Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850

1 | Interiority, Aesthetics, and Antislavery Sentiment

This chapter explores the simultaneous presence of the themes of interiority and aesthetics in the sentimental rhetoric of American and British antislavery appeals, and it reads them as respectively invoking different political ideas. Placing interiority and aesthetics at opposite angles may seem surprising, considering our modern association of aesthetics with subjective experience.1 But the interpretations offered here show that expressions of aesthetic feeling in antislavery texts often contributed to redirecting the gaze beyond the individual self toward a fuller perception of the outside world. The liberal emphasis on interiority in antislavery writings, through a discourse anchored either in notions of a similar human core and of universal natural rights, or in some expressions of religious sentiment, helped to counter racist assertions that highlighted bodily difference. Yet it also revealed its weakness and its limitations precisely because of its supposed inattention to outwardness, the exterior, the surface. Over against this focus on interiority, one occasionally finds an aesthetic discourse that directed the gaze at exterior or physical beauty. Better equipped against the almost irresistible forces of illiberalism, especially in an age when aesthetics played a significant role in the dynamics of racism, this aesthetic streak could have a progressive political effect by providing readers with a concrete, positive glimpse of a republican, multiracial, multicultural community.2 Chapter 1 u Interiority, Aesthetics, and Antislavery Sentiment Observed through these themes, the white novel of sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic may be said to have shown a clear investment in the workings of interior liberal sympathy, even as it left some room for republican solidarity. In spite of their official endorsement of a republican worldview, the American novels conveyed enthusiasm for the possibilities of liberal individualism surging up in the new nation, and the authors seemed unable or reluctant to merge those political philosophies. Sympathy , which in Adam Smith functioned as a correspondence between two interior worlds, reached delirious, and even incestuous, heights, as it transported its subjects into a world of intensity and passion. The British culture of sentiment seemed more open to an integration of liberal and republican tendencies, or to a combination of interior worlds and exterior forces. Three black writers used the themes of interiority and aesthetics explicitly in their appeals to feeling, but they offered an idiosyncratic take on those themes. Two African American writers, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Phillis Wheatley, were obviously inspired by both religious belief and the discourse of natural rights, and anchored many of their emotional appeals in the logic of interiority inherent in those ideologies . While Gronniosaw gives an extensive description of his religious conversion, Wheatley offers grand visions of the religious sublime. But my analysis also highlights points of divergence from that kind of emotionality , and especially the ways in which, for both writers, modes of aesthetic feeling helped to smuggle in a different political consciousness. Directing the reader’s emotion toward the outward features and appearance of both nature and human beings, these writers attempted to create an appreciation of the other that is not based exclusively on interior similarity, but makes possible a recognition of external difference. The association of this external difference with beauty, and its integration into the reader’s emotional world, suggest a politics of recognition and inclusion, and an acceptance of otherness within a communitarian vision. Gronniosaw and Wheatley occasionally forced the reader to move from interior to exterior, hence proposing a vision more complex than the liberal one, and better equipped to deal with the vagaries of difference. It is the writers’ international and cosmopolitan experience, moreover, that allowed them to develop this ideology, and the feelings to express it. Unlike in the writings of the Afro-British writer Ignatius Sancho, however, the liberal and republican impulses tended to remain separate, and did not lead to a coherent whole. Sancho, on the other hand, strove to achieve a unique “balancing act.” 34 slavery and sentiment Interiority, Aesthetics, and the White Novel of Sentiment In William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) Worthy and Myra, the ideal republican couple, are linked by an aesthetic sensibility that suggests that worldview. When Worthy remarks to Mrs. Holmes on the beauty of nature, she points out to him that Myra used to admire those very scenes, and that a “secret sympathy” makes them “entertain the same predilection.” She then mentions a piece of embroidery in the temple that she has...