Aestheticizing Blackness in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Abolitionist Poetry

초록

This essay explores how Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and “A Curse for a Nation” extend beyond the issue of American slavery to address British racism. Representing blackness as a signifier of artistic creativity, EBB’s antislavery poems aesthetically challenge essentialist notions of black inferiority in a mid-Victorian society troubled by post-abolition economic decline and colonial unrest in the British West Indies. The poems thus work to liberate blackness from the chains of racial essentialism and draw on black performativity to expand the language of the poet’s social criticism.

키워드