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Preface This book aims to show that the anglophone literature about slavery in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries made an important contribution to the history of emotion, and that black writers in particular pushed feeling’s ability to express a political vision. Texts on slavery, including slave narratives, invariably contained an appeal to the reader’s sympathy. By engaging readers emotionally, narrators hoped to shake them into a recognition of the slaves’ plight, and to bring about a change in the slaves’ lives. This book posits, though, that sympathy and sentiment in antislavery texts were not just about slavery, or even about the particular thoughts and feelings of black men and women, but about conveying an encompassing political ideology. Black writers, I argue, were profoundly engaged with the ideologies and the literatures of their times, and they used sentiment in their writings to perform that engagement. Feeling, in effect, became a means to promote of a particular vision of society , including of post-emancipation society.1 In a way, this book offers one possible investigation of the insight that Black Atlantic writers were men and women of their times. Although it is hard to track down their reading habits, it is clear that many of them, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, John Marrant, Frederick Douglass, were well read and knowledgeable about immediately surrounding as well as international cultural and political currents. While many of the readings proposed here emphasize the originality and the unique radicalism of their texts, they also encourage making connections between black and white texts as co-participants in the ideologies of their times. Two major worldviews emanate from the appeals to feeling analyzed here. Commonly referred to as “liberalism” and “republicanism,” they are anchored respectively in an individual and in a civic or communal defini- tion of ethical, social, and political ideals. As Philip Pettit puts it, “liberalism hails a distinctively isolationist, and republicanism a distinctively communal, ideal” (180). The historiographical debate about the presence and the nature of liberalism and republicanism in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries has found no resolution, and this book does not enter that debate at length. The debate revealed the extent to which the terms liberalism and republicanism only describe a prevailing attitude. They do not allow us to make precise predictions about the thoughts or the intentions or even the political programs of those who claim loyalty to them. This book recognizes the complexity of values and intentions. Still, the concepts can helpfully distinguish the substance and the interactions of important cultural values. Indeed, I argue that they provide considerable new insight into the political world of Black Atlantic writers, and that they help put these writers on modernity’s political map. This book is based on the assumption that the broad opposition of individualism and communalism describes a fundamental ethical dilemma of all social life. While the norm is to care most intensely for those closest to us, a culture’s myths and practices can expand the self-sustaining community to very large numbers of people with whom contact is only conceptual. In fact, it is a characteristic of modernity that societies have an aversion to the suffering of people who are far distant from their immediate contacts. The point of the dichotomy is not to differentiate individualist and communalist writers by those labels, but to put the study of their complexity into the context in which it was most important to them. Focusing on the emotional and political tendencies of the texts, moreover, is valuable because together they constitute the culture’s ethics. American culture became markedly liberal and individualistic in comparison to other cultures, including the one from which its sprang. While the term republicanism is no longer embraced in contemporary political theory,2 it remains the best descriptive term by which to understand the communal ethic of some abolitionists as well as of contemporary leftists in the West. Whatever label people of social conscience in the West attach to their concern that government operate for the common good, that impulse is in the tradition of republicanism, and the history of that ethic can tell us much about how we have arrived at our current condition. x Preface ...

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