Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Erin Pearson, author of Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
What inspired you to write this book?
I was intrigued by an offhand comment in Eric Lott’s Love and Theft, in which he noted how often blackface minstrel songs depict Black people who have been transformed into things. Wanting to know more, I got into the archives, visiting the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, the American Antiquarian Society and the Huntington Library to investigate popular culture portrayals of enslaved people as interchangeable with objects. From nineteenth-century political cartoons and trade cards to the same kinds of blackface minstrel songsters Lott describes, I realized that a range of white commentators conceptualized slavery by taking the fundamental logic of chattel slavery (converting human beings into consumable commodities) and making that logic literal.
As I expanded my research to include transatlantic abolitionism, I recognized that the same impulse that drove those (frequently racist) popular cultural depictions also fueled an influential strand of antislavery consumer activism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that point, I realized I needed a book to encompass the surprising overlaps between ideological positions and geographic locations in order to show that consumption played a defining role in how people far away from slavery made sense of the system and their relation to it.
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
In the process of researching the book, I learned that the meaning of the word “consume” shifted in the eighteenth century. Whereas older meanings focused on negative connotations like “use up” or “destroy,” it expanded in this time period to also include the economic sense of “purchase.” This shift coincided with both the peak of the transatlantic slave trade and the period when commodities like sugar transformed from luxuries into everyday necessities for even low-income consumers. Suddenly, “consume” could encompass a wide range of meanings significant to chattel slavery: it expressed the logic of a system that sought to make people (economically) consumable, it captured the purchase of commodities like sugar, and it conveyed the destructive violence that enslaved people faced. As a result, consumption gave people a way to connect their own daily purchases with the commodification of enslaved people and the depredations of the system. Understanding the evolving semantics of “consume” thus explains why tropes of consumption are so pervasive in Atlantic World depictions of slavery. Beyond the centrality of consumption in structuring understandings of slavery, I hope this book will help readers recognize how careful attention to small details in language can illuminate broad historical trends.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
I was very surprised by the fact that consumption structured understandings of slavery in texts with very different purposes and ideological viewpoints. Certain white supremacist songs and antislavery pamphlets put remarkably similar conceptual frameworks to very different ends. I was even more surprised to learn that texts from across the ideological spectrum still depicted the connections revealed by consumption as highly aversive. People with a wide range of opinions about slavery, in other words, nevertheless responded to the institution (and their personal connections to it) with a similar sense of aversion. This realization risked being pretty demoralizing–what did it mean that a significant antislavery tool could be so easily used for white supremacist humor? I eventually came to recognize that disgust could be very effective in generating action, even as it could also spur problematic reactions. Even more importantly, I learned from writers like Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs that many Black abolitionists made a calculated and pragmatic decision to use consumption in ways that capitalized on its efficacy while subverting its tendency to slide into dehumanization. I hope readers will find their example as inspiring and instructive as I did.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
Even though my book focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I keep thinking about a twenty-first-century artwork that I discuss in the conclusion: British artist Lubaina Himid’s 2002 installation Cotton.com. According to Himid, the work–originally installed in a former cotton mill in Manchester–was inspired by nineteenth-century factory workers who urged Abraham Lincoln to end slavery despite the threat to their own livelihoods. Himid imagined those workers unloading cotton bales and discovering a piece of cloth or hair from an enslaved laborer on the other side of the Atlantic. For most of the commentators I discuss in my book, such a discovery would have been a source of horror; even in antislavery texts, envisioning products imbued with substances from the bodies of enslaved people tended to provoke disgust. Himid, conversely, saw such contact as the basis of radical solidarity, imagining that cotton workers on both sides of the Atlantic could use the connection to join forces and resist exploitation. A major takeaway of the book is the way many Black abolitionists sought to rework the problematic tendencies of aversive consumption tropes, and I love the way Himid’s artwork takes it one step further by refusing aversion altogether.
What’s next?
I’m excited to dig into transatlantic poetry and painting that sought to use the picturesque as an antislavery strategy. As we might expect, most visual and written abolitionist texts depicted slavery in grotesque, gothic, or sentimental terms, but there were others that attempted to use visual appeal to generate antislavery feeling. I plan to investigate how writers and artists tried to put beauty to abolitionist ends, as well as the risks of such a project.
