to a 'war of representation' — visual as much as verbal — surrounding abolitionist discourse from the late eighteenth century onwards. Many of the formal, public events of 2007/8 have centred around celebrations of such iconic figures as William Wilberforce. But the bicentenary has also provoked a more critical response to the ways in which this complex history both of enslavement and enfranchisement have been imagined, told and taught — a response that challenges official accounts and invites us to look again at the paradoxes embedded in national histories that have first enslaved and then liberated persons of African descent, and continued to discriminate against them at home and abroad.

This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review is concerned with some of the histories that created, and that continue to shape, both the present-day phenomena discussed under the rubric of trafficking, and the contemporary discourse of trafficking itself. One such history is that of transatlantic slavery. Since the millennium, numerous NGOs have been founded in the US, Australia and Europe with a mission to end what they call ‘modern slavery’. Their campaigns have overlapped with, and played a significant role in shaping, the development of media, NGO, policy and political discourse on human trafficking, which is, according to the antislavery NGO Free the Slaves, ‘the modern day slave trade—the process of enslaving a person’.1 In this discourse, the history of transatlantic slavery is invoked by means of visual as well as textual references in order to emphasise the severity of trafficking (and other phenomena included under the umbrella of ‘modern slavery’) as a human rights violation. The message has been communicated so effectively that although in international law slavery is held to be only one of several possible outcomes of trafficking, in the anti-trafficking rhetoric emanating from national and international policy agencies, as well as NGOs, trafficking is now frequently said to be ‘modern slavery’.2

This chapter examines the connection between race relations, often considered a domestic issue tied to identity politics in the United States, and the question of universalism and cultural relativism that is central to discussions of human rights. More specifically, it considers how sex trafficking works to consolidate a national narrative of exceptionalism that universalizes the U.S. condition, and how sex trafficking references the language and history of transatlantic slavery. Domestic discourses around difference and race, while seemingly distanced from debates around human rights, are in fact two conversations that enable each other. That is, contemporary national discourses of racial difference, particularly multiculturalism and postracialism, are made available through the concept of human rights and global diversity. Alternately, contemporary human rights discourses share much of the language, frameworks, and strategies for understanding difference that U.S. civil rights-era activisms articulated.

The question of the ultimate origin of African slaves is one of the most perplexing in the history of trans-Atlantic slavery. Here we present the results of a small, preliminary isotopic study that was conducted in order to determine the geographical origin of 25 enslaved Africans who were buried at the Newton plantation, Barbados, sometime between the late 17th and early 19th century. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the slaves' origin, we used a combination of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium isotope analyses. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios were determined in bone and dentinal collagen; oxygen and strontium isotopes were measured in tooth enamel. Results suggest that the majority of individuals were born on the island, if not the estate itself. Seven individuals, however, yielded enamel oxygen and strontium ratios that are inconsistent with a Barbadian origin, which strongly suggests that we are dealing with first-generation captives who were brought to the island with the slave trade. This idea is also supported by the fact that their carbon and nitrogen stable isotope values differ markedly between their teeth and bones. These intra-skeletal shifts reflect major dietary changes that probably coincided with their enslavement and forced migration to Barbados. While it is impossible to determine their exact origins, the results clearly demonstrate that the slaves did not all grow up in the same part of Africa. Instead, the data seem to suggest that they originated from at least three different areas, possibly including the Gold Coast and the Senegambia.

There are many wild rice species, but only two are domesticated. The most widely known is Asian rice, Oryza sativa. Domesticated in China approximately 10,000 years ago, it has been a primary staple in Asia for millennia, becoming by the 20th century one of the world’s most consumed cereals. Less known is Oryza glaberrima, or African rice, which was not recognized as a unique species until the mid-20th century. Glaberrima’s history begins not in Asia, but in the inland delta of West Africa’s Niger River, where it was domesticated some 3,500 years ago. Africans adapted glaberrima to a variety of landscapes and developed specialized farming practices that advanced its diffusion elsewhere in the continent, notably to wetland swamps and the tropical coastal region between Senegal and Cameroon. Cultivated there for millennia, African rice became (and still is) a principal dietary staple of West Africa. Women play a major role in rice cultivation. They plant, harvested, mill, and cook this important food crop. Since the so-called Age of Discovery, Oryza glaberrima has been entwined with the history of transatlantic slavery, which lasted from the mid-15th century to the last quarter of the 19th century. Over 400 years, nearly 13 million Africans were kidnapped and imprisoned on European slave ships bound for the Americas. Once landed, the survivors were sold as chattel labor to work colonial mines and plantations. Many had experience growing rice. African rice often accompanied slave voyages. As slave ships plied the West African coast, their captains purchased it in bulk to feed their captives during the weeks-long Middle Passage. Eventually, unmilled seed rice found its way from ships’ larders into the hands of New World Africans, who planted it in their provision gardens or maroon hideaways. By the end of the 17th century, plantation owners in Carolina (and later Brazil) were beginning to cultivate rice in response to rising demand from Europe. They very likely grew glaberrima at first—acquired as leftover slave ship provisions—and were almost certainly tutored by slaves already proficient at growing it. The development of rice as a lucrative export crop, cultivated on a massive scale in the tropical and semi-tropical swamps and tidewater estuaries of the Americas, is also a story of African agency and know-how. Nearly all the technologies employed on New World rice plantations bear African antecedents, from the irrigation systems that made fields productive, to the milling and winnowing of grain by African female labor wielding traditional African tools. The recovery of African rice history dispels long-held beliefs that Africans contributed little to the global table and added nothing more than muscle to the agricultural history of the Americas. It upends the myth that they only provided labor, existing as less-than-human “hands” that uncomprehendingly carried out slaveholder directives. Rice history has directed scholars to new geographical spaces, such as the provision gardens of the enslaved, while integrating contributions from archaeology, botany, geography, linguistics, and genomics. Not least, it gives to slavery’s victims a voice rarely heard in traditional sources.

As a formerly enslaved labourer turned artist, Bill Traylor's prolific outpouring of between 1200 and 1500 drawings during 1939–1942 represents a ground-breaking exploration of the memory and history of transatlantic slavery. As I argue, Traylor's autobiographically inspired and imaginative ‘storytelling pictures’ defy white mainstream determinations to fix his visual archive according to prescriptive categorizations or monolithic designations. Far from representing an uncut, unmediated and seemingly authentic and transparent lens through which to examine the lives and deaths of black men, women and children, Traylor's drawings constitute experimental works of art. His extensive body of work bears witness to his coming to consciousness of that which I theorize as a self-made visual language by which he breathed fresh life into an array of black experiences and memories which have remained, at worst, undramatized and unimagined within white mainstream art histories or, at best, narrated via indirection and understatement within the parallel literary tradition of the white western originated, hybrid and far from static genre of the slave narrative. Cutting to the heart of Traylor's thought-provoking, shocking, uncensored and even traumatizing vignettes, this article analyzes the extent to which his vast body of work and interrelated series of visual anti-slave narratives have had a defining impact upon the development of twentieth-century African-American visual cultures.

This essay is an exploration of the British-raised writer Caryl Phillips's dramatic adaptation of Simon Schama's book Rough Crossings (2005), which was first performed in the UK as part of the 2007 bicentennial commemoration of the end of slavery in the British Empire. It explores how Phillips's rewriting of Schama's history of transatlantic slavery, Abolition, the War of Independence, and the fortunes of the Sierra Leone settlement in the eighteenth century functions as a dramatic critical envisioning of African American politics and leadership in the twentieth century. The essay begins by noting the initial and instructive significance of Africa America for Phillips's diasporic engagements with Britain, and its emergence as a central concern in his circumatlantic envisioning of modern diasporic life. It considers next the confluences between Schama's book and Phillips's adaptation, and explores the significant changes and transformations which distinguish the play of Rough Crossings. Rather than offer an accurate vision of the eighteenth century on stage, Phillips uses the historical occasion of the play to address twentieth-century concerns and happenings related to African American charismatic political leadership. Its two key African American figures, David George and Thomas Peters, are presented as “hagiographical” characters who recall the political trajectories of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X – hallowed and revered personages in African American history who iconically encapsulate two distinct kinds of dissidence in which the proper name of each functions almost as a sacred signature. The essay argues that Phillips's play calls into question the efficacy of each form of dissidence across centuries, and ultimately considers Phillips's concluding identification of an American-born post-racial vision of circumatlantic and humanitarian affiliation with the problematic figure of well-meaning white British Abolitionist John Clarkson, who is going into exile as the play ends.

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

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious Shannen Dee Williams (bio) Paintings and sculptures of black women religious produced during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and photographs taken of black sisters before the turn of the twenty-first century are invaluable historical artifacts. Because so much of the history of black Catholic sisters has been systematically erased and made inaccessible by archival restrictions, visual sources are sometimes the only evidence available to researchers – beyond oral history – that document black sisters’ presence and experiences of racial segregation and exclusion in religious life.1 This is especially true for the church’s earliest black sisters and African-descended women and girls who entered European and historically white sisterhoods in the modern era. In an effort to bring more attention to black sisters’ rich, but often elusive, visual history, this issue of American Catholic Studies features seven pieces of visual art and photographs that survey their history from the rise of transatlantic devotion to St. Iphigenia (cover image) in the sixteenth century through the canonization of St. Josephine Bakhita in 2000. These selected images not only document black sisters’ pioneering histories in female religious life, but also chart their fiercely contested presence in the church when most equated whiteness with purity and holiness and blackness with evil and moral debasement. Unsurprisingly then, several of these images have been used by black Catholics and other members of the faith at various moments in history to promote black evangelization and contest white supremacy in the church and wider society. [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo Courtesy of Ben Tavener The eighteenth-century statue of St. Iphigenia (shown above) enshrined at the renowned and slave-built Sao Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil is one such example. Although extant church records reveal that Iphigenia and her convent of 200 Nubian virgins pioneered female religious life in the first century, widespread devotion to the church’s first black sister-saint did not begin until the late sixteenth century.2 This followed the forced conversion of [End Page 94] millions of Central and West Africans to Catholicism during the transatlantic slave trade and African dispersal throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world. As historian Erin Rowe has demonstrated, the veneration of sub-Saharan African saints by black Catholics and other members of the church’s faithful resulted in “the widespread distribution of images, including sculpture, painting, and engravings” of Iphigenia in Iberia and Latin America. 3 This visual art, often commissioned by black confraternities (lay associations), combined with fervent devotion, enabled African-descended Catholics struggling to free themselves from the chains of chattel slavery, European colonization, and racial apartheid to forge an alternative spiritual discourse on blackness that rejected demonization.4 It also seemingly inspired free and enslaved African-descended Catholic women and girls in Iberia and Latin America to seek freedom and other opportunities to expand their social mobility through various forms of female religious life. In late seventeenth-century Mexico, for example, at least one clandestine confraternity of African-descended women who appear in the historical record called themselves the religiosas (nuns) of Iphigenia.5 Although the church’s active participation in chattel slavery, colonization, and racial apartheid in the Americas and Africa kept the global black sister population low and statistically insignificant through much of the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls of black African descent embraced the religious state in the modern era. In Latin America, where St. Iphigenia was widely venerated, hundreds of African-descended women and girls entered religious life during the colonial era alone. However, admission restrictions based on blood purity, race, and color relegated black sisters to the lowest rank in their [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of the University of New Mexico Press communities with rare exceptions.6 Most were permitted only to serve as donadas (religious servants who took vows and wore veils) and restricted to domestic and menial labor in their orders regardless of their status, education, and spiritual perfection. 7 Although church records are inundated with direct and fleeting references to African-descended donadas...

Reviewed by: Anatomy of a Séance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada David Marshall (bio) Stan McMullin . Anatomy of a Séance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central CanadaMcGill-Queen's University Press. xxxiv, 260. $80.00, $27.95 At one telling point in Stan McMullin's fascinating Anatomy of a Séance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada, he recounts how William Arthur Deacon, the famed book review editor of the Globe, declined to review Trails of Truth, a book documenting the séances held in the St Catharines area in the late 1920s. He confessed to being personally neutral and certainly not hostile to the subject of spiritualism. Still he felt reluctant to write anything about spiritualism because public opinion on the subject was so divided and strong that publishing a review in any newspaper would be certain to 'stir a hornet's nest.' As McMullin explains, those who held séances and a host of other people exploring the paranormal, such as fortune tellers and palm readers, were subject to prosecution under the Witchcraft section of the Vagrancy Act. McMullin's book, therefore, is an exploration into the underground or the margins of spiritual and religious life in Canada. Historians have concentrated on spiritualism's relationship to larger social and cultural issues, such as its role in providing a scientific or [End Page 418] material foundation to Christian belief, and its relationship to feminism and other reform-oriented political movements, including the abolition of slavery in the United States. But McMullin's objective is primarily to recreate the inner world of spirit communication. What precisely happened during a séance? Who was involved? How did the spirit world appear and communicate? What motivated individuals to participate? What, if any, institutional structures developed around spiritualism? These questions drive McMullin's account, and the result is a finely detailed look into the inner world of spiritualism. The book is replete with long and detailed firsthand accounts of spirit communication. McMullin's extensive quotation from the primary sources draws sceptical readers into the private world of spirit communication. Historians have either ignored or consciously avoided the thorny problem of what actually happened during spirit communication. McMullin's ability to recreate a finely detailed look into the necessarily concealed world of séances and spiritualism is testimony to his excellent research and keen sensitivity to the spiritualist movement. Anatomy of a Séance begins with the experience of Susanna and John Dunbar Moodie in the 1850s, moves through the late Victorian generation of spirit seekers, then discusses early twentieth-century figures who claimed their work in spirit communication was related to the emerging science of psychic research. He concludes with a discussion of Canada's best-known spiritualist, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who went to great lengths to keep his spiritualist activities hidden from the public. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, spiritualists still struggled with a legal system and public opinion that regarded spiritualism as somehow unsavoury. The analysis of the Rev B.F. Austin, who was found guilty of heresy by the Methodist Church in Canada for his spiritualist beliefs and activities, is a particularly valuable addition to historiography. McMullin clearly demonstrates the complex relationship between spiritualism and Christianity through his recreation of the séances, which in many cases look suspiciously like a church service. During many spiritualist meetings, prayer was held and there was hymn singing. Moreover, séances and church worship were ultimately concerned with trying to understand the miraculous, the character of a supreme being, and the possibility of life everlasting. One theme that connects the people in this book is that a recent death of a loved one or family member inspired their pursuit of mediums and spirit communication. This book, therefore, is not only about the highly secretive world of spirit communication but also about how generations of Canadians dealt with their grief. As McMullin demonstrates, this phenomenon became more commonplace in the wake of the slaughter of the First World War and the flu epidemic that followed so hard on its heels. [End Page 419] David Marshall David B. Marshall...

Slavery in what became the United States endured for more than 250 years. The European international slave trade to what became the US lasted for almost 200 years, and after it was legally abolished in 1808, the domestic trade in enslaved people (the so-called ‘interstate trade’) within the US continued for more than 55 years. During the international trade at least 800,000 Africans were kidnapped, transported, or landed in the US. From the 1770s to the 1860s, the ‘interstate trade’ involved the sale of more than 650,000 enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the Lower South. Another 1.3 million were sold locally in the South. Ports from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, to Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina thrived on the basis of this trade in humans (Eltis and Richardson, 2010). Political power and economic wealth across the South was largely based on ownership of enslaved property, and legal enforcement or support for slavery. Religious organizations and civic life were almost inextricable from slavery. The entire system was enforced with the power of the state.