Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross
• Rodney Taylor

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature. By Kelly Ross. Oxford Studies in American Literary History. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. [viii], 191. $89.00, ISBN 978-0-19-285627-2.)

Coming from the background of literary studies, Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature delivers on its title. It is a valuable contribution to the study of southern, African American, American, and surveillance literature. Kelly Ross examines how surveillance and “sousveillance . . . watching from below” appear and reappear in antebellum American literature by exploring the interconnections between genre and race and “by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction” (pp. 1, 13). Ross’s argument is inherently interdisciplinary as she incorporates social science and historical evidence to offer a fresh perspective on canonical literary works and to shed light on the often neglected literatures of slavery.

Across four chapters, Ross presents different ways in which literary genres portray both surveillance and sousveillance. The first chapter discusses how fugitive slave narratives that predated the authorial intrusions from abolitionist culture provided enslaved narrators who are astute observers and informants within the slave system. Enslaved narrators who “sousveille” successfully offer a primary glimpse into southern society and show the protective means that sousveillance provided from racialized violence and surveillance (p. 26). The second chapter applies the framework of surveillance, sousveillance, and investigation to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) as well as his Dupin tales by linking how “surveillance migrates from slave narratives . . . [to] detective fiction” (p. 13). Chapter 3 provides readings of Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) to show how Black rebellions destroyed the illusion of white surveillance, which in turn shows that white surveillants were neither invisible nor immune from the Black gaze. The fourth and final chapter discusses the speculative possibilities of both Black and white surveillance in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to protect enslaved women and their families from violence and capture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–1860).

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature is well researched and is in conversation with scholarship and literary criticism on both surveillance and sousveillance, as well as the literary authors and texts she reads closely. Most important, however, is that Ross analyzes a vast range of literary genres and is able to convincingly argue her thesis and offer a comprehensive understanding of the ways observation shaped and influenced writing before the Civil War.

What is most compelling is how Ross is able to provide new close-readings for historically distant literature. Her analysis of pre-abolitionist slave narratives provides yet another way of highlighting the sophistication of enslaved narrators to countermand the systemic injustices of slavery and reminds readers of a broader body of a distinctly American genre of literature. She also [End Page 615] offers a keen reading of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Though it is not traditionally read as detective fiction, Ross presents the novel as such and shows its influence on Poe’s later detective fiction.

Ross ends with a brief coda that connects her work with the contemporary moment by showing that the person who recorded the murder of George Floyd was committing an act of sousveillance. In turn, the epilogue, while not explicitly making the call for more scholarship in this vein, provides a vocabulary of thinking and a critical framework for scholars of American, southern, and especially African American literature of later decades to build on her work and show that the phenomenon of observation is hardly contained to the American antebellum period. [End Page 616]

Rodney Taylor Ball State University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...