Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic

The whiteness of Romantic studies is a symptom of amnesia. It bespeaks a massive act of forgetting on the part of contemporary scholarship, an institutional disavowal of the economic conditions that help make cultural production during the Romantic Era possible: the maritime economy of the Atlantic. Black Romanticism deterritorializes British national identity and the culture of the Romantic era, reimagining them as the effect of myriad economic and cultural exchanges circulating throughout the Atlantic. It remembers the forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital role Africans and other diasporic commoners play in the cultural production called Romanticism, and practices counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. This volume focuses on Jean-Jacque Dessalines, Jack Mansong, Juan Manzano, John Gabriel Stedman, and Mary Prince, Caribbean figures whose biographies have over the past two centuries become part of a constellation of stories about slavery and colonialism, following a circuitous route that began in Africa and traveled from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. Each narrative has endured transformations that render the “original” story less significant than the ways they have changed, been changed, or changed the stories connected with them. Each of these figures has acquired multiple and contradictory reputations in part due to changing audiences and media.