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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 18–34

Chapter 1
Slavery, sentimentality and the abolition of affect

This essay addresses the way details about the unspeakable conditions on the slave ships interrupt the sentimentalization of the plight of the enslaved in order to examine the political volatility of affect — in particular, disgust — in the late eighteenth-century metropolitan debates over the abolition of the slave trade. While disgust, with its capacity to assign abject qualities to objects, would seem to be the province of the proslavery advocates seeking to strip the enslaved of their claim to humanity, this volatile affect also plays a role in abolitionist efforts to convert visceral responses to descriptions of the Middle Passage into an impetus for action, making dehumanizing revulsion into moral outrage.
Keywords: abolition, Great Britain Parliament, sentimentality, affect, slave trade, disgust
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