Main editors: Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Madeleine Dobie, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
A literary history sponsored by the The Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Series (CHLEL) under the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). Published by John Benjamins Publishing
In this work, we invite researchers from literary studies and other disciplines to reflect on the relationship between modern forms of slavery and literature, in the broadest sense of the word. We aim to draw a comprehensive map of these relationships as they have unfolded from the beginning of colonial slavery in the 1400’s with an emphasis on the transatlantic slave trade, but with an open view towards related and intertwined histories of slavery and slave trade in other parts of the world from the beginning of this period to today.
The literary history combines an historical approach with a topic-oriented approach. This means that while it will aim to make an historical development visible, it will not aim for historical coverage but rather aim at discussion of historical periodization through comparative modes. The scholarly study of slavery raises a number of different problems of representation, authentification and circulation which challenges our very understanding of the concept of literature and basic concepts we use to study it, such as genre, narrative or fiction. A literary history of slavery thus has to be open to very different genres and even incomplete, fragmentary textual documents of various kind.
The work therefore falls into to three volumes with different topical approaches, but all investigating shared comparative and historical questions related to the relationship between literature and slavery in modern times.
Volume editor Madeleine Dobie
This volume examines sentimental responses to slavery across national, historical and linguistic contexts. It also widens the angle of enquiry to encompass other emotions. How has literature, broadly defined, approached the relation between slavery and fear, anger or even happiness and humor? One of the premises of this study is that feelings are never transparent. They are immersed in cultural normativity and politics.
In this volume, we ask what kinds of work emotions perform in texts about slavery. Since emotions are attuned to social realities, how do they change and adapt to different political and historical contexts? What k genres, tropes, and images evoke emotions in relation to slavery in different literary historical periods? And how is emotionality related to personal life stories, family structures and issues such as gender and race?
Volume editor Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Over the last 3 decades, slavery and its social and cultural legacies has been an important subject of commemoration, scholarship and artistic exploration as well as a site of public debate. In this volume, we engage this question from the vantage point of literature, understood in the broadest sense as textual, visual or cinematic depictions of slavery across genres ranging from memoirs, diaries and travel literature to novels, documentaries and feature films. We ask how, at different moments, ‘literature’ has contributed to the transmission (or the repression) of the memory of slavery.
We invite reflection on questions such as: what is the relation between history and memory in literary representations of slavery; who narrates on behalf of whom and to what ends; what are the central metaphors, storylines and topoi of literary representations of slavery? What kind of identities and political realities are created or enabled by texts, what are the performative effects of literary language, and how do we understand different textual and oral representations of slavery within literary, cultural and political histories?
Volume editors Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Helen Atawube Yitah
Slavery has been described as enveloped in silence due to the simple fact that the number of literary texts written by enslaved people is very limited, especially when compared to the vast amounts of text and documentation produced by the colonial powers. This volume addresses this problem as a fundamental condition for the study of slavery, but also looks to the material that actually exist: How did enslaved people express themselves in other genres, through letters, in legal and financial documents? How did the formerly enslaved take up authorship as free colored or after emancipation in newspapers, journals or in other forms of text and expression? And how and to what extent are these questions of authorship tied to the problems of agency and political subjectivity?
This volume thus addresses the way in which literature was read and discussed throughout the colonial system. This includes the existence of libraries in plantations and colonies, the way colonial literature was read and discussed in Europe, e.g. in relation to the abolition debates, the use of literature in schools and missions, and more broadly to the use of text as documentation in questions of trade, insurance and debt as processes of translation, de- and rematerialisation and the negotiation of subjectivity that takes place through these interactions. But it also relates to processes of translation from an African to a plantation context, when texts pass from one colonial system to another and when accounts circulate between European audiences. Finally this section discusses the afterlives of the translational processes in creole literatures and transatlantic diasporas.
The volume covers slavery in the modern period ranging from the 15th century to slavery in the contemporary world. Within this period it is possible to outline a series of interactions between literary forms and the historical and economic realities of slavery within early and mature capitalism that are not immediately comparable to earlier forms. Earlier forms of slavery will thus be included only insofar as texts from the modern period refer back to them. The description of the relationship between literature and slavery in the modern period will, hopefully, on the other end open up interesting perspectives for the discussion of contemporary forms of slavery, highlighting the historical basis for this tragic contemporary reality.
Since the literary history is topic-oriented, a natural question arises regarding chronology. It is important to us that we do not lose chronology entirely, because the problem of slavery is very much dependent on historical contextualization and specific historical, politically motivated restrictions on conditions of discourse. Central to the project is thus a reflection of historiographical methodology both in introductions and individual articles including attention to the following issues and differences between:
As can be seen from the project description and from chronological outline above we aim to include not only transatlantic slavery but also slavery in Africa, Mediterranean slavery and East-Indian slavery as they relate to the establishment of a new, global colonial order. This is done with the intention of enhancing the globally comparative scope of the volumes. Though we do not wish to question the specific cruelty of race-based slavery, we do wish to allow for nuanced comparison between the cultural record of Atlantic slavery and the forms of representation associated with other forms of slavery. The volumes will include discussion of the varied economic, political, gendered, ideological and cultural forces at work (often in combination with each other) in different modes of slavery.
The book’s comparative perspective, as previously mentioned, also entails comparisons between the practice and conceptualization of slavery in different historical periods. For example, the understanding of race has varied considerably over time, evolving from an initial grounding in culture and phenotype to later biological/hereditary theories and contemporary negotiations between constructivist and essentialist models.
A third comparative axis concerns the relationship between texts written by the various parties involved in the institution of slavery, i.e. the enslaved, slaveholders, abolitionists and other observers. A nd afinal comparative interest concerns the relation between different colonial regimes and between larger and smaller colonial powers, e.g. the behemoth Spanish empire and slavery in the Nordic colonies.
Three volumes of approx. 20 articles of 6.000-8.000 words. The overall length will be 1,500-2,000 pages. Style Sheet Chicago Style (Author-date).
