American abolitionist geographies: Literature and the politics of place, 1840–1861

Abstract

American Abolitionist Geographies argues that literary abolition was a movement that challenged the geographic integrity of the American nation. As a category of literary texts emerging in dialogue with the most active years of the American abolitionist movement (1840–1861), I argue that literary abolition accentuated the anti-national and counter-national investments of abolitionism. In the years 1840–1850, literary abolitionism engaged with the persons, locales and texts of the international (and particularly British) antislavery movement. In the years between 1850 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, literary abolitionism turned geographically inward. During this latter period, literary abolitionism criticized the expansionist tendencies of the state by focusing on the insuperability of regional differences and on the hidden resistant histories within regions. Literary abolitionism, I conclude, made possible a surprising range and complexity of geographic reference that has gone unrecognized by Americanist critics\u27 persistently nationalist reading strategies. Chapter 1 begins by examining the centrality of both Garrisonian abolitionism and West Indian emancipation to Ralph Waldo Emerson\u27s famous 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” The chapter goes on to analyze how Emerson\u27s 1844 “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” both engages with the rhetoric of abolitionism and proposes a novel ethics of non-mastery to match the address\u27s politics. Chapter 2 explores William Wells Brown\u27s changing attitudes toward the British West Indies as both reformist exemplum and possible destination for fugitives displaced by the Fugitive Slave Law. Brown\u27s dialectical engagement with British reformism, the chapter argues, conditioned his shift toward a more revolutionary politics. Chapter 3 offers a reassessment of Harriet Beecher Stowe\u27s politics of space in Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin by arguing against a critical consensus that the novel endorses the ideology of manifest destiny. Chapter 4 examines Stowe\u27s Dred, James Redpath\u27s The Roving Editor, and multiple works by Thomas Wentworth Higginson to document a broad shift in the literature of late abolitionism toward the maroon warrior as an object of radical identification and the maroon community as a place of refuge