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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. 193–209

Chapter 10
Orientalism, slavery and emotion

Slave market scenes in early nineteenth-century journeys to the Orient

The oriental travel narratives of the first half of the nineteenth century played an important role in debates about slavery. An episode in the slave market of Constantinople that appeared in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1735) created a model followed by later writers. But while Lamartine, a committed abolitionist, tried to stir up feelings of pity by describing the sale of a Black woman and her child, in Marcellus, Nerval and Pückler-Muskau, similar descriptions evoked different reactions, ranging from the condemnation of Islamic polygamy to the acceptance of slavery as an ‘oriental fatality.’ Nerval, for his part, reserved pity for the fate of White slaves. Oriental travel narratives as such represent a kind of emotional barometer that gauges both the progress of abolitionist discourse and resistance to it.
Keywords: orientalism, travel literature, slave market, abolitionism, empathy, tears, gender, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Schoelcher
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