Teaching Eighteenth-Century Black Lives

Like other contributors to this forum and many others in our field, I aim to use the eighteenth-century classroom as an invitation for students to learn more about the history of the modern racism that shapes their own lives and the lives of people immediately nearby. I was on a Chawton Library fellowship in July 2016 when Philando Castile was killed by police in Minnesota. His death felt discomfitingly far away from the privileges of Chawton—rural splendor, intellectual retreat, an archive focused on white women writers. My students also felt far away, and I spent several days struggling to think about how my research efforts mattered to the work I'd be doing in the classroom when I returned home. As this piece goes to press in the summer of 2020, we are living the grave reality that the systemized murder of Black people, often at the hands of police, continues apace. In the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and their fellow victims recognized under #SayTheirName, many of us are taking action to call for immediate, material, and radical reform of institutions threatening Black lives, from police forces to universities to the White House. This activism must inform our teaching: as experts in the period containing the apex of the British slave trade as well as its slow erosion under the pressures of abolitionism, we have the opportunity (I would argue, the responsibility) to help students understand the racially unjust present that we have inherited.

I teach in Queens, reportedly the most diverse county in the country. My students are largely from the metropolitan area and many are socioeconomically disadvantaged—St. John's University has a strong and real mission to educate immigrant and low-income populations, with 37 percent of students Pell-eligible; the majority are first-generation college students; the student body is 44 percent students of color.¹ Literature classrooms fall short of this statistic but still reflect a relatively unusual degree of inclusion, one that invites faculty continually to revisit questions of relevance and immediacy of the curriculum for students. A course on the English novel focusing on genre and gender, which I had lined up for the spring after my summer in Hampshire, didn't seem at that moment the most urgent side of the period to show to students, most of whom would be taking the course to fulfill a historical division requirement. I asked my chair for a "special topics" designation to accommodate a course focusing on Black lives, which he immediately granted, and I got to work during my Chawton evenings compiling a long overdue bibliography of primary and secondary materials for a course called "The Matter of Eighteenth-Century Black Lives." The title borrows its terms from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, converting "matter" into a noun that points to our period's discourse on Black life, the traffic in humans of the Middle Passage, and the calls for social justice produced by authors of African, Caribbean, and European origin.

I have since taught the course twice at the undergraduate level. It is, without exception, the eighteenth-century course in which students have been most vocal and empowered to speak. Many are already experienced themselves in the injustices covered in our readings: geographical displacement, state-sanctioned violence, white apologism and respectability politics, the ethics of sympathy, political and economic disenfranchisement, mass incarceration. We begin with Ignatius Sancho's letters and Phillis Wheatley's poems, then move backward in time to Oroonoko and the primary materials collected in Catherine Gallagher's Bedford/St. Martin's edition. We then move forward again to the 1780s and abolitionism, beginning with Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, moving to white abolitionist poetry by Anna Barbauld, Hannah More, and William Cowper, and concluding with the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, now teachable thanks to Lyndon Dominique's Broadview edition. Along the way we touch on some contemporary journalism and cultural studies—Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," and Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow—to give students a...