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.

Matthew Goldmark examines the role of compassion in the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous condemnation of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), which describes Spaniards’ violent attacks on defenceless indigenous populations across the so-called New World. Goldmark argue that in the Brevísima relación, affect justifies action; it is the sight of indigenous suffering that obliges the text’s royal recipient Phillip II to stop the violent destruction perpetrated by his unmanaged vassals in the New World. While scholars have mined the juridical, classical and religious source base that Las Casas employs in the Brevísima relación, few have placed emotion at the centre of this intellectual inquiry. In this chapter, Goldmark argues that emotion – specifically pity – is essential to the Brevísima relación’s defence of indigenous peoples and, as important, to its creation of a transatlantic imperial relationship between 'Indians' and the Crown. In the Brevísima relación, pity identifies a hierarchical relation that obliges intervention from a powerful imperial witness-authority. Thus, the affective imperative created by pity is not one of contemplation of an equal, but rather a call to action for an Other whose relation to empire remains undetermined.