School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemConspicuous consumption: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing in the 1790s(John Hopkins University Press, 1994)In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women’s protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with some critics arguing that a relatively benign & “cultural racism”; in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism. Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, characterizes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more “positive” and “open-minded” about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolutionary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science; in his view, the Victorians must bear responsibility for inventing the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent. But while abolitionism may have taken its roots in philanthropy and a new-found enthusiasm for the universal rights of man, the many tracts it spawned contradict such a clear-cut distinction between the earlier and later periods. In its luridness and violence, late eighteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric points directly, for instance, to the systematic colonization of Africa; it is also rich in the sorts of phobias and bogeys more commonly associated with the later nineteenth century, such as miscegenation, cannibalism, and an essentialist stereotyping of sex and race, such as the perception of white woman’s sexuality as a form of degenerate black sexuality.