Bodies in abolition
Broken Hearts and Open Wounds
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5009130 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura Brace (0000-0002-0835-7448, University of Leicester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 485-498 |
| Publication date | 2014-07-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Citizenship Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1362-1025 • E-ISSN: 1469-3593 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13621025.2014.923701 |
| OpenAlex | W2016571827 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
This paper explores some of connections between bodies and slavery in the antislavery discourses of the late eighteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on representations of violence and cruelty, and on the discourses of blood, sweat and tears in the eighteenth century to interrogate the bases of the humanitarianism discourses and what it meant to ‘compassionate’ the suffering of others. It argues that the connections between slavery, the body and citizenship lie in the socialization of sentience, the ‘complicated stings’ of social death and the idea of having a secure property in the person. Some of these connections were broken by the de-historicizing move towards focusing on the vulnerability of the slave and the power of the consumer. Using the slave sugar boycotts of 1791–1792 as a particular example, the paper argues that these more complicated stories are ‘leached out’ by discourses that treat slaves only as bodies, moralize consumption and rely on a neat split between public and private at the expense of a layered understanding of citizenship and empire, and of inequality, subordination, marginalization and social conflict. The article then traces some of the ways in which this emphasis on moralized consumption and disposable bodies resurfaces in current antislavery campaigns in the twenty-first century in the rhetoric of ethical consumption, risking the same ‘leaching out’ of political analysis, hollowing out our understanding of the link between slavery and citizenship
Aesthetics · Art · Citizenship · Consumption (sociology · Empire · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Philosophy · Sex work and related issues
Sentiment and sociability
A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery
Specters of the Atlantic
Volatile Bodies
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The Subject of True Feeling
Regulating Aversion
Consuming Anxieties
Improving the Inside
Post-humanitarianism
Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti‐slavery culture 1
Narrative of Commercial Life
Interpreting the Bicentenary in Britain
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility
Slavery and the Culture of Taste
The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History
Specters of the Atlantic
Female emancipation in an imperial frame
On Cultural Anesthesia
Speechless Emissaries
Gendered Difference, Violent Imagination Blood, Race, Nation
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |