Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833

Geography played a key role in Britain's long national debate over slavery. Writers on both sides of the question represented the sites of slavery - Africa, the Caribbean, and the British Isles - as fully imagined places and the basis for a pro- or anti-slavery political agenda. With the help of twenty-first-century theories of space and place, Elizabeth A. Bohls examines the writings of planters, slaves, soldiers, sailors, and travellers whose diverse geographical and social locations inflect their representations of slavery. She shows how these writers use discourses of aesthetics, natural history, cultural geography, and gendered domesticity to engage with the slavery debate. Six interlinked case studies, including Scottish mercenary John Stedman and domestic slave Mary Prince, examine the power of these discourses to represent the places of slavery, setting slaves' narratives in dialogue with pro-slavery texts, and highlighting in the latter previously unnoticed traces of the enslaved.

Author: Elizabeth A. Bohls
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/23/2017
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9781107438163

About the Author
Bohls, Elizabeth A.: - Elizabeth A. Bohls, Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon, is author of Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge, 1995), Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2013) and co-editor with Ian Duncan of Travel Writing, 1700-1830 (2005).