Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 by Srividya Swaminathan
Abstract
206 RHETORICA côté du marchand, du ménestrel, ou du pèlerin reste toujours l'impécunieux poète. Ainsi, de la vantardise des troubadours belligérants aux monologues des valets à louer, MJ tisse un réseau de significations, où la liste n est plus tant un trope qu'un outil conceptuel qui permet de renouveler la connais sance de ces poètes. Le lecteur peut regretter la place un peu trop grande que prend la figure du poète devant la question plus proprement rhétorique ou poétique du fonctionnement de la liste; il peut regretter la composition mo nographique des derniers chapitres et les choix qu'elle conditionne (corpus des fabliaux très rapidement évoqué). Mais, il ne peut, en dernière analyse, que reconnaître la finesse, la pertinence et l'utilité des analyses autant pour le médiéviste que pour celui qui travaille sur d'autres époques. Catherine Nicolas Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III) Srividya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759-1815. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. xiii + 245pp. ISBN 9780754667674 The proliferation of scholarship on the multi-national and multi-era debate over slavery, on the part of scholars from multiple disciplines, has created an embarrassment of riches; because there is so much scholarship, work tends to specialize by country, era, genre, method, and topos. That is, with the exception of David Brion Davis' extraordinary work, scholars gener ally write about the debate over the slave trade or the abolition of slavery, and almost always within a single nation. And they generally further specialize by focusing on the proslavery or antislavery position, most commonly the latter. Finally, although the slavery debate itself violated generic categories— with poems, plays, sermons, political speeches, paintings, and songs either attacking or defending slavery—scholarship has most commonly accepted a visual versus verbal split, as well as a split within written discourse between literary and political discourse. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, students of the slavery debates are currently well-served in terms of specific studies, but have fewer broad brush treatments. While Srividya Swaminathan's Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric ofBritish National Identity, 1759—1815 can hardly be called broad brush—one of its many virtues is the grounding of her arguments in close textual analysis— it does transcend many of the boundaries that unhappily limit the area. A study of the debate within Britain, the book places that debate within the larger context of the debate within and from the colonies, as well as the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United States. As well as polemical pamphlets, slave narratives, speeches, and sermons, Swaminathan considers Reviews 207 literary texts such as Mary Birkett's A Poem oil the African Slave Trade, James Boswell's No Abolition of Slavery, and the collection Poems on the abolition of the slave trade. Briefly, Swaminathan s book has two significant points for scholars of the history of rhetoric. First, her work nicelv complicates the pro- and antislavery dichotomy. She is very persuasive that there was, after a certain point, very little true "proslavery" rhetoric in the British debate, and that, therefore, the term "regulationist" is a much more accurate one. That is, defenders of the slave trade initially tried to denv the brutality of the conditions in which slaves were transported, but quickly abandoned that approach. They moved to the argument that there were flaws in current practices, but that they could be ameliorated, that better regulation would sufficiently improve conditions. In effect, they tried to coopt the language of reform—the very discourse on which abolitionists relied so heavily—by arguing for reforming rather than abolishing the slave trade. Second, she argues that, while the abolitionists were politically success ful in achieving the abolition of the slave trade and then the abolition of slavery within Britain, to describe the end result of the debate in purely po litical terms, or to attribute causality solely to the abolitionists, is to miss the larger cultural consequences of the arguments made by both sides. Instead, Swaminathan argues, the slavery debate was framed as an issue about the identity of the British and the nature of their empire: "The dialogue...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2011-03-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2011.0024
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