A01=Erin Pearson
abolition
abolitionist novels
African American history
African American literature
American Literature
American slavery
Anglophone Atlantic
animal violence
anti-Black racism
anti-Blackness
antislavery action
Antislavery consumer activism
at-home Blackface minstrelsy
Author_Erin Pearson
Black abolitionists
blackface minstrelsy
blood-sugar metaphors
British literature
cannibalism
Category=DS
Category=DSBD
Category=DSBF
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHB
Category=NHD
Category=NHK
consumption as connection
disgust
economic foundations of slavery
Elizabeth Heyrick
Elizabeth Margaret Chandler
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frederick Douglass
Free Produce Abolitionism
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Henry David Thoreau
Herman Melville
hungry animal tropes
John Woolman
Mary Prince
minstrelsy
Moby-Dick
Olaudah Equiano
Quakers
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
semantic proximity
sentimental literature
sentimentality
slavery
sugar cultivation
sugar trade
sympathy
Tangible Commodities
Thomas Cooper
transatlantic
transatlantic studies
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Walden
Product details
- ISBN 9780813953878
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Oct 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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How abolitionists persuaded people of their personal complicity with slavery to advance the cause of freedom
Grievous Entanglement explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. Consumption became a formidable trope that tied the evils of chattel slavery to individuals' behavior through their purchase of slave-produced commodities like cotton or sugar. With her groundbreaking analysis of this dominant conceptual framework, Erin Pearson provides new insight into both the motivation behind and the functioning of antislavery activism.
Unlike sentimental literature, which sought to engender sympathy for the enslaved, consumption-as-connection leveraged aversion to inspire people to sever their ties with an evil institution. Strategic disgust, Pearson shows, proved effective in inciting abolitionist action. It also frequently slipped into nonabolitionist and even proslavery uses by actually fomenting racism, as this book is the first to demonstrate. Examining a wide variety of media, including poetry, political cartoons, blackface minstrelsy, slave narratives, and novels produced from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, this ingeniously interdisciplinary study reveals how aversive consumption powerfully shaped ideas about slavery to both positive and pernicious effect.
Grievous Entanglement explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. Consumption became a formidable trope that tied the evils of chattel slavery to individuals' behavior through their purchase of slave-produced commodities like cotton or sugar. With her groundbreaking analysis of this dominant conceptual framework, Erin Pearson provides new insight into both the motivation behind and the functioning of antislavery activism.
Unlike sentimental literature, which sought to engender sympathy for the enslaved, consumption-as-connection leveraged aversion to inspire people to sever their ties with an evil institution. Strategic disgust, Pearson shows, proved effective in inciting abolitionist action. It also frequently slipped into nonabolitionist and even proslavery uses by actually fomenting racism, as this book is the first to demonstrate. Examining a wide variety of media, including poetry, political cartoons, blackface minstrelsy, slave narratives, and novels produced from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, this ingeniously interdisciplinary study reveals how aversive consumption powerfully shaped ideas about slavery to both positive and pernicious effect.
Erin Pearson is Assistant Professor of English at Elon University.
