For 2010 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2010)

Between the shelling of Fort Sumter and the fall of Richmond, the British public followed closely the course of the Civil War in the United States. However, the themes of race and popular government typically associated with the war were not isolated to the American context. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, contemporary understandings of such themes were continually tested, challenged, and rebuilt in the light of international developments.

In order to better understand these themes, this thesis interweaves two historical strands. On the one hand, it explores responses to global events during the period: not just the American Civil War, but wars with China, rebellions in India, New Zealand and Jamaica, nationalist movements in continental Europe, and the transnational independence campaign of the Irish Fenians. On the other, it examines the domestic debate about the extension of the franchise, from the failure of Conservative and Liberal bills in 1859-60, to the eventual passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867.

Based on a case study of the large, influential and diverse county of Yorkshire, the thesis considers the extent to which a national intellectual culture existed in Britain at the time. In doing so, it examines the mechanisms by which new views of race and democracy were disseminated at the popular, provincial level.

Race, democracy and the American Civil War in the County of Yorkshire

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5895&context=etd

The Walt Whitman brand: Leaves of grass and literary promotion, 1855-1892

Comical associations between the science of photography and ideas about race were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the medium's invention. Some humorists observed that no bourgeois sitter would welcome the sight of his “negative” or blackened self; others illustrated the cosmetic character of race by depicting the effects of photographic chemicals on human skin. This essay takes these racial jokes seriously by reading them as historically specific social commentary. Beginning with an analysis of the first book of photographic humor, Cuthbert Bede's Photographic Pleasures (1855), it shows how this genre both reinforced and challenged popular conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and the photographic medium.

Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

ABSTRACT:This article examines how abolitionists developed a rhetorical tradition premised on the neologisms colorphobia and Negrophobia in order to posit an affective basis for race prejudice. These concepts functioned initially as puns on hydrophobia, the historical name for rabies, named for the dread of swallowing known to accompany the disease. In other words, colorphobia harbored a precise metaphor in its etymology, picturing the slave system as a mad dog in the throes of a rabid breakdown, spreading race prejudice in the form of an infectious fear. Exploring the forms this rhetoric could take, I demonstrate that while satire thus served as the dominant mode early on, phobia’s emphasis on fear soon began to inspire strategies of public health activism too. Political discourse in the U.S. began to incorporate scientific investigations of fear as a psychological state. I conclude by arguing that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Dred is the most significant work of literature to respond to this rhetorical trend. Skeptical of the move to isolate fear as an exclusively pathological feeling, Stowe endeavors to repurpose a phobic aesthetic in the form of the novel’s protagonist Dred, originally spelled “Dread,” to explore the potential uses of fear as a political affect.

Dread: The Phobic Imagination in Antislavery Literature

Chaney analyzes cartoons representing slaves and slavery from the British satirical periodical Punch, or the London Charivari to argue that African American readers such as Frederick Douglass engaged in an evolving role as readers, interpreters, and users of Punch's iconographic discourse-even when, after the outbreak of the Civil War, the political sensibilities of the British periodical were no longer sympathetic to the cause of abolition. Reading the ekphrastic relation between Punch cartoons of Shakespearean mock-ups of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and Douglass's citation of these images in various mid-nineteenth-century speeches, Chaney argues that this intertextual and transatlantic dialogue with Punch enabled Douglass to renegotiate inscriptions of racialization, authority, and iconic celebrity. Beyond the cartoons, key pieces of evidence utilized in the essay include humorous asides from Samuel Ringgold Ward during an 1853 address of the Congregational Union in England, Douglass's speech "The Proclamation and a Negro Army" (1863), and several of Douglass's statements about the racial and political value of his hair from various sources.

Michael A. Chaney

Papers

Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature