Content area
Full Text
Black Victorians/ Black Victoriana. Gretchen Gerzina, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pp. 222. $62.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).
Black Victorians/ Black Victoriana, is mi arresting title. After all, nineteenth-century Britain is, through oversight as much as by design, commonly imagined to have been an African-free zone. The relative dearth of scholarship on the topic is in marked contrast to the abundance of monographs and historical studies about the eighteenth century. Distinguished black authors of the 1770s and 1780s such as Ignatius Sancho, Olaudali Eqniano and Ottobah Cugoano have had their writings reissued as Penguin Classics. Contemporary black poets and novelists-among them Fred D'Aguiar, Sweet Thames (1992) and S. I. Martin, Incomparable World (1996)-have produced work that draws heavily on the Georgian period.
Its common to cite demographics as the main reason for the lack of interest in the "black nineteenth century." After Abolition in 1807 far fewer men and women of African descent disembarked at England's ports. Those who already lived in the country intermarried. Many of them lived in conditions of poverty and died young. It's hardly surprising if those academics who are interested in issues of race and ethnicity in this period tend to scratch around in the margins of canonical novels-Edward Said on Jane Eyre, for instance-or to look at topics such as scientific racism and racial taxonomy, rather than to attend to questions concerning the lives of real black Victorians.
How pleasing it is then to be able to welcome a new collection of essays, edited by Gretchen Gerzina, that attempts to redress this very imbalance. Framed against a series of backdrops-the campaign to end slavery in the United States, the growing ascendancy of race theory and the Scramble for Africa...