Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Abstract: Ever since the publication in 1993 of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, scholars have been challenged to move beyond traditional frameworks for analyzing British and American literature. Gilroy’s paradigm-shifting work asked readers to consider the Atlantic as a cultural and political system emergent from transatlantic slavery, and it pushed us beyond our geographic and national comfort zones. Considering the fact that Romanticism and the global slave trade emerged simultaneously, and that many of our aesthetic, philosophical, and literary categories were predicated upon this historical coincidence, this paper explores the global afterlife of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with attention to issues of captivity, servitude, cruelty, and belonging. In particular, the paper engages a cluster of texts written by black women, including Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig, Maryce Conde’s 2009 novel I, Tituba, and Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) and A Mercy (2008), which all...