Revolutionizing Sentiment

Abstract

In Chapter 5, sentimentalism becomes event-oriented as possibilities for revolt resonate throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Questions of violence, hemispheric politics, and community collide in narratives of slave resistance, including Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), and Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859–62). Each text engages the racial, gendered, and economic exploitations of slavery while contemplating sentiment’s role in organized acts of slave violence; together these fictions highlight transamerican structures of enslavement and racialization that complicate US racial discourses. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Blake’s construction of a militarized affective abolitionism, which builds on prior nineteenth-century fictions’ challenges to slavery and racism. As the novel insists upon a sentimentalism that works at the level of “the people,” it makes sentiment revolution-ready.