Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Goddu’s bold monograph contributes new interpretive tools to the collective efforts to recover neglected aspects of the African American archive. And it adds its voice to the growing collection of studies prompting us to scrutinize the structures of white abolitionist feeling.
Selling Antislavery also sets the scene for further material and visual histories of the antebellum abolitionist movement, and the manifold, complex affective confrontations with slavery that brought the US to Civil War." * American Literary History *
"
Selling Antislavery offers a richly detailed and meticulously researched interrogation of the American Antislavery
Society’s print, visual, and material culture. Goddu’s careful analysis of the ways these objects and texts shaped the tastes, perspective, and identity of those white northerners who would come to define the region’s middle class is especially compelling.
" * Winterthur Portfolio *
"What makes
Selling Antislavery essential reading is the breadth of its research, the depth of its analysis, and the way it demonstrates that 'the movement’s rhetorical approaches were consolidated by its material practices'...
Selling Antislavery will interest early Americanists for how it moves from the decades of antislavery activism before the 1830s through the 1860s. It is an important study for anyone interested in the history of media, politics, and culture in the United States." * Early American Literature *
"This meticulously researched and crisply argued book manages the interlocking commercial, sentimental, and political formations of 19th-century U.S. print and material cultures with nuance and analytical dexterity...Goddu’s book represents the crucial work that print and material culture studies do. Her readings texture conversations of the literary with material and print cultures’ tangible, quotidian presences...
[Selling Antislavery] s a model of how to contextualize whiteness and its various communities and identities and practices, helping us to think about how whiteness as an identity mobilizes racial politics to define itself not just seemingly against Blackness, but also seemingly against racism and anti-Blackness." * Textual Cultures *
"
Selling Antislavery provides a comprehensive analysis of the fascinating material culture of abolitionism: quirky almanacs, women's Christmas fairs, lavish gift annuals, and grand panoramas of southern slavery and black achievement. It is the book for which slavery studies-and American studies more broadly-has been waiting." * Jeannine DeLombard, author of
In the Shadows of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity *
"Through a multimedia array of case studies, Teresa A. Goddu focuses on the business-minded corporatism of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Her book is a much-needed history of the key dynamic that drove the rapid evolution of the antislavery effort in the United States from a small, heterogenous, and unpopular collection of gradualists and radicals into an organized and efficient mass movement." * Marcy Dinius, author of
The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. Antislavery Inc.
Part I. Antislavery Print Culture
Chapter 2. Summing Up Slavery: The Antislavery Almanac and the Production of Fact
Chapter 3. The African American Slave Narrative as Factual Compendium
Part II. Antislavery Material Culture
Chapter 4. Speaking Objects: Antislavery Fairs and Sentimental Consumerism
Chapter 5. Antislavery Fairs and the Culture of Class
Part III. Antislavery Visual Culture
Chapter 6. Antislavery's Panoramic Perspective
Chapter 7. Fugitive Sight: African American Panoramas of Slavery and Freedom
Conclusion. The American Anti-Slavery Society Celebrates Its Third Decade
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
