This chapter reads Mary Prince’s History within a Black Atlantic context of Black print and activism to connect the abolitionist work of enslaved and free Black people across the Caribbean, North America, and Britain. Mary Prince’s testimony creates abolitionist futures too, linking past and present through transatlantic Black networks of resistance and print. The legacies of abolitionist arguments made by Prince, Belinda Sutton, Olaudah Equiano, Grace Jones, Ottobah Cugoano, and many others are shown to be of vital importance today as we seek pathways out of ongoing racial capitalist violence.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Felipa de la Cruz penned two letters to her freed husband who had moved from Sevilla to Veracruz in New Spain. These letters reveal extended discussions of Cruz’s commitment to securing liberty for herself and their children, as she reminded her husband not to forget her desire for freedom. Felipa de la Cruz’s letters hold immense historical value as they are among the earliest known letters penned by an enslaved Black woman in the Atlantic world that have survived in a historical archive. Reading the private correspondence between Felipa de la Cruz and her absent husband also reveals the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in an urban environment. The Coda presents these two letters transcribed in Spanish as well as in English translation. The Coda also includes a map of the social ties of a generation of free and liberated Black Sevillians who were Cruz’s contemporaries in the late sixteenth century (approximately 1569–1626). The map and extended key allow readers to trace some of Felipa de la Cruz’s Black neighbors who also had ties with the Spanish Americas, and their respective socioeconomic ties across the city.

In N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction short story “The Effluent Engine” (2011), Jessaline, a Haitian spy and “natural” daughter of Toussaint Louverture, arrives in New Orleans in the early years of Haitian independence. Her world is both like and unlike our own: in the tale, Haitians have learned to convert gases from sugarcane distilleries into fuel for airships. Turning “our torment to our advantage,” as Jessaline puts it, Haiti effectively bombed French ships to win the Revolution; became the world’s leading manufacturer of dirigibles; and secured diplomatic standing in the United States, even constructing an embassy in New Orleans.1 And yet, despite Haiti’s steampunkesque political and technological power, there is much in “The Effluent Engine” that recalls a less optimistic history. The French are still “hell-bent upon re-enslaving” the nascent republic; although the United States begrudgingly recognizes Haiti, it remains “the stuff of American nightmare”; and Jessaline confronts white supremacist terrorism and the threat of racial-sexual violence in the US South, where she fights the Order of the White Camellia.

This essay analyzes a central problem of both the U.S. and Haitian revolutions: namely, establishing governments based on enlightened principles, while maintaining economies dependent on Atlantic plantation regimes. The unique contours of this predicament in revolutionary Saint-Domingue had significant consequences for the United States. Like their North American peers, leaders in the French colony were committed to the production of plantation commodities. But in contrast to the United States, slavery was abolished, and citizenship granted to black men. During the 1790s, free and enslaved observers in North America tried to discern what each stage of the Haitian revolutionary experiment portended for the future of slavery, emancipation, black citizenship, and the economy in the United States. With independence in 1804, Haiti became a beacon for people of African descent, in part, because the new nation renounced the plantation regime, concluding that it was incompatible with universal freedom and citizenship. But most white North American rulers actively resisted this conclusion—and the Haitian example—for decades, until the paradox of a slaveholding republic reached its breaking point in the U.S. Civil War.

This chapter connects Black Atlantic and Indian diasporas in the Caribbean while also noting differences between them. Although a particular aspect of diaspora theory suggests a nostalgic longing for the original homeland in a dual home–host binary, the authors discussed here prefer not to ground themselves in a bounded ethnonational identity tied to a specific location. Rather, the very concept of diaspora is open-ended and multifaceted in their works. Even as they retain memory of and loyalty toward their several homelands and hostlands, they are also critical of the experience of continuing displacement, gender violence, and racism. Their embrace of different and evolving horizons avoids the melancholia associated with diasporic identities. Against the troubling narratives of their sense of unbelonging, they articulate a disjointed, provisional, productive sense of subject formation that is a critical counterpart to exclusionary discourse based on nationalist jingoism and nostalgic idealizations of the homeland.

The Machine Age helped usher in the literary experiments of modernism in a very practical sense by increasing international travel and correspondence exponentially in the early twentieth century. This chapter explores the idea of “being American” in Europe by charting the two-way traffic of modernists and avant-gardes across the Atlantic. Drawing on a diverse range of vanguardists (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bob and Rose Brown, Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams), it examines how motifs of technology, popular culture, and racial difference were often read through the lens of American exceptionalism. In both expatriate forums (such as Broom, transition, and various literary salons) and “homegrown” projects (including Contact, Fire!!, and Others magazines), these writers harnessed the nervous energies of the Machine Age to complicate and proliferate, rather than consolidate, modernist canons and formations.

Chapter 4 explores a more marginalised interpretation of modernisation, which foregrounded race and multiculturalism. Throughout the late twentieth century, the left wrestled with a growingly multiracial society and the rise of both the far right and a more self-confident anti-racist movement in post-colonial Britain. This profoundly shaped the Labour Party, which this chapter illustrates by exploring the 1980s ‘Black Sections’ controversy. Yet, there were only scattered arguments that linked either antiracism or multiculturalism to ‘modernisation’. This chapter explores some isolated explorations of antiracism as modernisation, notably by Ken Livingstone, and explains their intellectual context. However, it also explains why they stalled, stressing institutional and electoral factors, but also the growing discomfort among anti-racist movements with concepts like modernisation. Thus, ‘modernisation’ only became consistently linked with ‘multiculturalism’ in the 2000s, and even then, this association was hotly contested. The implications for Blair’s governments of this absence of race and multiculturalism in 1990s discourses of modernisation are explored at the end of the chapter.

Not just embraced by reactionaries, aristocrats, or committed duelists, the idea of honor had widespread cultural and sociopolitical purchase in the Romantic era. As a master value – or a value so prolific that it is becomes the hidden assumption of a range of different theories and practices – honor, this introduction argues, addresses three major developments in modernity: the growing split between private and public selves, the development of new kinds of civic virtue, and the ascendent place of affect in cultural production. Placing Keats, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Kant, and Hegel in conversation with contemporary critics such as Wai Chee Dimock, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Achille Mbembe – all of whose recent work is concerned with honor and mutual recognition – this introduction further reveals Romantic cultures diagnosis of the limits of liberal republican notions of liberty when faced with the social necessity of material forms of dignity.

Known for its brutal descriptions of punishment – and the resistance of its narrator – The History of Mary Prince is usually read as a slave narrative that argues for abolition by way of affective appeals. While its explicit set pieces of violence and sexual humiliation played upon the sentiments of British readers, provoking an instinctual repulsion towards slavery, these scenes may have also encouraged readers to identify the enslaved as permanently degraded. Mary Prince and her editor Thomas Pringle, however, challenge this acceptable debasement of slaves by connecting the concept of honor to Prince’s physical character. In doing so, the History addresses a prejudice long-held by both abolitionists and colonialists towards the black female body and demonstrates how Romantic abolitionism could pivot from the bourgeois liberal ideal of freedom – or the negative right of non-restraint – to dignity, a positive, material affirmation of social worth. A concluding section treats the History as a prospectus – or, perhaps, Afrofuturist manifesto – for the political subject that can exist outside of the state, capitalist institutions, and even the bounds of recognizable sovereignty.

A postlude acts as a précis of my argument about honor across the Romantic period. In the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands – the popular 1857 autobiography from a Creole nurse known as “the Other Florence Nightingale” – we witness the complex legacy of feminist honor in the literature of the black diaspora. Building her reputation at the height of Britain’s imperial conquests, Seacole seems to embrace the “manly” liberal-republican values that Mary Wollstonecraft urged women to adopt. But Seacole also deliberately cultivates her outsider status, especially within the colonial borderlands’ autonomous black collectives, where mutualist activity happens beyond the sanctioned, Western apparatus of respect.

Chapter 4 discusses various cultural constructions of physical difference: racialised phenotype, supposed medical predisposition or resistance to specific diseases and climes, and concepts of filthiness and hygiene. The eighteenth-century Navy was embedded into the structural racism of the Atlantic world and British empire, and many seamen suffered from this. Yet, unlike other institutions, it still rarely used ‘race’ as a systematic label to recruit, classify, or sift its workforce. Seamen were occasionally deployed according to climatic theories of national character and racialised constructions of disease and immunity. However, many naval surgeons still saw immunity as acquired rather than innate, and thus modifiable and dependent on a man’s most recent deployment, rather than intrinsic to ‘race’. Similarly, prejudice surrounding the cleanliness and attitudes of some groups of ‘foreigners’ was linked more to the administrative structures of foreign countries and navies than to essentialist understandings of the individuals themselves. Therefore, in the eyes of many officers, virtually any able man could be absorbed, reformed, and put to use by British naval discipline. This did not mitigate the violence and discrimination of everyday racism, but it highlights the somewhat levelling attitude of an administration bent on maximising its efficient exploitation of manpower.

This chapter tracks the discourse around race, slavery, and racial Blackness in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present day, with attention to the way the essay form has responded and contributed to the rise of new multiracial societies and struggles for emancipation and abolition. The author discusses how the work of abolitionist writers such as Lemuel Haynes, Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper has informed the subsequent tradition of Black essay writing in the United States and elsewhere.

This chapter analyzes the white supremacist fear of racial hybridity and scientific racism’s uncertain and contradictory construction of whiteness through a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) and Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854). Both New World novels, respectively written in light of and in response to the Jacksonian Indian removal and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, articulate the fractured Black Atlantic world by representing and critically contesting Anglo-Saxonism’s cultural pathology. The essay shows how antebellum debates about the “racial” character of two different antiquities – ancient Egypt and the medieval Norse settlement of America – function as an imaginary filter for negotiating fears of racial hybridity and degeneration in the removal/antebellum present. Next to uncertainties as to the civilizational significance of writing, these literary works reveal a Black Atlantic literary counterdiscourse that explores the economic and social undercurrents of racial slavery – a form of labor whose continued existence depended on the incessant circulation of imaginary “scientific” constructions of a “natural” hierarchy within mankind.

Building on Achille Mbembe’s A Critique of Black Reason and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, emerging respectively from a francophone and anglophone tradition of Black critique, this chapter focuses on the profound importance of Blackness in the history of globalisation. Both writers argue Blackness needs to be understood in ‘worlded’ terms, with transnational dimensions and local inscriptions, and an emphasis on the interrelatedness of the world – its ‘systematic’ character. Moreover, each recognizes that in its engagement with imperialism, racialization, and the radical redefinition of subjectivity effected by capitalist modernity, Black writing pre-emptively grasps the spirit of globalization. As with the ‘one and unequal’ world literary system, Blackness shares a common basis in European colonialism and transatlantic slavery, but is also uneven, context-specific and immensely mutable, prohibiting any ‘total’ comprehension. Distilling a complex history into certain key topic areas, the chapter examines the significant international dimension of Black literary movements; the worlded and anti-colonial articulations of Blackness found in Négritude and the writing of Frantz Fanon; shifting Blackness in a neoliberal global order; and the afterlife and representational challenges of the foundational ‘world-system’ of slavery.

Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.