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Essay Review: “Biopolitics of Seriality”: Frederick Douglass as Transatlantic Figure by Clare Pettitt

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Pettitt, Clare. 2020. Serial forms. The unfinished project of Modernity, 1815-1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Most lovers of 19th-century literature will be familiar with celebrated African American abolitionist, orator, and author Frederick Douglass.  However, few of us are probably aware of the extent of Douglass’s efforts across the Atlantic to promote abolitionism and also to dismantle colonialism. This book chapter, “Biopolitics of Seriality,” from Claire Pettit’s book Serial Forms underpins Douglass’s involvement in the fight for equality, human rights, and mere food security even in Ireland—part of the British Empire— and the amazing friends and relationships he cultivated as a result of his interventions.  The book chapter which is quite wide-ranging notes a late-career publication of Douglass’s, his 1886 reminiscences of the condition of the Irish when he visited Ireland decades earlier.  Just as well, though, it does a masterful job of drawing Douglass’s enslaved experience into the relationship that he shared with the Howitt’s and shows why Douglass was so visceral in his critique of Irish colonialism and why he was so moved by the oppressed Irish and thus felt compelled to confront it. As Clare Pettit has argued, this chapter suggests that we need to develop a more complex way of thinking about the developing relationship between kinship, citizenship, and biopolitics at this critical historical moment. Arguably, Douglass was the perfect person to undertake this task.

Reviewed by Alonzo Smith

Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections by Corrine Fowler

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Peepal Tree Press | £19.99 | Published 2020 | 324 pages | ISBN 9781845234829

From the Press: “Green Unpleasant Land explores the countryside’s repressed colonial past and demonstrates its importance as a source of ideas about Englishness.

The book presents historical evidence to show that rural England was a place of conflict and global expansion. It also examines four centuries of literary response to explore how race, class and gender have both created and deconstructed England’s pastoral mythologies. In particular, the book argues that Black and British Asian writers have challenged narrow, nostalgic views of rural England but also expressed attachment to English landscapes and the natural world.

The book questions the countryside’s reputation as a retreat from urban life. It interrogates the idea that country houses are models for civilised living or that moorlands are places of freedom. It presents new perspectives on the “English” flora and fauna that feature in literature, parks, allotments and suburban gardens. The book reconsiders a range of rural locations through the lens of British colonial involvement, including East India Company activity and the slavery business. The book connects England’s outward-reaching histories to what was happening in the countryside: the enclosure of common land, the beginnings of industrial mass farming and the reshaping of landownership through imperial profits. In bringing together histories usually separated by the Atlantic, Green Unpleasant Land makes connections, for instance, between the rebellion of enslaved people for their freedom in Jamaica in 1831, and the struggles of English agricultural workers in the Captain Swing uprising of the same year.

But Green Unpleasant Land is more than an academic study – accessibly written as it is – because it contains a section of Corinne Fowler’s own stories and poems written in response to the research she has undertaken and the material objects she has encountered. It is a personal story, too, of her own family relationship to transatlantic enslavement.

Green Unpleasant Land should make uncomfortable reading for anyone who wants to uphold nostalgic views of rural England. The heatedness of the recent media response to such work shows just what is at stake: a selective vision of nation that underplays the impact of four colonial centuries, or a vision that embraces, as Paul Gilroy expresses it, a post-imperial ‘convivial culture’.”

Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell

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Princeton UP | Hardcover | $39.85 | Paperback | $27.95 | Published 2020 | 488 pages | ISBN 9780691194011

“Between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War, many prominent thinkers in Britain and the United States elaborated a vision for the unification of the English-speaking world into a single political entity. The basis for this utopian thinking was a shared assumption about the racial and cultural exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This book by Duncan Bell is the first study of the wide range of figures – prominent scholars, journalists, novelists, politicians, and businessmen – who pushed for closer co-operation and integration between the two transatlantic anglophone powers and even for the eventual creation of an ‘Angloworld’ which would extend to the British settler colonies in North America and the Pacific. Such ideas were given added impetus by geopolitical crises, including the Venezuela boundary disputes of the mid-1890s and the imperial wars in South Africa and the Philippines.

The author takes up the ideas of dozens of thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, from the celebrated to the obscure, though central to the book is a quartet of noteworthy figures: Andrew Carnegie, W.T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H.G. Wells. Campaigning groups were established; transatlantic networks were formed; articles, pamphlets, books, and speeches were written and disseminated – all with the aim of emphasizing unity. Proposals for institutionalizing transatlantic links ranged from the modest to the extraordinarily bold. The former included strengthening defense cooperation, deepening economic connections, and coordinating imperial strategy, while the latter encompassed plans for the creation of novel forms of political community, even a single transatlantic state. And much of the thinking was underpinned by ideas about race and a shared Anglo-Saxon cultural inheritance.

Although the popularity of this vision began to wane in the mid-Edwardian era, versions of it reverberated through the twentieth century, and echo now into the present”

Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century Edited by Robin L. Cadwallader and LuElla D’Amico

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Routledge | Hardcover | $128.00 | Ebook | 39.16 | Published 2020 | 234 pages | ISBN 9780367274962

From the publisher: “This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction. As such, it initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases by offering a fresh perspective on literature that is often studied primarily within a national context. Women and children in nineteenth-century America are often described as being tied to the home and the domestic sphere, but this collection challenges this categorization and shows that girls in particular were often expected to go abroad and to learn new cultural frames in order to enter the realm of adulthood; those who could not afford to go abroad literally could do so through the stories that traveled to them from other lands or the stories they read of others’ travels. Via transatlantic exchange, then, authors, readers, and the characters in the texts covered in this collection confront the idea of what constitutes the self. Books examined in this volume include Adeline Trafton’s An American Girl Abroad (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), and Elizabeth W. Champney’s eleven-book Vassar Girl Series (1883-92), among others.”

Ebook available through the TCU Library. Entry prepared by Ammie E. Harrison.

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor

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Paperback | $27.95 | Published 2018 | 320 pages | ISBN 9780822371151

From the Press: “Following the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would profit only by abandoning the formal empire. British West Indians across the divides of race and class understood that, far from signaling an invitation to nationalist independence, this liberal economic discourse inaugurated a policy of imperial “neglect”—a way of ignoring the ties that obligated Britain to sustain the worlds of the empire’s distant fellow subjects. In Empire of Neglect Christopher Taylor examines this neglect’s cultural and literary ramifications, tracing how nineteenth-century British West Indians reoriented their affective, cultural, and political worlds toward the Americas as a response to the liberalization of the British Empire. Analyzing a wide array of sources, from plantation correspondence, political economy treatises, and novels to newspapers, socialist programs, and memoirs, Taylor shows how the Americas came to serve as a real and figurative site at which abandoned West Indians sought to imagine and invent postliberal forms of political subjecthood.”

The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man Edited By Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini, with Paul Walker

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Hardcover| $39.95| Published June 15, 2020| 312 pages | ISBN 9780820356556

From the press: “Born into slavery in Hampton County, Virginia, orphaned soon thereafter, and raised for almost two years among Native Americans, the charismatic Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-May 20, 1909) rose from humble and challenging beginnings to emerge as an inventive and passionate activist and educator who championed social justice. During the post- Reconstruction era and early twentieth century, Stanford traversed the United States, Canada, and England advocating for the rights of African Americans, including access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. His imprint on working-class urban residents, Afro-Canadian settlements, and African American communities survives in the institutions he led and the works that presented his imaginative, literate, ardent, and often comic voice.

With a reflection by Highgate Baptist Church’s former pastor, Rev. Dr. Paul Walker, this collection highlights Stanford’s writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. Editors Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer and editor. As an American expatriate, Stanford was seminal in redirecting antislavery activism into an international antilynching movement and a global campaign to dismantle slavery and slave trading. This book squarely inserts this influential thinker and activist in the African American literary canon.”

The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature by Jessie Reeder

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Hardcover| $194.95| Paperback | $34.95 | Published June 23, 2020| 288 pages | ISBN 9781421438078

book cover with silhouette of South America over an old mapFrom the press: “Spanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealings—Britain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century.

In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empire—progress and family—grew strained under the contradictory logic of an informal empire. By reading a variety of texts in English and Spanish—including Simón Bolívar’s letters and essays, poetry by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and novels by Anthony Trollope and Vicente Fidel López—Reeder challenges the conventional wisdom that informal empire was simply an extension of Britain’s vast formal empire. In her compelling formalist account of the structures of imperial thought, informal empire emerges as a divergent, intractable concept throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

The Forms of Informal Empire goes where previous studies of informal empire and the British nineteenth century have not, offering nuanced and often surprising close readings of British and Latin American texts in their original languages. Reeder’s comparative approach provides a new vision of imperial power and makes a forceful case for expanding the archive of British literary studies.”

The Yellow Demon of Fever Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade by Manuel Barcia

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Hardcover| $65.0 | Published in 2020 | 296 pages |  ISBN 9780300215854

From the press: “A pathbreaking history of how participants in the slave trade influenced the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge

As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives. Manuel Barcia examines the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.

Manuel Barcia is chair of global history at the University of Leeds and a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.”

Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts edited by Monika M. Elbert and Lesley Ginsberg

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Paperback | $47.95 | Hardcover | $170.00 | Published in 2019 | 290 pages |  ISBN 9780367869984

From the press: “American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy.

The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.”

Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers by Stephanie Palmer

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Hardcover | Published in 2029 | 218 pages | $155.00 | ISBN 9780367204297 

From the press: “Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as “women” was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of “America.” “America,” their responses prove, is a transnational construct.”