"But It's For Research!" Monday
Yet again, the post has disappeared when it was almost finished.
I beseech you again, imaginary reader, to pretend that this post is longer and better written.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation is one of the best accounts of Black Britons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
If you know me, then it becomes fairly obvious why I would be interested in a book that spans political history, fashion, visual culture, philosophy, and a variety of other texts in order to discuss representations of race in Britain during this time period.
But why might a non-academic enjoy this book?
One reason might be that a surprising number of smart, well-read people seem to think that racial mixing outside of colonial outposts and slave plantations is a recently new phenomenon. Gerzina helps dispel this myth. She does focus on the abolitionist movement, but perhaps more interesting to readers are the sections were she focuses on non-political circles. There's violinist George Bridgtower and Cambridge scholar Francis Williams. There are business men, celebrities, and Lord Mansfield's lovely young grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Lindsay, featured on the cover in the famous Zoffany portrait with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray.
Gerzina writes in a beautiful, clear style and sets up the historical context of the time in such a way that it can act as a (rather focused) introduction to the era. Because she uses so much visual culture, it is easy for someone new to the subject to grasp it. You don't need to have read anything in advance (but if you have, it will enhance the experience); you can look at the images and see what she is analyzing.
If one criticism was to be made (and this is a bit stretching it), it is that the book focuses a lot on those who left a paper trail. As a result, we get a lot of accounts from famous figures of the abolitionist movement such as Granville Sharp and Ignatius Sancho, but less first person accounts of the loyalists who fought for Britain in the America war only to find poverty in London (a group with whom many Londoners of the time would be well aware). Regardless of race, the middle and upper classes simply leave more of an archival record. Overall, the book overs a broad survey of London (and some of the rest of the country - it's UK title after all is Black England) at the turn of a century when it was already well on its way to becoming the multicultural metropolis it is known as today.
Other Books by Gerzina can be found at her website: http://www.gretchengerzina.com/index.php?id=5This includes her wonderful work on The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett!
Other Similar Scholarly Books:
Gerzina's Black Victorians, Black Victoriana
Gerzina's Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend
Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution (Also available on DVD)
Kim F. Hall's Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
Rajani Sudan's Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850
Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
Roxann Wheeler's The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
Don Jordan and Michael Walsh's White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
Felicity A. Nussbaum's The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century
Not a scholarly book, but you should read it, if you are in the mood for a fantastic and fun autobiography:
Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
Other Online Fun:
An interesting NPR interview of Toni Morrison on her new novel, A Mercy, in which she talks about White Cargo.
"African London" Exhibit at the Museum of London
Links Cited:
Black London @ Amazon [www.amazon.com/Black-London-Life-Before-Emancipation/dp/0813522722]
Gerzina official site [www.gretchengerzina.com/index.php]"The Black Figure in 18th-C Art" @ BBC - History [www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition]/africans_in_art_gallery_03.shtml
Burnett Biography @ Online Literature [www.online-literature.com/burnett/]
All Similar Book links are from Amazon.com
Toni Morrison Interview @ NPR [www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php]
"African London" Exhibit @ the Museum of London [www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/Collections/OnlineResources/RWWC/Themes/1078/]