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In:A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 34–49

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Chapter 2
Race and affect in Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie, ou L’esclavage aux Etats‑Unis

 | Columbia University
Published online: 12 December 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxvi.02dob
Abstract
Gustave de Beaumont’s novel Marie, ou l’esclavage (1835), a companion piece to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America (1835, 1840) (Beaumont accompanied Tocqueville on his travels through the United States), belongs to a small group of early nineteenth-century francophone fictions in which the question of slavery is deflected onto the examination of race. Romantic psychology and epistemology shape Beaumont’s exploration of race as a site of emotional intensity that has no fixed referent. This treatment of race as an emotional forcefield rather than as the cause of an emotional effect, anticipates the work of theorists of affect and social emotionality such as Sara Ahmed. While Beaumont strives to demystify race, thereby exposing the absurdity of racial prejudice, by centering whiteness as an aesthetic value and metaphor for purity, the novel in the end illustrates its tenacious hold.
Article outline
  • Comparative histories and literatures of race and slavery
  • Race, emotion and affect
  • Literature, history and the emotions
  • Notes
  • References
References (49)
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