Bleeding Humanity and Gendered Embodiments: From Antislavery Sugar Boycotts to Ethical Consumers

The origins of humanitarian narrative are closely linked with the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, with all of the deeply problematic understandings of shared "humanity" that it entailed. In an influential essay, the historian Thomas L. Haskell argued that it was aspects of capitalism such as contract and individual responsibility that first shaped the emergence of a sense that one's actions could have an effect on distant others, and hence (ironically) created the conditions of possibility for humanitarian sensibility. ¹ Thomas W. Laqueur went on to show how "the humanitarian narrative relies on the personal body, not only as the locus of pain but also as the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help," with detailed accounts of the suffering body eliciting "sympathetic passions" that could move a person from feeling to action. ² Closer attention to such antislavery narratives has revealed, however, that they stood in precarious relation to any sense of universal human rights and in many cases actually reinforced forms of racism and disavowal of the humanity of the enslaved. Deirdre Coleman, in particular, pointed out the virulent racism and African "otherness" that existed within many antislavery tracts in this period (well before the rise of nineteenth-century scientific racism), as well as the ways in which white women advanced their own claims for emancipation at the expense of Africans. "The belief in a common humanity, the sentimental identification of the African as brother: these recuperative features of abolitionism always co-exist with a panicky and contradictory need to preserve essential boundaries and distinctions," she writes. ³ As a matrix for the birth of European humanitarianism, then, eighteenth-century abolitionism was extremely flawed.

Lynn Festa has also examined "the way eighteenth-century abolitionists used tropes and figures borrowed from sentimental literature to delineate the parameters of the human" and "excite the 'humanity' of metropolitan readers toward the suffering of enslaved people in distant climes." She argues that sentimental abolitionism involves a "double movement of empathy and usurpation" in which "sentimentality generates a situation in which the subjects who sympathize and the objects who elicit sympathy confront one another across an affective and cultural divide in which one set of people feels for—has feelings about and instead of—another." ⁴ All of this work has crucial implications for how one thinks about humanitarian action in the world today, which arguably also "produces hierarchy and difference as much as it creates reciprocity and likeness." ⁵ Indeed, very similar critiques have been extended to showing how twentieth-century narratives of suffering, victimhood, and trauma also hinge upon problematic relations between victims and would-be saviors and between sentiment and action. A number of feminist theorists especially have explored the limits of sentimental "sisterhood" established through forms of gendered embodiment that focus on injury, suffering, pain, and wounding, while ignoring race, class, and other forms of privilege. ⁶ The fetishization of the wound, the commodification of suffering, and the mobilization of narratives of injury have all become powerful mechanisms for the distribution of power, as Sara Ahmed has shown, including the power to justify when and where to make humanitarian interventions, and who is deserving of the "gift" of rights. ⁷

Drawing on this body of work and my own previous work on antislavery sugar boycotts, this article considers how specific historical examples of British and American antislavery activism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can alert us to the limits of contemporary humanitarianism and its problematic relation to human rights discourses. In particular, I explore how the emblems, slogans, and material culture of women's antislavery movements, alongside visual representations of the act of emancipation, focus attention on the gendered body and the consumption of food and drink in ways that foreshadow certain contemporary versions of ethical consumption, fair trade, and gendered humanitarianism. The aim is not to draw a direct line of connection between the past and present, and certainly not to suggest an unchanging continuity between the two periods. Rather, the inquiry refers to the earlier instance as a...