Beth R. Wilson – författare

Drawing on methods from the history of emotions to study enslaved people's lives, Beth R. Wilson exposes the social, cultural and political role that emotion played in the US South. Exploring both individual and collective emotions, Wilson shows how enslaved people resisted white people's attempts to restrict their feelings and expressions by developing their own emotional ideals and expectations. Moving through case studies that examine a range of underexplored forms of testimony, the book introduces readers to slave narratives, letters, written interviews and recorded testimony to show that emotion was central to how enslaved people resisted, survived and remembered the system of slavery. Enslaved people's descriptions of their individual experiences of love, pain, grief and joy are woven throughout this study, which provides a framework that historians can use to paint a nuanced, detailed and empathetic picture of the complex emotional impact of slavery.

Drawing on methods from the history of emotions to study enslaved people's lives, Beth R. Wilson exposes the social, cultural and political role that emotion played in the US South. Exploring both individual and collective emotions, Wilson shows how enslaved people resisted white people's attempts to restrict their feelings and expressions by developing their own emotional ideals and expectations. Moving through case studies that examine a range of underexplored forms of testimony, the book introduces readers to slave narratives, letters, written interviews and recorded testimony to show that emotion was central to how enslaved people resisted, survived and remembered the system of slavery. Enslaved people's descriptions of their individual experiences of love, pain, grief and joy are woven throughout this study, which provides a framework that historians can use to paint a nuanced, detailed and empathetic picture of the complex emotional impact of slavery.

This book explores the history of slavery in the Atlantic World through the lens of emotion. Combining methods from the history of emotions with those from slavery studies often for the first time, this collection provides new and important perspectives on the role that emotion played in various slave societies across the Atlantic World.Exploring slavery in Cuba, the United States, and British and French colonies, this book reveals how emotions were central to enslavers’ creation, justification, and perpetuation of the system of slavery. Simultaneously, chapters also evidence the ways in which the enslaved utilised emotion as a form of refusal, resistance, and survival. Finally, the book considers the legacies and afterlives of slavery, including how emotion can inform our understanding of slavery’s longer-term implications.Taken together, the studies in this collection highlight the importance of placing emotions firmly at the centre of the study of Atlantic Slavery. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Slavery & Abolition.