The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature ed. by Ezra Tawil (review)

Ezra Tawil in his introduction to this installment of the popular Cambridge Companion series explains that the volume aims to serve as a broad literary history of slavery, to move "beyond autobiographical genres and their direct fictionalization" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives and novels, to include "poetry, drama and performance, film, and even music" (1). Essays in the collection offer "an analysis of the centuries- long interaction between 'slavery' and aesthetic form" (2). Tawil inaugurates this approach with a juxtaposition of the well-known narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The former "was structured in relation to exemplary autobiography" of Americans, notably that of Benjamin Franklin. The latter navigated a more complex route between the seduction novel and the sentimental romance: "Jacobs pointedly relinquishes a feminine moral authority grounded in innocence and unknowing, just as Frederick Douglass's confessions of ignorance at the beginning of his Narrative," that is, ignorance of his own birth date and of his father, "compromise his claim to the marks of normative masculinity" (6).

Sarah Meer's contribution perhaps best achieves the goals laid out in Tawil's introduction, as it shows how nineteenth-century slave narrators made complex allusions and appropriations of key works of British literature that most powerfully invoked the values of liberty and republican virtues, such as William Cowper's long poem The Task and Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato. In the early nineteenth century, Meer shows, the word literature had a much wider meaning than today and encompassed literacy, the realm of books, and the capacity for authorship. For instance, Lucius Matlack, in the introduction to Henry Bibb's slave narrative, wrote that slavery is "[n]aturally and necessarily the enemy of literature" but "has become the prolific theme of much that is profound in argument, sublime in poetry, and thrilling in narrative" (73). Meer comments that Matlack "opposes 'slavery' to 'literature' simply because one is heinous and the other beautiful'…but he also casts light on the resonances 'literature' might have had for slave narrators" (73).

Robert S. Levine in chapter 8 offers a revision or correction of the highly influential work by Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and an article that anticipated that book, entitled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1989). Whereas Morrison focused on deep or occluded meanings, on "textual silences and evasions in white- authored texts" (137)," Levine wants to invert that hermeneutical methodology, and employs "surface reading" (a term he attributes to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus). Morrison did not wish to assail the stature of the canonical authors whose works she analyzed, but instead to correct for what Levine acknowledges was the failure of prominent critics to discuss slavery or blackness: "The word 'slavery,' for instance, does not appear in the indexes of such foundational works as American Renaissance, The American Adam, or The American Novel and its Tradition' (137).

Levine goes on to offer close readings of Cooper, Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Especially pertinent is his observation that since Carolyn Karcher's book Shadow over the Promised Land (1980), Benito Cereno has been most often read as an antislavery text. Levine drops the surface reading method here because, he argues, Delano's perspective is the surface, and this perspective is badly wrongheaded, most likely intended by Melville to lure readers into a moral and perceptual trap.

Philip Gould's chapter, the first in the volume, explains how and why "slavery" was so often employed as a rhetorical flourish in the political discourse of the Atlantic revolutions, often by statesmen who were involved in the slave trade and took no action to end it. The word slavery was applied to "enslaving desires that morally corrupted the individual: avarice, appetite, lust, and greed (among others)" (17). Republican political theory demanded a free and independent will, unfettered by economic or emotional restrictions, and rather incongruously claimed some to be slaves to...