Showing Rather than Telling

An observation often attributed to Joseph Stalin—"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"—would be an appropriate epigraph for Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic, Ramesh Mallipeddi's significant contribution to literary and historical studies. One of Mallipeddi's main themes is that in the debate over both the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery, abolitionists and emancipationists increasingly recognized that metropolitan Britons were more likely to respond emotionally and rationally to fictional and nonfictional accounts of specific embodied victims of enslavement than to abstract arguments against slavery.

A corollary of that theme is Mallipeddi's reevaluation of the concept of sentimentalism and its relationship to empire, as well as to the abolitionist and emancipationist movements from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Mallipeddi argues that modern commentators often mistakenly dismiss sentimentalism as simply a means for those witnessing the suffering of the enslaved to congratulate themselves for their own sensitivity. Colonial victims of slavery, as well as their metropolitan observers, employed sentimental appeals: "Sentimentalism may also be thought of as a counterdiscourse of capitalist modernity that counterposes the particular to the general, the qualitative to the quantitative, the singular to the typical, and the abstract to the concrete" (9). Consequently, Mallipeddi compels us to reevaluate our understanding of slave agency.

The roughly chronological organization of Spectacular Suffering begins with an analysis of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko as a progenitor of subsequent representations of bodies translated by slavery into commodities that sympathetic spectators observe. Mallipeddi is keenly aware, however, that the degree to which Oroonoko's aristocratic status trumps his enslaved status limits the extent to which the sentimental female narrator can empathize with him. The paradoxical subtitle of "Royal Slave" reflects the contradiction between Oroonoko's status by birth and his status by condition. As in many later representations of particular real and imaginary individuals, the enslavement of Oroonoko is tragic because it is an inappropriate condition for someone of his status, not because it would be inappropriate for anyone.

Mallipeddi acknowledges that the scarcity of primary sources limits our ability to recover the perspectives of the figures of sentiment themselves. Sentimentalizing observers almost always filter the points of view of the enslaved. Gendered and generic constraints render the challenge of recuperation especially great if the figures, fictional or nonfictional, are female, as Mallipeddi emphasizes in his treatment of the eighteenth-century evolution of the tale of Yarico, and in his analysis of the nineteenth-century as-told-to narrative of Mary Prince. Mallipeddi, however, might have paid more attention to the problem posed by basing general conclusions on a very small number of accounts by and about enslaved women. Yarico's changeable ethnicity over the course of the century, for example, may have prompted authors after Ligon to emphasize her romantic rather than enslaved condition. And comparison of Prince's narrative to contemporaneous male as-told-to slave narratives would give readers a better understanding of the extent to which its editorial interventions were gendered.

In his chapter on Sterne, perhaps the most controversial in the book, Mallipeddi disputes the readings of earlier critics, particularly Markman Ellis's interpretations in his 1996 Politics of Sensibility of the "tender" story of the "poor Negro girl" in Tristram Shandy, as well as the accounts of the caged bird, and the imagined Bastille prisoner in A Sentimental Journey. Whereas Ellis sees these episodes as thinly veiled critiques of colonial slavery, Mallipeddi reminds us that sometimes a bird may be just a bird, and concludes:

Rather than argue, as critics have frequently done, that Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey actually engage with the question of chattel slavery, I have tried here to show how Sterne's militant patriotism elides the question of racial subjection. The primary objects of Sterne's concern—Protestant heretics in the Anglican sermons; Tim's brother Tom in the Portuguese Inquisition; and the English captive in the Bastille—are...