She Is Weeping
An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World

A new understanding of the rise, expansion and perpetuation of slavery in the Atlantic World.

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero (Author)

9781316512203, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 November 2021

288 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'The book's most enduring contribution is its broad scope spanning ancient history to contemporary issues regarding poverty, disenfranchisement, and human trafficking … This book will surely impact future studies regarding slavery, intellectual history, and systemic racism … Recommended.' C. L. Stacey, Choice

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state.

1. The emotional foundations of racialized slavery
2. Scientific racism and emotional difference
3. Atlantic slavery and its passionate transgressions
4. The 'abolition' of an economic apparatus of feelings
5. The racialization of emotions in contemporary slavery
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], History of ideas [JFCX], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], History of the Americas [HBJK]