Familial Feeling Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel Elahe Haschemi Yekani Familial Feeling Elahe Haschemi Yekani Familial Feeling Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel Elahe Haschemi Yekani Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Berlin, Germany ISBN 978-3-030-58640-9 ISBN 978-3-030-58641-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58641-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. 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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this book began at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and, over the course of several stations and more years, has also brought me back felicitously to Berlin. It is therefore my great pleasure to begin by acknowledging those colleagues who have supported this project from its inception like Eveline Kilian, Helga Schwalm, Martin Klepper and Eva Boesenberg and who are now among the many old but also new col- leagues, such as Dorothea Löbbermann, Anne Potjans, Jasper Verlinden and Sigrid Venuß in the Department of English and American Studies that I also wish to thank. I further want to express my gratitude to Gabriele Jähnert and the colleagues at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and especially mention Stefanie von Schnurbein as well as Gabriele Dietze, whose many recommendations (literary and culinary) are an indis- pensable source of support in my development as a scholar. Magdalena Nowicka and Silvy Chakkalakal have also become great co-conspirators in Berlin. The University of Potsdam was another more than welcoming context to discuss this work, especially with my criticalhabitations collabo- rator Anja Schwarz but also with Lars Eckstein and Dirk Wiemann in the Department of English and American Studies there. At the University of Innsbruck in Austria Helga Ramsey-Kurz and Veronika Schuchter have been excellent interlocutors to think more about “Uncommon Wealths”. A generous fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz provided me with the great privilege and luxury to focus extensively on my sources and discuss early readings with engaged co-fellows overlooking Lake Constance. For the hospitality and support there, I want to extend vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS my gratitude to the entire KuKo-Team as well as to Aleida Assmann and Silvia Mergenthal and I also wish to thank Gudrun Rath, another critical- habitations collaborator, who made the stay in Konstanz more fun. From the most Southern German university it took me to the most Northern University in Germany and it was at the Europa-Universität Flensburg that I was able to complete the biggest chunk of this manuscript, again in the company of great colleagues like Sibylle Machat and Birgit Däwes and many more. Ines Beeck, Seren Meltem Yilmaz, Leandra Göpner, Thao Ho and Alina Weiermüller have been excellent student assistants whose help in locating materials is greatly appreciated. I have had the great honour and privilege to present various sections of this work in many settings in Germany and abroad and I cannot thank all my hosts by name here but do want to acknowledge the support from Lisa Duggan and Ann Pellegrini during my time as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU. Tavia Nyong’o was a great sport in agreeing to co-teach a group of dedicated students at the Queer Entanglements Summer Academy of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation in Greifswald with me and later again joined me and Eva Boesenberg back in Berlin to discuss Entangled Diasporas. Mita Banerjee has been an excellent mentor in navigating the pitfalls of (German) academia. In preparing the manuscript my Palgrave Macmillan editors Lina Aboujieb and Rebecca Hinsley and the reports of the anonymous review- ers have been extremely helpful. Thanks are also due to Amy Luo and Malin Ståhl from Hollybush Gardens gallery in London and Lynda Jackson from the Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster for their help in locating pictures of Lubaina Himid’s installation. Finally, a book on “familial feeling” cannot come into existence with- out the love and support of friends and family, again too many to list them all. I want to thank Henriette Gunkel, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, Marie Schlingmann and Samantha Buck, Noemi Yoko Molitor and Marika Pierdicca, Anson Koch-Rein as well as Ali, Minu and Maryam Haschemi Yekani. My parents have been the best cheerleaders one can wish for. Thank you. And last and certainly not least, my love and gratitude go out to Beatrice Michaelis, without whose patience and support none of this would have been possible. CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Provincialising the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere 1 Part I 1719–1807: Moral Sentiment and the Abolition of the Slave Trade 67 2 Foundations: Defoe and Equiano 69 3 Digressions: Sancho and Sterne 123 Part II 1807–1857: Social Reform and the Rise of the New Imperialism 171 4 Resistances: Austen and Wedderburn 173 5 Consolidations: Dickens and Seacole 223 6 Conclusion: Queer Modes of Empathy as an Ethics of the Archive 273 Index 293 ix LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 4.1 Title Page of Robert Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery (London, 1824) 206 Fig. 5.1 Cartoon depicting Mary Seacole in Punch (London, 30 May 1857) 256 Fig. 6.1 Lubaina Himid, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 (installation photograph). (Courtesy Judges’ Lodgings Museum, Lancashire County Council) 286 Fig. 6.2 (a and b) Lubaina Himid, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 (detail). Acrylic on found porcelain, variable dimensions. (Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate) 287 xi CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Provincialising the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere When I began working on this book in 2011, the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade still felt recent.1 There were new flms, exhibi- tions, and a plethora of events commemorating and refecting Britain’s involvement in this global system of injustice on a larger national scale. More than a decade after these events, the country appeared to have moved on being consumed by the internal fallout and ongoing tensions around Brexit. However, in 2020, the commemoration of enslavement again entered the public spotlight invigorated by the anti-racist protests in reaction to police violence in the United States and across the globe. More and more vocal groups like Black Lives Matter no longer accept the unchallenged adulation of slaveholders and those who profted from colo- nial exploitation in the form of statues and monuments. In Bristol protest- ers took matters into their own hands toppling the statue of Edward Colston and throwing it into the harbour. Similar acts can be witnessed worldwide. These demonstrations show how powerful cultural relics are in shaping notions of national belonging and how they continue to impact the devaluation of Black lives. This is why many believe such monuments should no longer have an uncontested place in the public sphere. For the (now revived) debate on memorial culture and racism, the bicentenary of 2007 marked a turning point in Britain. In that context many politicians struggled to fnd the right tone to commemorate slavery and the transatlantic trade, specifcally in relation to Britain’s (historical and contemporary) self-understanding. Then Prime Minister Tony Blair © The Author(s) 2021 1 E. Haschemi Yekani, Familial Feeling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58641-6_1 2 E. HASCHEMI YEKANI was criticised for not offering a proper apology by circumventing the word “sorry”, instead speaking only of “our deep sorrow”. It seemed easier for Blair to delegate the cruelties of slavery to the far-away shores of the Caribbean and focus more on the abolitionist campaign at home.