Overview

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

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9780192856272

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Reviews

In her engaging and beautifully written study, Ross demonstrates the centrality of racial surveillance to pre-Civil War U.S. literature. She's particularly illuminating on 'sousveillance,' or counter-surveillance, by African American and other writers seeking to challenge racial hierarchies. Examining texts ranging from Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Ross shows how racial surveillance contributed to the fluidity of genre during the period. Among the many highlights of the book is her analysis of the productive tensions between surveillance and sousveillance in Poe's fiction. This is an essential work for anyone interested in antebellum literature. * Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies * An example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. The connections between surveillance, race, and genre that Ross uncovers change our understanding of antebellum U.S. literature. This is a superb book. * Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War * At last, the field of American literary studies has a thorough account of the emergence of the genre of detective fiction in the antebellum period. Through stunning readings of writers not often included in studies of detective fiction, including Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts, Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature convincingly demonstrates the role of slavery-both its system of surveillance and the capacity of those surveilled to watch back-as the most important crucible for the genre in the United States. This is an indispensable study. * Justine S. Murison, author of Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States *

In her engaging and beautifully written study, Ross demonstrates the centrality of racial surveillance to pre-Civil War U.S. literature. She's particularly illuminating on 'sousveillance,' or counter-surveillance, by African American and other writers seeking to challenge racial hierarchies. Examining texts ranging from Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Ross shows how racial surveillance contributed to the fluidity of genre during the period. Among the many highlights of the book is her analysis of the productive tensions between surveillance and sousveillance in Poe's fiction. This is an essential work for anyone interested in antebellum literature. * Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies * An example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. The connections between surveillance, race, and genre that Ross uncovers change our understanding of antebellum U.S. literature. This is a superb book. * Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War * At last, the field of American literary studies has a thorough account of the emergence of the genre of detective fiction in the antebellum period. Through stunning readings of writers not often included in studies of detective fiction, including Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts, Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature convincingly demonstrates the role of slavery-both its system of surveillance and the capacity of those surveilled to watch back-as the most important crucible for the genre in the United States. This is an indispensable study. * Justine S. Murison, author of Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States *

In her engaging and beautifully written study, Ross demonstrates the centrality of racial surveillance to pre-Civil War U.S. literature. She's particularly illuminating on 'sousveillance,' or counter-surveillance, by African American and other writers seeking to challenge racial hierarchies. Examining texts ranging from Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Ross shows how racial surveillance contributed to the fluidity of genre during the period. Among the many highlights of the book is her analysis of the productive tensions between surveillance and sousveillance in Poe's fiction. This is an essential work for anyone interested in antebellum literature. * Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies * An example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. The connections between surveillance, race, and genre that Ross uncovers change our understanding of antebellum U.S. literature. This is a superb book. * Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War * At last, the field of American literary studies has a thorough account of the emergence of the genre of detective fiction in the antebellum period. Through stunning readings of writers not often included in studies of detective fiction, including Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts, Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature convincingly demonstrates the role of slavery-both its system of surveillance and the capacity of those surveilled to watch back-as the most important crucible for the genre in the United States. This is an indispensable study. * Justine S. Murison, author of Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States * Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature offers theoretically astute, historicist literary criticism that is both compulsively readable and admirably economical in presentation. * Jeannine Delombard, The New Rambler * Kelly Ross's comprehensive and dynamic account in Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature shows how a focus on the technologies and cultures of surveillance and sousveillance (watching from below) illuminates deep and previously unacknowledged connections between genre and race. * Genre *

In her engaging and beautifully written study, Ross demonstrates the centrality of racial surveillance to pre-Civil War U.S. literature. She's particularly illuminating on 'sousveillance,' or counter-surveillance, by African American and other writers seeking to challenge racial hierarchies. Examining texts ranging from Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Ross shows how racial surveillance contributed to the fluidity of genre during the period. Among the many highlights of the book is her analysis of the productive tensions between surveillance and sousveillance in Poe's fiction. This is an essential work for anyone interested in antebellum literature. * Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies * An example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. The connections between surveillance, race, and genre that Ross uncovers change our understanding of antebellum U.S. literature. This is a superb book. * Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War * At last, the field of American literary studies has a thorough account of the emergence of the genre of detective fiction in the antebellum period. Through stunning readings of writers not often included in studies of detective fiction, including Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts, Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature convincingly demonstrates the role of slavery-both its system of surveillance and the capacity of those surveilled to watch back-as the most important crucible for the genre in the United States. This is an indispensable study. * Justine S. Murison, author of Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States * Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature offers theoretically astute, historicist literary criticism that is both compulsively readable and admirably economical in presentation. * Jeannine Delombard, The New Rambler *

Author Information

Kelly Ross is Associate Professor of English at Rider University where she teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and crime fiction and film. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, and Leviathan.

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