Tacuma Peters

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano’s aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke’s discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano’s discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts.

This article argues that the work of Ottobah Cugoano provides readers with a robust anti-imperial analysis of European modernity. For Cugoano, slavery and colonialism are coeval and mutually constitutive processes. I argue that Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery which has been accepted as a tract of radical abolitionism should also be interpreted as an anti-imperial text. I contend that we must attend to the global scope of Cugoano’s anti-imperialism which includes critiques of European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as provides recommendations for radical changes in the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. Through an analysis of Cugoano’s historiography of modern slavery and colonialism, I argue that Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery provides one of the most thorough criticisms of slavery and empire in the eighteenth century.

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has the paradoxical status of being a text that rejects historiography and History as a primary means of facilitating radical political transformation while also being a key point of departure for histories concerning modern colonial and decolonial thought.1 This reflection is an examination of the tensions in Black Skin, White Masks as a political work and as an intervention into philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and existential debates. Prompted by the 70th anniversary of the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, I examine the richness of the past two decades of historiographical scholarship on slavery, abolition, and freedom struggles in the Caribbean and North America alongside arguments that Fanon made about the limited role of history in sustaining and guiding anti-colonial thought and praxis. Black Skin, White Masks remains relevant, albeit troubling, for querying the presumed connections between historical knowledge, political action, and scholarly production facilitated by academic and political trends. I am interested in how the provocations of Black Skin, White Masks, in particular its last chapter “By Way of Conclusion,” provides fertile grounds for questioning, positioning, and refining contemporary historiographical production.