Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismAbolition BluesThere is a problem with allowing abolition to set the terms for raising the question of race and Romanticism. [1] One of its effects, after all, was to maintain, maybe even police, the line between British and African, between white and black. Abolition too easily accommodates raciology in the difference it asserts between "us" and "them." [2] Which is not to say that it failed to achieve great things. What scholarship needs now, however, is a criticism that, rather than speaking for black voices, lets black voices speak. There were so many, so very many, and we can hear so few. Notes1. See among many fine studies, Alan Richardson, ed., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), Debbie Lee Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002). 2. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000). Navigation |