Benevolent White Femininity and Empire in William Wells Brown’s Clotel
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William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave who took refuge in Europe, is often taken up as an exemplary black cosmopolitan, but this characterization fails to account for another important cultural discourse he engages: imperialism. In Clotel, the first Afro-American novel published in England, Brown employs the reasoning of the British Empire for his abolitionist cause. By treating empire as an implied context for abolitionism and gender in Clotel, this essay aims to complicate the current understanding of Brown’s contribution to the African American letters. The genealogy to which Brown belongs is not just black cosmopolitanism but also a now-obsolete black thought that casts Empire as the vehicle for racial aspirations. Where the dominant antislavery literary discourse is marked by an imperialist desire to expand the US through the liberated slaves’ colonial work in Africa, Brown suggests that the US be under the cultural guidance of the British liberal empire. Slavery puts America in the position of morally backward land that calls for the civilizing influence. A gendered question about who can and should perform such work of civilizing the land of slavery drives the plot of the novel. Through the character of Georgiana, the only liberator in the story, Brown answers to the question and ultimately revises a masculine politics of abolition by offering a feminine alternative.
Abstract
William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave who took refuge in Europe, is often taken up as an exemplary black cosmopolitan, but this characterization fails to account for another important cultural discourse he engages: imperialism. In Clotel, the first Afro-American novel published in England, Brown employs the reasoning of the British Empire for his abolitionist cause. By treating empire as an implied context for abolitionism and gender in Clotel, this essay aims to complicate the current understanding of Brown’s contribution to the African American letters. The genealogy to which Brown belongs is not just black cosmopolitanism but also a now-obsolete black thought that casts Empire as the vehicle for racial aspirations. Where the dominant antislavery literary discourse is marked by an imperialist desire to expand the US through the liberated slaves’ colonial work in Africa, Brown suggests that the US be under the cultural guidance of the British liberal empire. Slavery puts America in the position of morally backward land that calls for the civilizing influence. A gendered question about who can and should perform such work of civilizing the land of slavery drives the plot of the novel. Through the character of Georgiana, the only liberator in the story, Brown answers to the question and ultimately revises a masculine politics of abolition by offering a feminine alternative.
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