Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
Romanticism's Black Geographies

Employs Wedderburn's stories of Black, place-based resistance to slavery to boldly reassess Romantic-era writing across multiple genres.

Katey Castellano (Author)

9781009523905, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

242 pages
23.4 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

Building on scholarship in Romanticism, Black studies, and environmental humanities, this book follows the political thought of Robert Wedderburn, a Black Romantic-era writer. Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn's vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Instead of emancipation administered by British colonial and commercial interests, Wedderburn championed the ecological projects of enslaved and Maroon communities in the Caribbean as models for liberation. His stories of Black, place-based opposition to slavery provide an innovative lens for rereading significant aspects of the Romantic period, including the abolition of slavery, landscape aesthetics, and nineteenth-century radical politics.

Introduction: Robert Wedderburn, romanticism, and black geographies
1. Against private property: Wedderburn's the axe laid to the root
2. From plantation to prison: Wedderburn's the horrors of slavery and London's radical press
3. Black women's abolitionist geographies in the horrors of slavery and the history of Mary prince
4. Provisions and pigs: black geographies in Matthew Lewis's journal of a west India proprietor
5. Maroon settlements as abolitionist commons: nanny of the maroons, R. C. Dallas's history of the maroons, and J. G. Stedman's narrative of a five years' expedition
6. Emancipation as the enclosure of 'waste fertility': Thomas Carlyle's rage against pumpkins
Conclusion / Wedderburn's last word: abolition with pigs, pumpkins, and yams
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]