1st Edition
Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World
This book explores the history of slavery in the Atlantic World through the lens of emotion. Combining methods from the history of emotions with those from slavery studies often for the first time, this collection provides new and important perspectives on the role that emotion played in various slave societies across the Atlantic World.
Exploring slavery in Cuba, the United States, and British and French colonies, this book reveals how emotions were central to enslavers’ creation, justification, and perpetuation of the system of slavery. Simultaneously, chapters also evidence the ways in which the enslaved utilised emotion as a form of refusal, resistance, and survival. Finally, the book considers the legacies and afterlives of slavery, including how emotion can inform our understanding of slavery’s longer-term implications.
Taken together, the studies in this collection highlight the importance of placing emotions firmly at the centre of the study of Atlantic Slavery. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Slavery & Abolition.
Introduction
Beth R. Wilson and Emily West
Part I: Slavery’s Emotional Politics, Regimes, and Refuges
1. The Poison Pen: Slavery, Poison and Fear in the Antebellum Press
Erin Austin Dwyer
2. “Convince them that you are a tyrant [because] the negro must fear:” The Performance and Appearance of Confidence Among the Enslavers of South Carolina and Cuba.
Liana Beatrice Valerio
3. ‘Happiness in Havana? Dia de Reyes as an Emotional Refuge in Colonial Cuba
Will Perez
Part II: Enslaved Relationships and Affective Ties in the U.S.
4. “Horrible enough to stir a man’s soul”: Enslaved Men, Emotions, and Heterosexual Intimacy in the Antebellum US South
Kaisha Esty
5. “Her Work of Love”: Forced Separations, Maternal Grief, and Enslaved Mothers’ Emotional Practices in the Antebellum US South
Beth R. Wilson
6. “She died from grief”: Trauma and Emotion in Information Wanted Advertisements
Katherine Burns
Part III: Enslaved People’s Emotional Vocabularies and Expressions
7. Trials of Enslavers in Former French Colonies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Testimonies of the Enslaved between Gratitude and Fear
Teresa Göltl
8. Enslavement, Emotions and Oppositional Insolence in the Slave Society of British Guiana
Gordon Gill
Part IV: Emotions and the Afterlives of Slavery
9. ‘Memory, Trauma and ‘Affective Autonomy’: Displaying Emotion and Trauma at the International Slavery Museum
Matthew Jones
10. ‘Whose Emotions?’
Hannah Cusworth
Biography
Beth Wilson is BA funded Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Reading, UK, specialising in the history of slavery in the US South and the history of emotions.
Emily West is Professor of American history at the University of Reading, UK, specialising in the history of slavery, gender, and women in the antebellum US South.
