Subject to Others

The abolitionist writing of white British women over two centuries helped to found a female political vanguard. At the same time, it constructed Africans as others, denied Africa and its people any authentic heterogeneity, and displaced anxieties about its authors' assumed powerlessness and inferiority onto its depictions of slaves. "Subject to Others" charts the emergence of a colonial discourse in this anti-slavery prose and poetry unlocking the customarily unheard and invisible resistances of slaves that resound in every text. Eurocentric constructions of Africans and slaves integral to these women's anti-slavery polemics meant that issues of race, gender, and class equality for freed African-Caribbean slaves did not appear in white British texts after emancipation. Ironically anti-slavery colonial discourse played a signifcant role in generating and consolidating 19th-century British imperialist and "domestic-racist" ideology. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics in literature, history, cultural studies and women's studies.