Eighteenth-Century Black Lives, 1688-1838

Catalog description

Covers representations of black life in literature published during the age of the British slave trade and abolition. Explores texts by former black slaves and white English authors, highlighting various attitudes toward black life in British culture. Topics include black authors’ relationships to English structures like Christianity, culture, and global commerce, and their calls for abolition. Examines whether white writers can represent abolitionist positions and the politics of white sympathy for the slave trade’s violations. Through prose, poetry, fiction, treatises and scholarship, the course centers blackness and its connection to slavery in the eighteenth century.