Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery and Empire

Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland?s role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked.

This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland?s place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire ? Ireland was both one of the ?home? nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers ? as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.

Foreword – Ireland, slavery, antislavery, post-slavery and empire: an historiographical survey1. Common ground: positioning Ireland within studies of slavery, anti-slavery and empirePart I – Bodies of Experience 2. ‘A Good Head and a Better Whip’: Ireland, Enlightenment, and the body of slavery in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women3. Colonial bodies and the abolition of slavery: a tale of two CobbesPart II – Humanitarian Politics and Protest 4. Debating empire and slavery: Ireland and British India, 1820–18455 ‘This foul slavery-reviving system’: Irish opposition to the Jamaica Emigration Scheme6. Black abolitionists, Irish supporters, and the brotherhood of manPart III – Geographies of Race 7. Failing to ‘unite with the abolitionists’: the Irish Nationalist Press and U.S. emancipation8. Amalgamation, moral geography, and ‘slum tourism’: Irish and African Americans sharing space on the streets and stages of antebellum New York

Fionnghuala Sweeney is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her research concentrates on American, African American and Caribbean literature and visual culture, literary connections between Ireland and the Black Atlantic, and Afromodernism. She has published widely in these areas and is author of Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (2008).

Fionnuala Dillane is Lecturer in nineteenth-century Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland, with research interests in Victorian authorship and print cultures, genre history and memory studies. Her most recent work includes Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (2013), joint winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize.

Maria Stuart is Lecturer in American Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century American Literature, African American Literature, Crime Fiction and Dysfluency Studies. She is co-editor of The International Reception of Emily Dickinson (with Domhnall Mitchell, 2009).