Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-22T23:18:15.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ANTI-SLAVERY COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

Edlie Wong
Edlie Wong*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Black maritime labor was essential to the capitalist world economy as European nations began to reconsolidate their Atlantic empires in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1804) and Emancipation in the British West Indies (1838). British merchant vessels plying the waters of these lucrative Atlantic economies were often crewed by those colonial subjects whom they once held as commodities. Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic – has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).

Type
Articles
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 451 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adams, Charles Hansford. “Preface.” The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. ix–lv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, Francis Colburn. Manuel Pereira; or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina with Views of Southern Laws, Life, and Hospitality. London: Clarke, Beeton, 1853.Google Scholar
Adams, Francis Colburn. “Paper Presented by C. F. Adams [sic]. Esq., Late of Charleston, South Carolina, on the Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen.” Papers Read and Statements Made on the Principal Subjects Submitted to the Anti-Slavery Conference. London: Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1854. 34–36.Google Scholar
“America.” London Times 1 June 1852: 8. The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
“American Writers in England.” National Era 26 May 1853: 82. African American Newspapers. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.Google Scholar
Armistead, Wilson. “Imprisonment and Enslavement of British Coloured Seamen: Illustrated in the Case of John Glasgow.” Leeds Anti-Slavery Series 89. London: W. Tweedie, 1853.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. “Poor Eliza.” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 635–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Black Law of South Carolina.” National Era 27 June 1850: 102. African American Newspapers. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boney, F. N. “Introduction.” Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991.Google Scholar
Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.Google Scholar
Brown, John. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991.Google Scholar
“Charleston Workhouse, as Seen by a South Carolinian.” Zion's Herald and Wesleyan Journal 6 May 1857: 1. American Periodical Series Online. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
“Coloured Seamen.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.3 1 Mar. 1853: 50.Google Scholar
“The Den of Villany–Imprisonment and Enslavement of British Colored Seamen Illustrated in the Case of John Glasgow.” Frederick Douglass’ Paper 13 Oct. 1854: 1. African American Newspapers. Web. 5 June 2009.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London: MacMillan, 1905. Google Book Search. Web. 21 June 2009.Google Scholar
Douglass, Frederick. “Editor's Preface.” My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Frederick Douglass Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994. 105–07.Google Scholar
Fehrenbacher, Don E.The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.Google Scholar
“From the London Daily News.” Frederick Douglass’ Paper 6 Aug. 1852: 1. African American Newspapers. Web. 26 May 2009.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Irwin F. “Justice William Johnson: South Carolina Unionist, 1823–1830.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 36.3 (July 1969): 307–34.Google Scholar
Hamer, Philip M. “British Consuls and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1850–1860.” Journal of Southern History 1.2 (May 1935): 138–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamer, Philip M.. “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1822–1848.” Journal of Southern History 1.1 (Feb. 1935): 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.8 (1 Aug. 1853): 180–82.Google Scholar
“Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 3.1 (1 Jan. 1855): 10–11.Google Scholar
“Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 5.2 (2 Feb. 1857): 37–38.Google Scholar
“Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 5.3 (2 Mar. 1857): 60–62.Google Scholar
“Imprisonment of Colored Seamen in Southern Ports.” Monthly Law Reporter (July 1853): 165. American Periodical Series Online. Web. 12 April 2009.Google Scholar
“John Glasgow.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.7 (1 July 1853): 145–48.Google Scholar
Johnson, William. The Opinion of the Hon. William Johnson, Delivered on the 7th August, 1823. (Charleston: 1823). Slavery and the Courts. Web. 1 Oct. 2009.Google Scholar
Kenny, Eliza J. “Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society.” Liberator 14 Mar. 1845: 41. American Periodical Series Online. Web. 10 Feb. 2009.Google Scholar
Linebaugh, Peter, and Rediker, Marcus. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon P, 2000.Google Scholar
“Manuel Pereira, or the Sovereign Rule of South Carolina. By F. C. Adams, Charleston, South Carolina.” Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.5 (1 May 1853): 118.Google Scholar
May, Samuel J. “The Power of Public Opinion on American Slavery.” Report of the Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Conference and Public Meeting, Held at Manchester, on the 1st August, 1854. London: William Tweedie, 1854. 38–39. Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
“Negro Law in South Carolina.” New Hampshire Farmer's Cabinet 30 Jan. 1851: 2. Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690–1876. Web. 12 June 2008.Google Scholar
“A New Reform Novel.” New York Daily Times 4 Oct. 1856: 3. American Periodical Series Online. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
“Review.” Provincial Freeman 25 Apr. 1857: n. pag. African American Newspapers. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
Rich, William J. “Lessons of Charleston Harbor: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Pro-Slavery Federalism.” McGeorge Law Review 36 (2005): 569–626. Lexis-Nexis. Web. 6 Nov. 2008.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House.” Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. 213–30.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce, and Cheah, Pheng, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.Google Scholar
Schueth, Sam, and O'Loughlin, John. “Belonging to the World: Cosmopolitanism in Geographic Contexts.” Geoforum 39 (2008): 926–41. ScienceDirect. Web. 18 Aug. 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Slavery in the United States.” Manchester Guardian 15 Mar. 1851: 6. British Library Online Newspaper Archive. Web. 9 Sept. 2008.Google Scholar
“South Carolina Laws Concerning Colored Seamen.” New York Daily Times 5 Dec. 1853: 4. Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690–1876. Web. 12 June 2008.Google Scholar
Untitled. The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature 27 Nov. 1852: 571. American Periodical Series Online. Web. 12 June 2008.Google Scholar
Untitled. Anti-Slavery Reporter 5.53 1 May 1850: 73.Google Scholar
Untitled. Charleston Mercury 11 Aug. 1852: 2.Google Scholar
Untitled. London Times 25 Dec. 1852: 4. The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985. Web. 26 June 2009.Google Scholar
Ward, Samuel Ringgold. Autobiography of A Fugitive Negro. New York: Arno, 1968.Google Scholar