Conclusion: Queer Modes of Empathy as an Ethics of the Archive

Addressing the boom of memorial events and special exhibitions as well as the establishment of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool celebrating the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, the conclusion of Familial Feeling returns to the question of ethics in dealing with the archive of slavery. Reflecting on methodology in literary studies by contrasting surface reading with approaches that foreground negative affects, Haschemi Yekani, via a recourse to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative” reading, proposes a queering of empathy that should not rest on a celebratory understanding of the past, as trauma overcome, but serve as a foundation of ongoing tension in contemporary narratives of familial feeling and national belonging. For this purpose, Haschemi Yekani examines the 2007 installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service by artist Lubaina Himid. The author proposes that by engaging with the messy entanglements of marginalised and hegemonic voices in the establishment of Britishness as familial feeling, one can arrive at more complex reading strategies of the literary sources from the historical archive of the early Black Atlantic and the British novel as well as a less congratulatory contemporary memorial culture that seeks British “Greatness” in the past.

Introduction: Provincialising the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere

In the introduction to Familial Feeling, Haschemi Yekani proposes a transatlantic reframing of Ian Watt’s famous work on the rise of the novel. Offering a critical overview of the intertwined histories of enslavement and modernity, this chapter proposes a focus on transatlantic entanglement already in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to challenge the more prevalent retrospective paradigm of “writing back” in postcolonial studies. Introducing the concepts of familial feeling and entangled tonalities, Haschemi Yekani describes the affective dimension of literature that shapes notions of national belonging. This is then discussed in the book in relation to the four entangled aesthetic tonalities of familial feeling in early Black Atlantic writing and canonical British novels by Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Robert Wedderburn, Charles Dickens, and Mary Seacole. To provide context for the following literary readings, scholarship on sentimentalism and the abolition of slavery is introduced and significantly extended, especially in relation to the shifts from moral sentiment and the abolition of the slave trade in the eighteenth century to social reform and the rise of the new imperialism and colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.

Consolidations: Dickens and Seacole

Discussing Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation and Bleak House in conjunction with Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands this chapter traces a crucial shift in mid-nineteenth-century literature which consolidates British imperialism via “enlightened” differentiation from the United States and culminates in the more paternalistic rhetoric following the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. While travelling both authors construct conciliatory images of the English home that do not overtly challenge the sensibilities of the British reading audience. In her travel account, Seacole utilises a confident tone often directly addressing her readers more familiarly than the Black authors before her. Dickens too uses excessive overt narrative comment to promote an idea of a shared sense of indignation at lacking American manners in his travelogue and at the misguided international philanthropy of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Both their consolidating tonalities rest less on complex introspection than on an explicit reassuring British familiarity. However, while Dickens increasingly understands British familial feeling as tied to whiteness, Seacole contests such racialised conceptions of national belonging.

Foundations: Defoe and Equiano

This chapter discusses Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative as foundational texts of emergent enlightenment thinking about the subject in relation to modernity and slavery. The aesthetics of their entangled foundational tonality is characterised by self-reflexive descriptions of psychological interiority, a retrospective temporal framework, religious conversion, and a belief in the emerging modern market economy. While both self-made men develop an emotive claim to Britishness, the representation of familial feelings remains stifled. In contrast to insular adventurer Robinson Crusoe, former slave Olaudah Equiano’s life story is much more strongly reliant on bonds to establish commonality. Moreover, their constructions of masculinity are spatially distinct. While Equiano’s “oceanic” identity is mostly formed in movement on the sea, Crusoe’s “insular” version seems to fend off any form of Otherness. For Equiano claiming familiarity is instrumental in the process of being recognised as a citizen, for Crusoe, the flight from familial obligations is part of the narrative appeal of his adventure. Thus, this chapter argues that while Black writing is often dismissed as imitative, it is in fact the marginalised perspective of the ex-slave that can be considered foundational of a more realistic description of intersubjectivity in English writing.

Digressions: Sancho and Sterne

Artifice and authenticity are conflictingly related in the extroverted and stylised displays of feeling in the texts of Laurence Sterne and Ignatius Sancho. Whereas Sterne employs aesthetic playfulness to set himself apart from literary predecessors, Sancho uses it to claim a part in the culture of taste and sensibility. This chapter reads Sancho and Sterne’s literary adoption of a digressive tonality distinctly not as imitative but as entangled. The scenes dealing with slavery in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are tied into more bawdy episodes. While not necessarily only sentimental, they still elude ideas of political solidarity. Sancho’s interjections of emotional concern in his published letters in turn not only highlight his capacity to feel (as well as his attachment to his family); in adopting the Sternian digressive dash, he does not adhere to the usual linear form of redemptive abolitionist writing and displays a uniquely Black aesthetic voice, albeit one that also reproduces deprecating sentimental tropes. This needs to be read as more than simply epigonic. Sancho’s digressive tone, it will be argued, intervenes more fundamentally into the sentimentalist romance with the cultured, feeling subject of modernity, while Sterne remains more elusive in his aestheticised divagations.

Resistances: Austen and Wedderburn

In this chapter the most famous writer of (female) affective individualism, Jane Austen, and her canonical third published novel Mansfield Park featuring her supposedly most unpopular heroine Fanny Price is juxtaposed with orator Robert Wedderburn’s much more obscure pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery. The chapter also revisits Edward Said’s famous theory of counterpoint in his reading of Austen and proposes instead a focus on entanglement. By contrasting the two texts and their relation to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, readers get a better understanding of how writers used the affective means of prose writing to introduce more resistant entangled tonalities of familial feeling. Austen presents wilful female subjectivity in a family that invested in slavery and Wedderburn, the unruly planter son, claims familiarity with both his enslaved mother and his slave-owning father, challenging the formula of the “horrors of slavery”. Via internal focalization and incendiary rhetoric respectively both texts tonally also create a more intimate familiarity with their readers. They thus aesthetically resist writing conventions and introduce more ambivalent nuance: pushing the limits of the genre of the country-house novel in Austen and refuting the demure tone of abolitionist writing in Wedderburn.