17360
Advanced Seminar
VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Writing Abolition
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Comments
Between 1700 and 1810 British merchants transported almost three million Africans across the Atlantic for the purposes of chattel slavery – a trade upon which the British economy eventually came to depend. Yet from the middle of the eighteenth century, various abolitionist movements began to speak out against this practice, which they saw as brutal and inhumane. The British had long seen themselves as a people devoted to liberty, and whose spirit was embodied in the rights of the Magna Carta. By the 1780s a wave of abolitionist fervour swept through Britain, led by the Quakers and the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and by 1807 the slave trade had been abolished (although slavery itself was not made illegal in the British Empire until 1833). This course will examine the various discourses of human rights and humanitarian sympathy that emerged at the end of the long eighteenth century in relation to the abolitionist movement. Students will be asked to analyse and compare texts by British abolitionists with those of ex-slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince in order to examine debates over civil and religious liberties, forms of cultural exchange, the problem of geographical migration, and conceptions of British nationhood as a land of liberty and equality.
Students are expected to acquire the following texts:
Students are expected to acquire the following texts:
- Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Any edition.
- Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. Any edition.
A course reader will be made available on Blackboard at the beginning of semester.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Tue, 2025-10-14 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-10-21 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-10-28 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-11-04 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-11-11 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-11-18 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-11-25 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-12-02 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-12-09 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2025-12-16 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-01-06 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-01-13 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-01-20 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-01-27 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-02-03 14:00 - 16:00
Tue, 2026-02-10 14:00 - 16:00
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