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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. 175–192

Chapter 9
“No one can imagine my feelings”

The rhetoric of race, slavery, and emotional difference in the antebellum South

This chapter details the ideological foundations of the emotional norms of slavery and debates over whether those practices and feelings were tied to race or to slave status. It examines how theories of racialized emotional difference circulated, and the proslavery ramifications of those ideas, as well as how formerly enslaved people used the medium of slave narratives to refute white supremacist ideas about their affective inferiority and subvert the expectations of sentimental audiences. Abolitionists’ argument that emotional differences were rooted in slave status, not race, jeopardized proslavery ideology and individual slaveholders, as it meant that after Emancipation, Black people would expect the same emotional liberty as free people.
Keywords: United States, antebellum period, abolitionism, sentimentalism, slave narratives
Article outline
  • Transient griefs and beastly cruelty
  • Social constructs and biological imperatives
  • The feelings of a freeman
  • Feelings only a slave can imagine
  • Feelings no words can express
  • A stranger to sensibility
  • Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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References (35)
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