The figure of the grateful slave, devoted to his or her master in
thanks for kind treatment, is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century
writing from Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack (1722) to Maria
Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro' (1804). Yet this important trope,
linked with discourses that tried to justify racial oppression,
slavery and colonialism, has been overlooked in eighteenth-century
literary research. Challenging previous accounts of the
relationship between sentiment and slavery, in this 2008 book
George Boulukos shows how the image of the grateful slave
contributed to colonial practices of white supremacy in the later
eighteenth century. Seemingly sympathetic to slaves, the trope
actually undermines their cause and denies their humanity by
showing African slaves as willingly accepting their condition.
Taking in literary sources as well as texts on colonialism and
slavery, Boulukos offers a fresh account of the development of
racial difference, and of its transatlantic dissemination, in the
eighteenth-century English-speaking world.
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