Race, Slavery, and Transatlantic Scribal Politics

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

SPEAKERS: A. Veronique Charles, Columbia University; Fauve Vandenberghe, Harvard University/University of Ghent

"Abolition in Two Acts: Writerly Grains and Losses for Black Freedom in the Imperial Republic Before 1802"

This talk moves away from the well-celebrated, nineteenth-century iteration of Atlantic slavery’s abolition in order to examine gendered, textual expressions of Black freedom through assertions of liberties and entitlements from the prior century. In this talk, I frame the imperial French Republic as incarnating Abolition’s Frist Act. To this end, I examine writings from colonial Senegal against the backdrop of a nascent liberalism that incited revolutions across the Atlantic coupled with a singular decree of abolition (1792–1802). This study then establishes a diachronic study on the writings of a propertied, slave-owning, and slave-trading elite within this proto-literary regional context that, centuries later, propelled a veritable modernity in the world of letters within and beyond the francosphere.

“By the Slave Jauw, Printer’s Assistant”: Enslaved Authorship and the Racial Politics of Ephemerality and “Codexicality” in Eighteenth-Century Suriname

This talk examines a rare 1786 broadsheet poem written, printed and signed by Jauw, an enslaved printer’s assistant in Suriname. As the only known text authored in print by an enslaved person in the eighteenth-century Dutch Caribbean, Jauw’s broadsheet opens an important critical window into the racial politics of colonial print culture. This talk positions Jauw’s fleeting archival footprint alongside the contemporaneous elite, white colonial poet P.F. Roos, who actively sought to "codexicalize" his work to build a permanent literary legacy. I argue that the dominance of the codex as the ultimate arbiter of literary value relegated Jauw’s poem to the realm of sociological and political, rather than authorial value. Ultimately, I suggest that Jauw’s broadsheet poem puts pressure on the traditional Atlantic canon of enslaved life writing (e.g. Wheatley,  Equiano). Unburdened by the codex’s ideologically static mandate to represent an entire race or relay his entire life’s story, Jauw’s fleeting print legacy forces us to re-evaluate how racialization shaped the many ephemeral material forms that circulated in the eighteenth-century Atlantic.