On the Sublime and Beautiful

Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, and Reverberations of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics

Bibliographic Data

ID11738947
AuthorsTacuma Peters (corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume25
Issue4
Pages780-803
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory & Event (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1092-311X • E-ISSN: 2572-6633
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tae.2022.0041
OpenAlexW4307127242
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited20

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano's aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke's discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano's discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts

Aesthetics · Art · Emancipation · Evocation · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sublime · White (mutation · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Philosophy