Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature explores the connections between genre, race, and surveillance in antebellum American literature. It challenges the traditional notion of surveillance as a top-down enterprise and emphasizes the tactics of sousveillance used by enslaved people and their allies to resist racial subjugation. The book demonstrates how literary representations destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below and highlights the importance of race to surveillance studies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature explores the profound and often overlooked connections between genre and race by tracing the migration of surveillance from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. By examining the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional notion of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. The book examines the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, showing how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing, from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery. The book demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below, highlighting the importance of race to surveillance studies and asserting a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

Weight: 468g
Dimension: 241 x 163 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192856272