You Want To Read This Book!
Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America by Professor Teresa Goddu
A Recommendation by Chair of the Department of English and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Dana Nelson
When we think of abolition, we often remember Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: its tear-inducing scenes, like Eliza’s perilous escape across ice-floes on the Ohio River, or the products it inspired, like the infamous Topsy doll. But Stowe didn’t launch abolitionism’s powerful media strategies so much as she crested its wave, as Professor Teresa Goddu explains in her powerful new book, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. Goddu digs through a simply massive textual and material archive—coin boxes, gift books, tea sets, panoramas, almanacs and much, much more—showing how abolitionism of the 1830s harnessed emerging commodity culture to its activist cause and used corporatist logics to grow its membership empire. Like today, when prominent on the page of any political site is the “give” button—abolitionism created a cultural logic that monetized sympathy. It crafted activism as purchasing and giving branded merchandise. As Goddu tours her readers through abolitionism’s new mass media strategies, she shows how it literally engineered a middle-class identity for those who “bought in”—an identity grounded in philanthropic compassion and moral superiority, a “selfhood . . . grounded in black subjugation . . . that has yet to be undone” as she pithily summarizes the point. Selling Antislavery helps us understand how much of the activist media we see today had its roots in the structures pioneered by early nineteenth-century abolitionism, and it raises questions that resonate into our own moment.
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