Romanticism and Antislavery Literatures: Pedagogies and Contexts

Romanticism and Anti-Slavery Literatures: Pedagogies and Contexts reflects on the question of what it means to teach abolitionist and anti-slavery literature of the long nineteenth century in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Urgent questions remain regarding what it means to teach Romantic anti-slavery and abolitionist texts in the current moment, despite the field’s reassessment of its complicity in and resistance to Atlantic slavery and its global repercussions. As Patricia Matthew, Ivan Ortiz, Elizabeth Fay, Sean Gordon, Frances Botkin, and Nicholas Blaisdell describe their experiences in the classroom, they articulate linkages that connect their teaching praxis with histories of resistance and liberation, even as they also seek to problematize the idea that abolitionist texts can be considered straightforwardly liberatory. The contributors argue that it is not enough to teach abolitionist texts from the period without also engaging other contexts, including modern perspectives on the legacies of slavery. Drawing of the work of Edward Said, Simon Gikandi, and Fernando Ortiz, the introduction to the volume offers a meditation on 'contrapuntal reading' as theoretical framework that further elucidates what the contributors collectively achieve by orchestrating these dialogues between past and present. The responses by Alan Richardson and Debbie Lee consider the intervention that the collection makes within the larger pedagogical conversation of the last thirty years, in order to point to the new directions of inquiry the contributors suggest, both for teaching and for scholarship.